Huckleberry Hound — Jolly Roger and Out

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Ken Muse; Layout – Sam Weiss; Backgrounds – Dick Thomas; Story – Warren Foster; Story Director – Alex Lovy; Titles – Lawrence Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Narrator, Jolly Roger, Englishman 2, Questioner – Hal Smith; Huck, Englishman 1, Speaker of Parliament – Daws Butler.
Music: Bill Loose/John Seely; Jack Shaindlin; Phil Green; Spencer Moore.
First aired: week of Sept. 28, 1959 (rerun, week of May 23, 1960).
Plot: Admiral Horatio Huckleberry is tasked to bring in pirate Jolly Roger.

Warren Foster left the Fleischer Studio in New York in 1938 for a job as a writer with what was legally the Raymond Katz Studio but was realistically the Bob Clampett unit of the Leon Schlesinger Studio on the Warner Bros. lot. Clampett was making Looney Tunes that truly were looney. They were full of crazed, cross-eyed, one-shot characters making life miserable for the studio’s star, Porky Pig. One of them made an appearance in the middle of 1938. Foster may not have been at the studio for another few months but he certainly remembered the character when he finally left 21 years later and headed to Hanna-Barbera. (The cartoon was remade in 1945 while Foster was at the studio).

The character is Injun Joe of the cartoon Injun Trouble. The payoff is set up all throughout the cartoon as one of Clampett’s gooney characters, Sloppy Moe, idiotically bounces around telling that he knows something that he won’t tell. Finally, he tells. His secret is that Injun Joe is ticklish and Moe starts tickling him. That, of course, helps Porky in his quest to reach the West.

And so it is in this Huckleberry Hound adventure, Jolly Roger has a secret. And we find out what it is in the big climax scene—Jolly Roger is ticklish. And the tickling helps Huck in his quest to bring in the pirate.

Foster certainly had pirate cartoon experience at Warners; he cast Yosemite Sam as a pirate in several cartoons. Interestingly, Foster borrows a gag from a non-pirate version of Sam for this cartoon.

Speaking of Sam, the layout artist for this cartoon was Sam Weiss. Full credits arent available for all the Hanna-Barbera cartoons produced in 1959-60, but the only cartoon where I’ve spotted his name is Huck’s Somebody’s Lion. Weiss was working at the Jay Ward studio in 1959 then spent time at Format Films directing The Alvin Show. He served time on Roger Ramjet, directed for Stephen Bosustow Productions in the ’70s and worked on the G.I. Joe pilot in 1983.

Laid-back Huck pulls off a nice job in this cartoon. Daws Butler’s Carolina accent remains intact (and emphasized in places), even though Huck’s supposedly English. Some of the background art is a treat and Foster comes up with some clever bits (and a funny tag at the end).

Hal Smith gives us a quiet English accent for his narration which opens over a nice little map. A couple of other opening backgrounds involve islands “as lumpy as dill pickles” (because of all the treasure being buried), a seaport with schooners and the Parliament Buildings overlooking the Thames.

Foster gives a sense of old-world atmosphere by referring to “fierce bands of pirates who asked, and gave, no quarter” (who in the world today uses that saying?) and a throwaway gag with a shot of a pirate flag as the earnest narrator describes “The black flag, copied from the label of an iodine bottle, ruled the Spanish Main.” Then comes a shot of the bad guy, Jolly Roger, who rubs his teeth together (and they fall out individually) and has to tell the fumbling narrator who he is (in a confidential whisper). Foster then makes fun of English understatement.

Narrator: As ship after ship left London, never to return, indignation reached a fevered pitch.
Man 1: Ruddy bad show.
Man 2: Raw-ther.



An extraordinary session of parliament hears only one man can stop the piracy—Admiral Horatio Huckleberry. He gives a nice “Howdy, folks” to the viewers at home. There’s a cute gag about Huck and Roger both spotting each other’s ships with spyglasses. Their spyglasses are next to each other. It would have been a better gag if there had been a discovery by the audience instead of their ships floating toward each other.



Huck has a few asides for the audience, too, and Roger is channelling Sam a bit with his threats and alliteration. Can’t you hear Mel Blanc reading lines like these:

Roger: You lily-livered swab! I’ll blast your worm-eating ship right out of the water.
Huck: (to audience) Sounds like pirate talk, don’t it? (to Roger) Beggin’ your pardon, sir—are you Jolly Roger?
Roger: Aye, I’m Jolly Roger, the pistol-packin’-est pirate that ever paced a poop-deck.
Huck: (to audience) Take note how I tricked him into revealing his name and occupation.

After the old gag about a hanging after a fair trial, Huck answers a threat with “It’s no use, Rodge. You can’t smooth-talk your way out’n this one.” Then we get a battle of wits between Huck and the pirate. Huck’s ship gets blasted but manages to move under the cover of the smoke. “I merely topped my topsail and jibbed my jibsail.” Roger tries to board Huck’s ship from his own but get a foot on each with his body stretched. Huck throws him a line. Attached to an anchor. Into the brink he goes. The lighting effect around the anchor is good.



We get the crawls-into-a-cannon-that’s-fired gag, then Huck swings in his best swashbuckling manner onto Roger’s ship, skidding to a mid-air stop at the point of the pirate’s sword. Huck knows he’s in a cartoon.

Roger: Now you’re goin’a walk the plank.
Huck: (to audience) Wouldn’t be a real pirate picture, unless’n someone walked the plank.

Here’s Foster’s most Sam-like gag. Huck’s on the plank. He jumps high into the air, lands on the board and Roger on the other end of the board flies into the air and down with a crash. Didn’t I see that one in High Diving Hare (1948)? Interesting layout on the gag, being done at three-quarters angle from behind.

Huck concludes “everyone has a weakness” but discovers Roger’s is not boxing (a bop on the noggin crushes Huck), wrestling (another bop on the head sends Huck to the deck) or gunfire (Huck misses even with the gun pointed into his stomach). Huck discovers the weakness when Roger lifts him up and presses him nose-to-nose. The noses separate with a pop, Huck tells Roger he has a cold nose and tickles it. “We’ll have us a million laughs from here to the Tower of London,” confides to us.



The narrator returns for the final scene as Huck’s ship arrives in port with Roger attached to a ball and chain. Someone asks Huck how the pirate got the name “Jolly Roger.” Huck replies with a tickle demonstration. “Roger is just about as jolly as they come,” the hound tells us. And that’s the cartoon as far as Ken Muse is concerned. The last six seconds has Huck immobile, except for one eye blink.

Huck has two personalities. He was either a comic hero, taking a bit of a bashing but generally coming out on top, or he was a put-upon guy who failed at a reasonable task. Foster’s Huck was the first kind in the earliest cartoons, but then he switched gears to the more of the second along the way. In several Foster cartoons, Huck wasn’t casual, he was downright clueless (Cop and Saucer, Huck’s Hack). I prefer the first kind of Huck so that’s another reason this cartoon’s a winner for me.

One of the cues I’ve simply put down as “Seagoing Medley.” It includes “Sailor’s Hornpipe,” “A Life on the Ocean Wave” and “Sailing.” It’s a Langlois Filmusic library cue I don’t have.

0:00 - Huck Sub Main Title Theme (Curtin).
0:14 - EM-147 DOCUMENTARY MAIN TITLE (Green) – Map, pirate ship pulls up.
0:34 - TC-300 ECCENTRIC COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Pirate flag.
0:42 - ZR-49 LIGHT EERIE (Hormel) – Pan shot to islands, Jolly Roger introduced.
1:06 - L-1139 ANIMATION COMEDY (Moore) – Ships leave harbour, bored Englishment, parliament exterior shot.
1:20 - ZR-126 ENGLISH MAIN TITLE (Hormel) – Parliament scene, Huck spots pirate ship.
1:56 - LAF-65-7 seagoing medley (Shaindlin) – Roger and Huck banter, cannon fires.
3:04 - LAF-4-1 FISHY STORY (Shaindlin) – Roger laughs, falls in sea, fired out of cannon, Huck on rope, walks plank.
4:36 - LAF-27-2 RODEO DAY (Shaindlin) – “with a full twist,” Roger dives onto deck, boxing gag, wrestling gag.
5:30 - LAF-4-6 PIXIE PRANKS (Shaindlin) – Gun in stomach gag, “You got a cold nose.”
6:00 - TC-436 SHINING DAY (Loose-Seely) – Roger laughs, Huck pulls into port.
6:35 - LAF-72-2 RODEO DAY (Shaindlin) – “How’d he ever get the name Jolly Roger?”
6:57 - Huck Sub End Title Theme (Curtin).

Loving Ed Love

Ed Love passed away in Valencia, California 15 years ago today. Like many who began in the Golden Age of Theatrical Animation, he had a long career, thanklessly ending it by working in television on cartoons that, well, you shudder seeing the names of the artists who toiled on them.

I think of him mostly as working in the Avery unit in Tex’s early days at MGM (read Tim Walker’s revelation in the comments about why Love suddenly left Metro) and then eventually moving on to the Lantz studio during its best years in the mid to late ‘40s. Love was the studio’s last animator standing before it shut down at the end of 1948 (it reopened some months later producing inferior cartoons). And he even worked on Bob Clampett’s abortive attempt at a series at Republic, animating on It’s a Grand Old Nag.

On the day Hanna-Barbera Enterprises was formed in July 1957, Love was operating his own company, E.H. Love Sales. It had 17 staff members, according to Daily Variety, and had been providing TV cartoons to Swift-Chaplin Productions. Unfortunately, Howard Swift’s company was struck by the Screen Cartoonists Guild and under the terms of a settlement, agreed not to make television spots. Love’s company quickly signed a deal with the rival IATSE.

Ed arrived at Hanna-Barbera in 1959 and his early work is pretty distinctive. He loves teeth and animated head movements on ones; he seems to be trying to get as much movement as he can out of limited animation. Two or three head positions weren’t good enough for Ed Love. His talking heads moved around more than that. And he was entrusted with a bunch of TV spots in the early ‘60s for Kellogg’s featuring the H-B characters where the animation’s a lot fuller.

Edward H. Love was born in Pennsylvania on May 24, 1910 to William W. and Anne Cecelia Love (maiden name McCabe). They had been married in December 1905 in Pittsburgh. The family was in Chicago by the time Ed was 10; he had an older brother named William R. Love. He left a job in Chicago as a newspaper reporter in 1930 and moved to Los Angeles, selling oil royalties when he got married in October. He quit to work for Walt Disney as an in-betweener within a few months.

Denis Gifford of The Independent wrote a wonderful obit on him in its May 20, 1996 edition.

Ed Love is not a name well known even to those film-lovers who take notes from the creative credits which flash by all too quickly in the cinema. Television is no help, either, often cutting off credit titles or squashing them into unreadable portions of the screen while using the rest of the space to advertise whatever is coming next. This is especially true of cartoon credits, where even resorting to videos and freeze-frames does not always help. This is even sadder for a long-term animator like Ed Love, whose early work was never credited anyway, and whose later work may well be lost thanks to Hanna-Barbera’s latest practice of crediting every name in the company but in ultra-rapid frame flashes.
Fortunately for cartoonists, keen enthusiasts of the genre have in recent times been probing into the men and women behind the scenes, publishing articles, interviews and even books about Hollywood’s golden age of animation, and whilst the bulk of an animator’s work may never now be known, at least a milestone arises here and there to mark the progress of a special talent from rough pencillings to the height of colour and humorous movement. One such master was Ed Love.
Love’s 55-year career in animation cartoons began back in Los Angeles in 1930. It was the height of the American Depression and the 18-year-old college leaver with some talent as a cartoonist waded through the Classified Telephone Directory searching for a real professional to give him some tips on how to get work. He chanced on an animator who worked for the Walt Disney Studio and whose assignment at the time was on a Mickey Mouse short. He gave the teenager a chance to try making Mickey play the violin and then fall over. Young Ed had a go, nervously showed the result to Disney himself, and was promptly hired as an assistant animator at $18 a week.
From Love's Disney days, one short emerges above all others. This was Flowers and Trees, not the first-ever film in the "Silly Symphony" series, but the first to be filmed in glorious Technicolor. It was released in July 1932, and won for Walt his first-ever Academy Award. The director was Burt Gillett, and Love animated an evil tree who kidnapped a pretty young sapling.
Much later, Love’s name cropped up on the credits of perhaps Disney’s greatest ever feature film, Fantasia (1940). This pioneering attempt to bring life to a selection of popular classics was regarded as Disney’s greatest folly, especially by the moneymen of Hollywood, but it has stood the test of time and marks the first film use of stereophonic sound. Leopold Stokowski, who conducts the orchestra behind the picturisation of Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer's Apprentice, concludes this dramatic sequence by appearing in silhouette and shaking Mickey Mouse's hand. Interestingly, this piece was designed to be a super "Silly Symphony" on its own, and was so successful that during production it expanded into the full-length feature that became Fantasia. And it was on this sequence that Ed Love animated.
Love then moved across to the MGM cartoon studio under producer Fred Quimby. He joined the unit headed by Fred Avery, nicknamed "Tex", one of several animation geniuses developed by Warner Bros who found better self-expression elsewhere. Here Love became a valuable addition to Avery’s unit, right from their first production, Blitz Wolf (1942). This haywire piece of propaganda rivalled Disney’s Der Fuhrer’s Face, which copped the Oscar mainly because of its hilarious anti-Hitler song, punctuated with ripe raspberries. Love animated many of Avery’s best shorts, including the howlingly saucy Red Hot Riding Hood (1943), a top favourite with GIs everywhere and Screwball Squirrel (1944), which established Screwy Squirrel as a mainstream Avery madcap.
At MGM, Love was one of a team of four animators: Preston Blair, Ray Abrams and Irven Spence. Other crazy characters this team brought to life included Droopy Dog, the half-pint hound who introduced himself with "Hello, folks - I’m the hee-ro!", and the large and small bears called George and Junior, who were caricatures of the principal protagonists in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. This pair of bears starred in such titles as Red Hot Rangers (1947), which would prove to be Love's last film at MGM.
Love then moved over to the Walter Lantz studio, where Woody Woodpecker cartoons were made. Once a major force in animation, Lantz had started to sink after Universal closed their distribution deal and United Artists, a leading independent, took over. Love worked with Fred Moore, a famous name in cartooning who had been dismissed by Disney. Serving under the director Dick Lundy, they brought their superior skills to bear on Playful Pelican (1948). Starring Lantz’s second-string hero, Andy Panda, this failed to breath new life into the little animal, who was promptly retired.
Lantz, nearing the end of his UA contract, never knew whether his studio would last into the following week, and the dithering delays unsettled Love. He quit animation for a while, then found a new home in television where Hanna-Barbera, the Bill and Joe who once won Oscar after Oscar for MGM with their Tom and Jerry series, were setting up as kings of limited animation, the newish technique they had evolved, or perhaps revived, to suit the cut-price budgets of television.
Love worked on The Flintstones (1960), the first-ever television cartoon series aimed at an adult audience, and on its futuristic follow-up, The Jetsons (1962). Not the same as Disney’s, or Avery’s or even Lantz’s, but at least it was work.

Regardless, Ed seemed to have fun animating dialogue. He got a chance to work with most of the major characters after he arrived, including Huck’s famous nude scene.


Nowhere Bear, with Ed Benedict.


Two Too Much, with Walt Clinton.


Happy Go Loopy, with Bick Bickenbach.


Nottingham and Yeggs, with Walt Clinton.


Sour Puss, with Bick Bickenbach.

It’s tough to pick a favourite. I really like Jinks’ poses in Sour Puss. His body language is saying “Stick it, meeces!” in the frame above. Sure, it’s not Fantasia, but Ed did what he could under the limitations of early TV animation and came up with some enjoyable cartoons.

This is probably my favourite of Ed’s commercials.

Yogi Bear, Sunday, May 1961

This will likely be the last in a series of “50 years ago this month” posts of Yogi Sunday comics. I clipped these before there was a change which, more or less, eliminates convenient searching on the site on which I was finding my newspaper content. To be honest, I’ve done little new work on the blog due to work and other things; almost all posts you’ll read in the weeks ahead were compiled last January.

Sorry, the quality of the scans is not all that great. You can click on them to make them bigger.

Oddly, there are no silhouette character drawings in any of these. Perhaps they were used in the missing first row.

Gene Hazelton, or whoever handled stories for these, borrows a bit of business from George Nicholas’ best Yogi cartoon, Lullabye-Bye Bear for the May 7, 1961 cartoon. The premise of the cartoon is Yogi is trying to stay awake through winter and not hibernate but keeps falling asleep. Can someone explain why people/bears hold their arms out when they sleep-walk?



In Runaway Bear, Yogi is a roller-skating bear in a circus. He adopts an arms-behind-bar/leg-up pose in that cartoon like he does in one of the panels in the May 14 cartoon.



The kid in the May 21 cartoon has the “low ear” that Walt Clinton favoured in his layouts but doesn’t look like any character ever used in any animated cartoon.



Yogi played a goody-stealing Robin Hood in a first season cartoon and Ranger Smith went undercover in at least one later cartoon. The two ideas get married as the plot for the May 28 cartoon. The curious bystanding fish is a nice touch; very Warner Bros.



Yogi’s really stretching his rhymes at times in some of the panels, but I suppose that’s what the studio wanted, so that’s what it got.

Pixie and Dixie — Hi-Fido

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Manny Perez; Layout – Ed Benedict; Backgrounds – Dick (Richard H.) Thomas; Story – Warren Foster; Story Sketches – Dan Gordon; Titles – Lawrence (Art) Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Pixie, Dog – Don Messick; Dixie, Jinks – Daws Butler.
Music: Jack Shaindlin, Bill Loose/John Seely, Geordie Hormel, Spencer Moore.
First Aired: week of Sept. 14, 1959 (rerun, week of May 9, 1960).
Episode: Huckleberry Hound Show No. K-027, Production E-79.
Plot: Pixie and Dixie use a home sound system to pretend there’s a dog in the house to scare Jinks.

Hanna-Barbera had a bit of a connection with art of ventriloquism. One of its top character voices starting in the late ‘60s was Paul Winchell, who had spent years on radio and TV making people laugh with Jerry Mahoney. The ending of Quick Draw McGraw Show featured Baba Looey popping out of a chest doing a variation of Señor Wences’ most famous routine. And Don Messick entertained as a ventriloquist before moving to California to work in radio and, later, cartoons. So it’s a bit amazing that this cartoon screws up ventriloquism so badly.

If I understand things correctly, ventriloquism is the art of throwing your voice. On your own. But, in this cartoon, Dixie uses a microphone hooked to a hi-fi set. So what does ventriloquism have to do with it? And why bring it into the plot?

I suppose I should just ignore this little hole in the first of Warren Foster’s Pixie and Dixie cartoons to hit the air waves and just enjoy the rest of the cartoon. Foster seems to grasped the budgetary difference between television and theatrical animation right away. It costs a lot less to rely on dialogue instead of movement and drawings to get humour across, so Jinks does an awful lot of self-musing and talking to the camera in this one. But Foster leaves room for takes like he did for Sylvester over at Warners and Manny Perez, who had animated Sylvester for Friz Freleng, comes up with some pleasant stuff at times. This is Perez’ only Pixie and Dixie short. He animated one more short for Hanna-Barbera, likely working on a freelance basis.

Jinks has a unique running cycle in the opening of the cartoon. He rocks his arms back and forth in four drawings while running stooped with his head down. Unique to Hanna-Barbera, I should say; I caught a Sylvester-Tweety cartoon the other day where the cat runs in a cycle that’s a variation on this. The layout or background artist has come up with a light shadow that Jinks runs past seven times. Pixie and Dixie have an unusual design, too. A single line represents a tail. They’re drawn the same way in ‘Mighty Mite,’ which was also an Ed Benedict cartoon.



Jinks’ tie changes a bit during the cartoon. It’s thin for the most part but, at times, it’s a little wide and fluffy. This comes right after Pixie and Dixie shock Jinks by zapping him with two loose ends of a wire in their hole. There was a great Jinks’ electric shock take in Mark of the Mouse the year before, but Foster doesn’t even try to put it one like it in his storyboard. He follows the old Freleng pattern of violence happens off-camera but, unlike at Warners, the reaction shot is no reaction. Jinks isn’t even singed. We get some jagged teeth as Jinks informs the meeces he hates them to pieces.

The two decide they’ve “got to do something about that cat.” Dixie shows off his ventriloquism book, then shows off his skills. First, he walks to a box and borrows from Señor Wences:

Dixie: How’s the air in there?
(opens lid of box)
Growley-Voice Box: All right.

Then he imitates a cat outside a birdhouse where a sparrow is sleeping. There’s a surprise take by the bird. Nothing funny or elaborate. But I really like the multiples of the bird before he zips into his house.



Now it’s Jinks’ turn and the ventriloquism is suddenly abandoned for a mike and stereo speakers. Maybe it’s because of this line: “Those woofers will make good dog woofs.” Nice anticipation principles as Dixie growls and barks. He also has those same raised forearms that Jinks has in the beginning. Here are the drawings slowed down.



Jinks peers sleepily from under his blanket then jumps into the ceiling before crashing down again. He decides it’s a “nighttime-mare” and tells the audience about it. I like the way he pops up from under different parts of his blanket.

Pixie gets to quote Ralph Edwards from Truth or Consequences, more or less:

Dixie: Jinks is asleep. Run over and spin his dish.
Pixie: Ain’t we the devils?


Pixie becomes brush-strokes and partial ears.

The meece frighten Jinks into running into the basement with a crash. The cat has his eyes half-closed, with the lids at different heights, during portions of the cartoon. It’s pretty amusing. Here’s Jinks checking himself in the mirror.

Jinks: Oh, boy. I have to, you know, like get a grip on myself. Shee! All us cats are high-stringed. But, you know, I’m, like, high-stringed-er than most. (looks in mirror). Shee! I look terri-dible.

Jinks baps himself on the head (with a wood-block sound) in cycle animation to convince himself there’s no dog in the house. His tie has expanded again and has strings hanging down. Note the squinting eyeballs in one position of the cycle. He gets a hold of himself with a head-shake cycle, then determinedly stomps off to “find them meeces.” He turns to the camera and raises his eyebrows up and down, something he also did in ‘Sour Puss.’ But the barking scares the crap out of him until he finally slides to a stop, realises there is no dog and decides to ignore the barking.



Dixie wears himself out trying to get Jinks to pay attention. Both the cat and mice have teeny tongues in this cartoon; Pixie has a little buck tooth.



Jinks has caught on to what’s going on. We get some, like, hipster dialogue:

Jinks: Hey, you. Save it, fellas. Uh, no need to knock yourselves out. I dig your barking bit. It’s a real coooool gag. But, uh, I was hip all the time, you know. I knewwww there was no dog around the house. You meeces tried to fool Jinksie-boy.

During all this, a dog has been listening at the window and wanders in. Jinks goes from casual, to crying after seeing the dog, to multiples as he backs up in fright.



However, Dixie saves Jinks from the vicious animal by barking into the microphone. The dog turns friendly. Foster’s best line of the cartoon:

Dog: Gee, excuse me. I didn’t know you was a dog. All the new breeds, you know. Sorry, my mistake.

But Jinks isn’t grateful. He threatens the meeces, who run away and don’t turn around to realise he isn’t following him. He’s on the microphone. Evidently, the three of them live in southern California for the last shot is of a desert on the way to Arizona, where Pixie and Dixie hope to lose the cat they think is chasing them and yelling about how he hates them to pieces over and over. A running-away scene is generally an unimaginative way to end a cartoon, one Hanna-Barbera used far too often in later years, and that’s how this one finishes.

As the cartoon opens with a chase scene, it shouldn’t be surprising it opens with Jack Shaindlin’s quintessential P&D chase theme. Some beds are snipped together to make them longer and there’s a four-second insertion of a Shaindlin cue with the same tempo and orchestration as the one on either side of it. Why the sound cutter bothered, I don’t know. The funny thing, neither LAF-4-6 or the second use of LAF-4-1 are on the cue sheet for the cartoon, and nothing is substituted in their place.

0:00 - PIXIE ADN DIXIE (Hanna, Barbera, Curtin, Shows) – Main titles.
0:13 - LAF-20-5 TOBOGGAN RUN (Shaindlin) – Jinks chases meece into hole.
0:27 - TC-201 PIXIE COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Meece decide to electrocute Jinks, conversation in mouse hole.
0:58 - TC-432 HOLLY DAY (Loose-Seely) – Ventriloquism scene.
1:39 - LAF-4-1 FISHY STORY (Shaindlin) – Meece hooks up PA system, barks, Jinks wakes up.
2:13 - LAF-4-6 PIXIE PRANKS (Shaindlin) – Jinks looks around, barking
2:17 - LAF-4-1 FISHY STORY (Shaindlin) - Jinks jumps into ceiling, falls into basket.
3:10 - ZR-47 LIGHT MOVEMENT (Hormel) – Pixie spins dish, Jinks runs down stairs, crash.
3:25 - TC-300 ECCENTRIC COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Pixie and Dixie talk, Jinks looks in mirror, shakes head, starts walking.
4:01 - L-78 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – “Now to find them meeces,” barks.
4:14 - LAF-20-5 TOBOGGAN RUN (Shaindlin) – Jinks runs into closet, slides to stop.
4:30 - LAF-25-3 jaunty bassoons and zig-zag strings (Shaindlin) – Jinks ignores barking, dog at window, scared by dog.
5:44 - L-81 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – Dog barks, part of Pixie's following line.
5:49 - L-78 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – "Bail 'im out," dog apologises.
6:21 - LAF-74-4 rising-falling scale circus march (Shaindlin) – Pixie and Dixie run.
6:58 - PIXIE AND DIXIE (Hanna, Barbera, Curtin, Shows) – End titles.

Hanna-Barbera Photo Album

Reader Billie Towzer trawls the internet and periodically sends me random Hanna-Barbera-related pictures. These have been sitting in a file for awhile, so I’ll pass them on.

My favourite out of this bunch are two shots from 1962. The Chicago Daily News was publicising its addition of The Flintstones to its comics line-up and apparently threw some kind of party. Complete with ‘60s helmet hair goodness.




The Daily News decided to start the strip on a Saturday for some reason. Sorry it’s on an angle; this is the best version I can find. Click to enlarge.


I had some H-B toys when I was a kid; the easily-damaged Flintstone Building Blocks come to mind immediately (the little styrofoam nubs connecting the bricks broke off). But there was endless merchandise, stuff that made kids use their imagination. You could create your own living cartoons with these Yogi and Huck puppets. There were Pixie and Dixie and Mr. Jinks ones, too. I’ll bet a lot of kids shouted “I hate meeces to pieces!” playing Jinks. I guess these are from the late ‘50s. No, I don’t know why Huck is red instead of blue.



Here’s one of a number of seemingly endless cereal boxes with H-B characters. Yogi replaced a large Scotsman named Big Otis, hence he’s wearing kilts here. Good thing Yogi took over. Big Otis strikes me as kind of a scary cereal spokesman. And how many Scotsmen are named “Otis” anyway?



More merchandise. Seems to me these were advertised during the Huck show, too, so that would put them in the late ‘50s as well (you’ll note zip codes hadn’t been invented when the ad was published). The International Silver Company is known to fans of Old Time Radio as the sponsor of the Ozzie and Harriet show.



And, finally, a Yogi ride at some park. I’d rather take kids to this than a CGI Yogi movie.



Thanks to Billie for passing these on. There are a bunch more I’ll get around to sharing in future posts.