Flintstones Valentines

Valentine’s Day was originally known as “St. Valentine’s Day” and there were apparently three St. Valentines connected with February 14th. As they were Christian saints, none were around as early as the Stone Age. But the Hanna-Barbera marketing department didn’t let a little thing like history get in the way of making money.

Reader Billie Towzer sent me these Flintstones’ Valentines. I don’t suspect Billie did it to be my Valentine, but to give you a couple of examples what was/is available for the romantically (and maybe ananchronistically) inclined. The last one’s a little too Let-the-Sunshine-In cutsey-poo for me.

Quick Draw McGraw — Dizzy Desperado

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Lew Marshall; Layout – Bob Givens; Backgrounds – Fernando Montealegre; Story – Mike Maltese; Story Sketches – Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Quick Draw, Baba Looey – Daws Butler; Narrator, Stagecoach Cluney – Doug Young.
Music: Jack Shaindlin; Phil Green; Harry Bluestone/Emil Cadkin, unknown.
First Aired: week of January 18, 1960 (rerun, week of July 18, 1960).
Episode: Quick Draw McGraw Show M-17, Production J-21.
Plot: A bump on the head turns Baba Looey into a bad guy.

Some old familiar friends from Warner Bros. bubble up in Mike Maltese’s story in this cartoon. The desperado, La Cucaracha, zips past Quick Draw guarding the bank like Speedy Gonzales zooms past Sylvester guarding a hoard of cheese. And there’s a rope that gets stuck on a pulley à la Wile E. Coyote. Maltese isn’t the only Warners connection in the cartoon. The layouts were done by Bob Givens, who says he and Maltese came to Hanna-Barbera as a team. Givens had been in Bob McKimson’s unit at Warners and doesn’t seem to have stayed at Hanna-Barbera all that long; he soon was working for Larry Harmon Productions, laying out Popeye TV cartoons. His background layouts are fine. Here’s a panorama of the town that opens the cartoon. The mountains in the background are two-tone.



There’s only one character in the cartoon besides the principals, bad guy Stagecoach Clooney. Givens has given him a simplified design, like Ed Benedict might, but not as stylised. It’s almost like something out of a 1960 Mr. Magoo cartoon, which wouldn’t be surprising because Givens loved UPA. Baba looks so flat in the shot to the right, his body could be a rug on the desert.

Maltese opened almost all his Quick Draws with narration and apparently Doug Young must have been in the studio that day because he gets the job instead of Don Messick or Hal Smith. Doug puts on an urgent, somewhat raspy voice that works very well. He tells us “This the story of Little Cucaracha, the bandit” and suddenly a silhouette (that looks like a puppet) pops up against the outside of a hotel and starts firing. It’s followed by a long shot of a stagecoach. We never see the horses in anything other than this shot; besides Clooney, Givens ended up designing only some backgrounds and a few props.



Baba, for reasons of the plot I suppose, is uncharacteristically clumsy at the outset of the cartoon. He accidentally fires his rifle and it nails Quick Draw in the snout. It’s the eighth time that day he’s done it. Quick Draw isn’t drawn very attractively here. Since there were model sheets for the main characters (layout artists came up with final incidental character designs), I wonder if it’s just simply the way Lew Marshall drew him in three-quarter view.

The stage is stopped by Stagecoach Clooney. Baba shoots Quick Draw instead of the bandit. “What’s the use?” the singed-snouted Quick Draw rhetorically asks us. Clooney demands the gold-filled strong-box. Now it’s Quick Draw’s turn to be clumsy. He drops it on the head of the bad guy and then Baba. The blow doesn’t affect the bad guy, but it turns Baba into a crook who decides “I thin’ I keep the gold for myself.” This gives Quick Draw the chance to utter his first catchphrase “I’ll do the thin’in’...” etc. Now Baba speaks in a lower voice (much like he did in the first few cartoons of the series) and has adopted the name ‘Little Cucaracha’ (perhaps ‘Little Burro’ was taken). He shoots Quick Draw in the face and gives the camera a weird expression before vamoosing with the strong-box.



The narrator returns along with a pan of wanted posters. I wonder who Tim Tulley was.



Baba has somehow developed speed after the conk on the head as he rushes past Quick Draw guarding the bank twice to grab bags of gold. If you go frame-by-frame, you’ll see Baba doesn’t have any gold. It’s just the cycle animation of Baba going toward the bank turned over and inked and painted on the other side. The second time, Quick Draw calculates he can drop a large rock on Baba’s head and snap him out of his evildoing. But Baba’s too speedy and Quick Draw drops the rock on his foot. All we’re missing is Baba saying “Andale!” and Quick Draw reaction with “Sufferin’ Succotash!” We do get “Gad! The smarts!” from our hero.

Quick Draw decides to clobber the head of his former friend with a one-ton weight that he hoists up with a pulley, just like Wile E. Coyote did with a piano in ‘Hook, Line and Stinker’ (1958). And just like in the Warners cartoon (also written by Maltese), the rope sticks in the pulley after Quick Draw lets go. Quick Draw tells Baba to hold the rope while he unsticks it. Naturally, when that’s done, Baba lets go and the weight lands on the coyote Quick Draw, crushing him and turning him into a hat with a pair of feet (like Red Hot Ryder in 1944’s ‘Buckaroo Bugs’).



Since there was a one-ton weight conveniently in the desert, why not a cannon? That’s what Quick Draw fires to try to bop Baba. And it works. Baba is back to normal. But the cannon ball bounces onto Quick Draw’s head. Now he thinks he’s a bird and flies south for the winter, joining a pair of ducks in the air. Maltese tosses in a movie reference as Baba yells “Come back, little Quickstraw!” And he shamelessly has Baba make the old groaner observation that Quick Draw is for the birds.

We get two renditions of a Jack Shaindlin tune (I haven’t been able to identify it) with scurring strings and a happy oboe line. Actually, we get it three times because it’s edited into itself the second time it appears in the cartoon. There’s also a full version of Phil Green’s ‘Streets of the City’ from his Big City Suite No. 2. Appropriately, a harmonica version of ‘La Cucaracha’ is on the soundtrack but I don’t know its source. And there’s another short trumpet piece at the beginning of the cartoon that may be a Sam Fox library cue. It was used at the end of ‘Elephant Boy Oh Boy!’

0:00 - Quick Draw McGraw Sub-Main Title theme (Curtin).
0:14 - ZR-94 CHASE (Hormel) – Pan of town, silhouette.
0:33 - trumpet medium dance (?) – Long shot of stagecoach, rifle goes off, Quick Draw mimics Baba.
1:00 - CB-86A HIDE AND SEEK (Cadkin-Bluestone) – Bullets fly, Baba blasts Quick Draw, strongbox lands on bad guy and Baba.
1:40 - CAPERS (Shaindlin) – Quick Draw looks at bad guy, Baba feels funny.
1:50 - jaunty bassoons and skipping strings (Shaindlin) – Baba sees gold, shoots Quick Draw.
2:21 - CAPERS (Shaindlin) – Baba runs away with gold, Quick Draw talks to bad guy.
2:48 - La Cucaracha (Trad.) – Posters, pan of buildings.
3:04 - GR-248 STREETS OF THE CITY (Green) – Quick Draw in front of bank, Bab steals bag of gold, Quick Draw drops rock on foot, one-ton weight falls on Quick Draw.
5:14 - jaunty bassoons and skipping strings (Shaindlin) – Quick Draw under hat, shoots cannon ball, ball lands on Baba and Quick Draw, Baba back to normal, Quick Draw thinks he’s a bird.
6:43 - Quick Draw Sub End Title theme (Curtin).

Stop That Pigeon

The working title of ‘Dastardly and Muttley in their Flying Machines’ was ‘Stop that Pigeon!’ That would make sense as the show’s theme was ‘Stop That Pigeon’ crooned in kind of a sing/speak by that noted vocalist Paul Winchell, in character as Dick Dastardly.

Let’s face it. Yankee Doodle Pigeon isn’t really a character. He’s a plot device. He serves the same purpose as the Roadrunner or Tweety at Warner Bros. Dastardly and Muttley serve the same purpose as Wile E. Coyote or Sylvester. They fail. That’s what the show is about and that’s what the gags are built around. And, tossed in for good measure, are some already old Hanna-Barbera standbys—a snickering dog, and a dog that has to be bribed with something (medals, as opposed to Snuffles’ dog biscuits).

But it appears the show started out with the pigeon as the main character before somebody realised Muttley and Dastardly were hugely popular and it was imperative to move them from ‘Wacky Races’ to their own animated profit-centre. I never asked Jerry Eisenberg about this, and Jerry enjoyed working on this show, because it falls outside the purview of this blog. But I bring it up because the Van Eaton Gallery was selling the art you see below by Iwao Takamoto (as I understand it). Not only is Yankee Doodle Pigeon far more attractive than he ever ended up on screen, Iwao imbues him with some personality that was virtually absent from the Muttley cartoon series.








A lot of good people worked on ‘Dastardly and Muttley.’ Mike Maltese wrote some of the segments, old hands Ken Muse, Carlo Vinci, Ed Barge and Jerry Hathcock were among the animators and Ed Benedict was one of the layout guys. But, unfortunately, the gags were starting to wear around the edges, catchphrases were run into the ground, and the animation is a lot stiffer and less interesting than what the studio produced in my favourite era—when Huck and Quick Draw were the studio’s money-makers. Still, the drawings above give a hint the show could have gone in a different, and maybe a little more satisfying, direction.

Yogi Bear, Sunday, February 1962

Ah, you’ve got to love it when Gene Hazelton (or whoever) manages to work in a reference to Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera in the Yogi Bear Sunday comic (Saturday in Canada). In fact, we learn that Ranger Smith’s name is “Bill.” Apparently, it’s supposed to be John, though I don’t remember him actually ever having a first name in the original Yogi cartoons

We learn, as well, that Ranger Smith and his wife have a son. He’s named Randolph. He may be a baby, but he has the Hanna-Barbera 5 O’clock Shadow.

The scans of these cartoons are odd because the top row is taken from one paper and the bottom two from another paper. The top is overexposed and the bottoms are underexposed.



February 4 features a nice-looking horse and another (Hazelton?) cute kid. And a bear in chaps.



The February 11 comic introduces Big Mouth Benny. I’m not familiar with the strip so I don’t know if this is a one-shot. Apparently, Boo Boo isn’t living with Yogi this week. Someone should be shot for the end gag.



Joe and Bill make their appearance on February 18; “Bill” being Ranger Smith. And there are forest animals, too, the ones you almost never saw in animated cartoons because it’d cost too much to draw them all.



And here’s the Smith family on February 25. Cute toy bear, cute little-nosed wife, the kid gets his genes from the father’s side. And why is the ranger wearing his uniform going out to dinner with his wife? Is it at some ranger’s mess hall?

As usual, you can click on the comics to enlarge them.

Augie Doggie — Mars Little Precious

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Ken Muse; Layout – Dick Bickenbach; Backgrounds – Fernando Montealegre, Story – Mike Maltese; Story Sketches – Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Doggie Daddy – Doug Young; Augie Doggie, Alien Baby, Irish Cop – Daws Butler; Boinka Boinka – Don Messick.
Music: Harry Bluestone/Emil Cadkin; Phil Green; Spencer Moore; Jack Shaindlin, Hecky Krasnow, unknown.
First aired: week of February 8, 1960 (rerun week of August 8, 1960).
Episode: Quick Draw McGraw Show M-020, Production J-63.
Plot: Daddy chases after a Martian baby that Augie is supposed to be sitting.

Hanna-Barbera’s short cartoons got less entertaining into the 1960s for several reasons. One of them was the writers simply rehashed the same old gags over and over. How many times do you see the “sceptical cop” character show up about half-way into an H-B cartoon? The answer is too many. And generally, he’s Irish and ends his scene with his scepticism turned into a mental self-diagnosis, then commenting on the situation to either the audience or to “Sarge” at the stationhouse on a phone.

Said cop surfaces in this cartoon, and it isn’t even the first time a disbelieving officer of the law shows up in an Augie Doggie cartoon; ‘High and Flighty’ comes to mind (which also involved Mars). In this one, we get the station-phone ending after the cop sees the baby Martian. He calls to ask about the “policeman’s triple retirement plan.” Of course, he doesn’t retire. He just returns in another guise, series after series.

As for this cartoon, it features the adult-kid version of Augie, the one who’s a scientist, or invents stuff, or communicates with other planets. I prefer the Augie who’s more kid-like. Perhaps it doesn’t matter as Augie disappears for much of the cartoon and Doggie Daddy takes over, commenting throughout to the viewers (at one point, he says “Ain’t dat just like kids, folks?” as he looks at the camera in three-quarters view).

It seems like every Augie Doggie cartoon opens with Daddy reading the paper, but that’s actually not the case. It happened only six times in the first season (of 26 cartoons), including once in a bathtub. It happens in this one. Daddy’s talking to himself. “After a hard day, dere’s nothin’ like da newspaper...” Hey! What hard day? What exactly does Doggie Daddy do for a living? (Cashing child support cheques from Doggie Mommy has been suggested by cartoon cynics). No matter. The scene cuts to Augie gibbering on a radio the size of a desk. Must be before transistors. “Are you speakin’ Upper Slovenian or Lower Slovenian?” asks Daddy. Remember, this cartoon was made when Slovenia was never heard of; it was still part of Yugoslavia. No, Augie’s speaking Martian. “Dese kids with dere electric-tronics. What an imagination!” Daddy laughs.



But it turns out he really is talking Martian and he really has agreed to sit for Boinka Boinka’s kid. An interesting little bit of animation is when Augie runs past Daddy to go to the door. Daddy’s ears and newspaper flap (with paper rustling sound). It’s a little thing that Maltese didn’t need to add into the story, but it’s nice seeing a throwaway bit that Hanna-Barbera wouldn’t have bothered with a few years later.

Daddy’s still sceptical about the Martian stuff, even when Augie wheels in a baby carriage (shaped like a saucer) containing a green kid with eyes that aren’t filled in (like Barney Rubble’s were in the early days of The Flintstones). Daddy’s stock “After all,” observation to the audience at the end of a lot of cartoons gets inserted now. “How many fathers have a boy who’s an interplanetary baby sitter?”



Augie falls asleep reading ‘Snow White’ to the child, who decides to wander around this sets up most of the rest of the second half of the cartoon.

● The child climbs the wall and ceiling. Daddy follows then realises he can’t walk on the ceiling. Crash.
● The child lifts off like a helicopter and heads out the window, landing by the neighbour’s sleeping dog. The dog stares, blinks at the camera, then bores into the ground and covers the hole on top of him.



● The saucer-carriage lifts off and flies out the open door. Daddy chases after it and runs right into the mailbox. But why doesn’t the carriage hit the mailbox, too? It doesn’t swerve to avoid it.
● Daddy chases after the saucer-carriage down the street and runs into the Irish cop we mentioned at the outset. “Shall we have another waltz, or shall we sit this one out?” Officer O’Stereotype facetiously asks.



There’s talk galore while all this is going on, a lot of it seemingly to give Doug Young a chance to show off his Jimmy Durante impression. Maltese could just as easily left out Daddy’s chat to himself (“Come back here, you Martian mosquito” is one of Maltese’s more imaginative lines. “Wabbit season! Duck season!” it’s not).

So the carriage returns to the house, Boinka Boinka’s saucer lands and the unseen Martian comes to collect his child. Like a radio sitcom where a character has the kind of an explanatory line one never uses in a real conversation, Augie remarks “You say somebody on Jupiter needs a baby sitter?” Why not have the Martian say it? Anyway, the final scene had Augie trying to tune in Jupiter on his radio. “Maybe there’s nobody home, Augie boy,” Daddy offers, before lifting up the severed electrical cords from the radio for the audience to see. Sneaky, that Doggie Daddy.

The sound cutter apparently had loads of spare time to hunt for music. There are lots of short scenes so he’s used lots of short Phil Green cues. Spencer Moore’s oboe work-part music gets used for a couple of effects. One unidentified cue is when Augie is on the radio for the first time. It may be ‘Woodwind Capers’ by Clarence Wheeler, but that’s speculation. And the baby has his own little walking theme, with someone toodle-loo-ing on an ocarina. Hecky Krasnow wrote it.

0:00 - Augie Doggie Main Title theme (Curtin, Hanna, Barbera)
0:25 - CB-90 HAPPY HOME (Cadkin-Bluestone) – Dad reads paper, talks to Augie.
0:54 - C-C-F# woodwind underscore (?) – “Neither, Dad,” Augie on radio to Mars.
1:16 - PG-160G LIGHT MOVEMENT (Green) – Augie calls to dad, sound of saucer
1:36 - GR-333 BUSTLING BRIDGE (Green) – “Dese kids and dere imaginations,” saucer comes down, Augie rushes by dad.
1:58 - L-1158 ANIMATION COMEDY (Moore) – Saucer touches down.
2:01 - GR-154 PICNIC OR GARDEN SCENE (Green) – Augie talks to Boinka, wheels saucer baby carriage into home.
2:41 - THE GR-455 ARTFUL DODGER SHORT BRIDGE No 2 (Green) – Baby pops out of carriage, chatters.
2:45 - GR-65 BUSH BABY (Green) – Reaction shot, Augie reads Snow White to baby, sleeps,
3:21 - SWINGING GHOSTS (Krasnow) – Baby walks past daddy in chair, Daddy rushes out of scene
3:30 - CB-87A COME AND GET ME (Cadkin-Bluestone) – Daddy retrieves baby, “Ain’t that like kids, folks?”
3:52 - SWINGING GHOSTS (Krasnow) - Baby walks past daddy in chair, Daddy follows him up ceiling, crashes.
4:17 - GR-454 THE ARTFUL DODGER SHORT BRIDGE No 1 (Green) – Daddy puts baby in carriage. Daddy in chair.
4:34 - LFU-117-1 MAD RUSH No 1 (Shaindlin) – Baby flies past Daddy, out window, dog buries himself in ground.
5:06 - GR-457 DR QUACK SHORT BRIDGE No 1 (Green) – Daddy with baby in carriage, carriage takes off.
5:19 - ‘FIREMAN’ (Shaindlin) – Daddy walking, chases saucer, runs into mailbox, runs into cop, baby pulls up to cop.
6:08 - GR-78 CUSTARD PIE CAPERS SHORT BRIDGE No 1 (Green) – Baby talks to officer, Daddy runs away.
6:18 - GR-98 BY JIMINY! IT’S JUMBO BRIDGE No 2 (Green) – Cop on phone.
6:28 - PG-161G LIGHT COMEDY MOVEMENT (Green) – Baby saucer carriage returns to Doggie home and lands.
6:34 - L-1158 ANIMATION COMEDY (Moore) Saucer drops to earth.
6:36 - GR-85 THE BRAVEST WOODEN SOLDIER SHORT BRIDGE No 1 (Green) – Augie wakes up, walks to door.
6:47 - THE HAPPY COBBLER (Krasnow) – Augie at door, radio busted.
7:09 - Augie Doggie End Title theme (Curtin).

Kids, Special Interests and Cartoons

It strikes me as a simpleton mind-set when someone insists if you show a cartoon character with a gun, then kids will grow up shooting people. The people that say such things are, of course, those who saw cartoon characters with guns when they were kids. Maybe they even had their parents buy a toy one (as seen on TV) when they were a child. And they grew up just fine in spite of it. Well, except for their ridiculous grasp of deductive logic.

That’s the basic message contained in this story in the Hutchinson News of Saturday, July 2, 1960. It’s unbylined, but a chap named E. Lawson May was the paper’s TV Editor.

The early Hanna-Barbera cartoons only come in for a mention at the end of the article. But because the writer is full of common sense (and declares Huck and Quick Draw as being more than suitable for children’s eyes and minds), it’s worth printing 52 years later.

Capt. Kangaroo Helps Care for Youngsters
Educators, psychiatrists and do-gooders have been shouting louder than usual for the past year about how the younger generation is being breast fed by TV rather than books.
The optimists among us, however, are aware that the learned gentlemen assembling all these frightening statistics received their own primary education over the radio perils of Buck Rogers, Tom Mix, Flash Gordon, Omar the Mystic and well-informed criticism from another generation of analysts.
The simple truth is that TV, properly used by a parent, can offer child some delightful entertainment.
If the set’s prime function, however, is to get the youngster out of the way, the parents never should have had children in the first place. A preschool child would never be sent out on a busy city street alone, and there’s no reason why they should be expected to function in the channel-jungle without guidance.
Thanks to an easy-going, heavy-set young man named Bob Keeshan, the young mother’s first experience with television is generally quite encouraging. Keeshan, along with his friends Mr. Green Jeans, and Mr. Moose, conducts the “Captain Kangaroo” show via CBS six mornings a week.
At one time the network gave up on “Captain Kangaroo,” but a storm of protest, plus the fact that the show was outdrawing Garry Moore’s expensive morning variety show, bought Keeshan a new lease on life. Today the Captain is SRO with sponsors and mother knows she has at least 45 minutes every morning when the little one is in good hands.
“Be Good To Mother”
Bob Keeshan is not a great educator or a child psychologist, but he understands his audience. He appreciates their short attention span and never keeps any game, song or cartoon running too long. At no time does the Captain talk down to his little viewers or does he patronize them. He stimulates their imagination without frightening them, and good taste guides his every move. He closes each show by reminding the kids that “it’s another be-good-to-mother day,” and nobody is “gooder” to mom than captain Kangaroo.
Once the Captain closes up his weekday Treasure House, the television industry chooses to ignore children until around five o’clock. This is a sad mistake, because mother needs more than 45 minutes to finish her chores.
No Steady Diet
From 5 to 7:30 in the evening and on Saturday morning TV caters to kids. Some of the successful shows are little more than old movie shorts which were condemned as harmful to children a generation ago. Among these are “Our Gang,” “The Three Stooges” and
“Popeye.” Actually they are as harmful as they ever were, but kids adore this type of comic violence and, provided they’re not permitted to watch it as a steady diet, it’s a good bet they’ll survive.
But TV has developed its own cartoon empire and can point to the product with pride. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, who created “Tom and Jerry,” have come up with three of the most delightful and entertaining cartoon shows imaginable. They are such superb shows that the parents can laugh hysterically al the antics of the characters while the little ones are spellbound by the adventure.
Many a big city office is deserted early so pop can run home and enjoy “Ruff and Reddy,” “Huckleberry Hound,” and “Quick Draw McGraw” with his kids.
Perhaps “Huckleberry Hound” and his associates are the answer to many of TV’s critics. Because they are fun the parents are able to share them with the kids, and the shows are mature and intelligent, thus easing parental consciences.

Unfortunately, do-gooders today would complain about Quick Draw. He’s got a gun and shoots himself. Think of the kids imitating, blabbety, blah, blah. As it was, do-gooders manipulating studies and data managed to do a pretty good job of emasculating cartoons on Saturday mornings by about 1970. They guilt-tripped (if not pressured) networks and sponsors into filling the screens with cartoons with unsubtle (and therefore unentertaining) messages of doing good which, as we all know, ended racism, pollution, and violence forever because kids imitate everything they see on cartoons.

Oh. Right.