More Storyboards and Models

Tony Benedict was the first writer hired at Hanna-Barbera after the arrival of Mike Maltese and Warren Foster, and began work on all the company’s series. Like Foster, he drew his own storyboards (Maltese seems to have drawn sketches that were cleaned up by others), but I can’t tell you whether he drew these story panels for ‘Cinderella Stone’ (1964) or if Alex Lovy did. Regardless, Tony wrote the cartoon and here are some panels for it.






Yogi Bear was spun off into his own show in 1961. That meant someone had to replace him on The Huckleberry Hound Show. That somebody was Hokey Wolf, with mandatory sidekick Dingaling. Dick Bickenbach came up with these model sheets. The Ding model is from October 1960. Hokey first aired in January 1961 so that gives you an idea how fast the cartoons were churned out. The Hokeys were really the first I-can-take-it-or-leave-it TV cartoons the company produced. They weren’t nearly as funny as Huck or Quick Draw but were okay. The drawing style and voices gave them a familiarity.




Hokey wasn’t nearly as funny as Snooper and Blabber, either. Here’s a nice model sheet of them from Bick.



And, finally, some odds and sods. This August 1960 model sheet by Bick is self-explanatory. I didn’t realise sheets like this would have been made for television cartoons.



This model is from the Quick Draw McGraw cartoon “Talky Hawky.” The chicken hawk is called “Maxie” because Daws Butler used his Maxie Rosenbloom-style voice that was used more often at the Jay Ward studio. Tony Rivera did layouts on the cartoon.



Here’s a layout drawing of Blabber. I haven’t been able to figure out which cartoon this is from. I suspect this is Bick again.



And, finally, a 1964 sheet from ‘Ricochet Rabbit,’ showing differences in character sizes. Someone more interested in Mr. Bing-bing-BINGGG!! can tell you which cartoon this is from. It looks like Bick’s hand-writing again.



I believe these all came from the Van Eaton Gallery web site, which is always worth a look to see what animation-related things they have for sale.

Huckleberry Hound — Cop and Saucer

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Ed Love, Layout – Tony Rivera, Backgrounds – Joe Montell, Story – Warren Foster, Story Direction – Alex Lovy, Titles – Art Goble; Story Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Huck Hound, TV Announcer – Daws Butler; Radio Dispatcher, Alien – Don Messick.
Music: Bill Loose/John Seely, Spence Moore, Geordie Hormel, Jack Shaindlin, Phil Green, Raoul Kraushaar?
First Aired: week of December 21, 1959 (rerun, week of June 27, 1960).
Episode: Huckleberry Hound Show K-034.
Plot: Huck thinks a flying saucer is an illegally parked car.

Huckleberry Hound attracted fans because he was laid-back and somewhat naïve. But Warren Foster fiddled with his personality a bit in a handful of cartoons and it wasn’t for the best. Huck became flat-out stupid and couldn’t comprehend something obvious right in front of him. It’s not an endearing characteristic for him.

So that’s why I’m not crazy about this cartoon. I can accept Huck believing a huge flying saucer is a car. Considering designs of cars in the late 1950s, anything was possible. But Huck believing a metal thing with an antenna, and a wheel at the bottom is a person? Sorry, Warren. Yeah, I realise if Huck knew he was a space alien at the start it’d screw up your final gag, but I don’t buy it. He’s not Mr. Magoo who had an excuse for mistaking things in front of him.

Don Messick is admirable in this. At least, I think it’s Don as the alien. Bill Hanna would be too cheap just to bring him in to do a police radio dispatcher. Don had a bunch of different and unique vocal effects, showing what great talent he had.

Ed Love loved teeth, at least in the 1959-60 season. He used little mouth movements in dialogue sequences, with heads going up and down all over, sometimes on ones, sometimes on threes. Huck has teeth in this cartoon. I don’t know why Ed stopped drawing like this about a year later; you don’t really see it in The Flintstones, and certainly not in The Jetsons.



Joe Montell didn’t have an awful lot of backgrounds to draw in this cartoon. Much of the action takes place in a city park and a good portion of that is in front of one background drawing of trees. You can tell it’s Montell because of the dots he uses in the foliage.

And here’s some of the work of Tony Rivera. He’s got a small cast, besides Huck and the alien. One TV newsman. And he designed the props, including the saucer and Huck’s squad car. Oh, and there are some little birds. We’ll get to them in a second.



Foster starts with a dialogue gag after the almost-standard narrator intones about policemen, and how they serve and protect at night, and then introduces Huck. His rendition of ‘Clementine’ is interrupted.

Dispatcher: Attention! Calling Car 6-1-3-4-8-7-6.
Huck: No.
Dispatcher: 9-8-1-1-0-3-5-6-4.
Huck: No.
Dispatcher: 0-2.
Huck: Uh, uh.
Dispatcher: 2.
Huck (turning his eye to the camera): That’s m’car.

The radio sends the hound to the park to investigate a UFO. Huck calls it “ridica-luss.” Cut to the TV newsman who editorialises it’s “the silly season” and laughs at the very idea of a flying saucer. Well, it turns out the reports are true. Huck thinks the saucer must be a foreign car in the middle of the road “obstructing justice” and he goes to ask “that feller over there” if he knows who owns the car. The “feller” is the alien.

Now maybe it isn’t that Foster thinks Huck is a dullard. Maybe he’s woven into his cartoon a veiled commentary on the incompetence of some police investigations and corporate media bias.

Nah. The laughs are how Huck is too brain dead to see a metallic bell-shape isn’t a real person. And that the alien’s disintegrating gun is a kid’s toy (one that “can be downright dangerous in an adult’s hands” Huck tells us).

Well, let’s go through the gags.

► The alien uses a metallic cuff to grab Huck’s neck and throw him back and forth on the ground and finally against a tree. Huck informs us he’s been taught judo at the Police Academy. After getting whooped, he remarks “Of course, there are new holds comin’ along all the time.”
► Huck cuffs the alien. More throwing around (some nice little drawings by Love here).



► Huck pulls on the hand cuff but has trouble dragging the alien away. Cut to a shot of him being cuffed to his car. “I gots to remember t’leave off m’brake next time,” he decides.
► The alien’s ray dissolves Huck’s ticket, a garbage can where he’s hiding, a bird house where he’s hiding, the water in a lake where he’s parked himself and finally his police car as he calls for help. “This is a 7-0-7-3. Whatever that is.”




Huck’s annoyed. He demands the alien to use his car to take them both to the station. The alien carries them into the saucer, which lifts off. For some reason, the alien has the audio of the TV channel piped into his saucer’s control room. The announcer chuckles the saucer’s lifted off with a policeman in it. Huck looks out a porthole. Cut to a drawing of the earth, turning as the camera pulls back. Now clueless Huck clues in to what’s happened and cries as the iris closes.

Not much to say about the music cues in this cartoon. You can hear all 60 seconds of Shaindlin’s ‘On the Run’ starting at 4:35, then the sound cutter has added a little reprise. The short flute effect sounds like something from Phil Green’s Kiddie Comedy Suite but I haven’t been able to find it.

0:00 - Huckleberry Hound Sub Main Title theme (Hanna, Barbera, Curtin, Shows)
0:13 - C-19 LIGHT ACTIVITY (Loose) – Pan of city, Huck in squad car.
0:31 - Clementine (Trad.) – Huck sings ‘Clementine’ in car.
0:41 - L-81 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – Police radio goes off, duty to check all rumours.
1:06 - ZR-47 LIGHT MOVEMENT (Hormel) – Police car speeds, TV announcer, stops squad car.
1:35 - ZR-49 LIGHT EERIE (Hormel) – Shot of saucer, Huck demands license.
2:20 - creepy reverb muted trumpet music (Kraushaar?) – Alien pulls out gun, clamps around Huck’s neck.
2:49 - solo flute effect (Green) – Huck to camera “Little does he know.”
2:52 - LAF-2-12 ON THE RUN (Shaindlin) – Alien bashes Huck to the ground, Huck against tree.
3:10 - TC-303 ZANY COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Huck cuffs alien.
3:36 - LAF-72-2 RODEO DAY (Shaindlin) – Alien pulls back Huck, bashes Huck.
3:44 - C-3 DOMESTIC CHILDREN (Loose) – “Don’t get the picture,” Huck pulls on handcuff, attached to squad car, beam through ticket,
4:35 - LAF-2-12 ON THE RUN (Shaindlin) – Huck hides in garbage can, birds, motorboat, squad car zapped.
6:04 - C-14 DOMESTIC LITE (Loose) – Alien carries Huck into saucer, shot of earth, Huck cries.
6:58 - Huckleberry Hound Sub End-Title theme (Curtin).

Yogi Bear Weekend Comics, April 1962

Gene Hazelton and his crew didn’t bring in Huck or any other denizens of the Hanna-Barbera world outside Jellystone Park in the Sunday comics for this month 50 years ago, but we do get some out-of-this world guests and the return of little Randolph Smith.

The quality of the scans from microfilm isn’t great this month, and we’re missing the top row of panels because the few I found were too dark to be seen well.



April 1 sees Yogi getting an idea watching a little skunk in the missing top row. Another cute wife and kid. Seems Yogi must be famous to tourists as the mention of the pork-pie hat clues in the tourist dad about the identity of the skunk. The pun at the end is obvious, but inevitable. I like how the boy is still in fear and grabbing onto the dad.



That fickle Cindy Bear was willing to succumb to the charms of Bruno in the 1961 cartoon “A Wooin’ Bruin.” In the April 8 comic, she’s come out of three months hibernation (so says the missing first panel) with rosy cheeks and ready to play the tease again, this time with vest-clad Waldo. It’s been so long since I’ve seen “Hey, There, It’s Yogi Bear!” I don’t recall if Waldo’s design is similar to the bears used in the movie.



Jellystone must be next to an Indian reservation of stereotypes or something. Clichéd natives appear in the Sunday comics every few months and they’re back again on April 15. Me think-um end pun heap-big corny. Ugh! (Did natives ever talk like that? Outside Hollywood, I mean?)



Great character design of the little aliens on April 22. The word (?) balloons are imaginative, too. The ending’s really forced.



Ah, here’s adorable little Randolph Smith on April 29. Yogi had better luck with children here than he did in his TV cartoons in the first two seasons, as he got mutilated throughout the pictures. Boo Boo gets the weekend off in this comic, it seems.

As usual, you can click on the comics to get a bit of a better view of them.

Mike Maltese and Friends, 1961

During its short life, this blog has been blessed with the help of former artists of the Hanna-Barbera studio. They’re always friendly and willing to share their knowledge.

Mark Christiansen is one of them. He’s patiently answered my e-mails and, on one of his own blogs, has posted a few great, sometimes unique, things that I’ve been tempted to purloin. Today, I’ve given in to temptation because he’s posted a picture of my favourite cartoon writer, Mike Maltese. And, as Maltese might have Pepé Le Pew say, “Quel belle de bon-us!” Warren Foster is there, too.



The photos come from a 1961 article in the TV-Radio Mirror, yet another one of those We-Got-Kicked-Out-By-MGM-But-Had-The-Last-Laugh stories. But it’s got pictures of some of the staff, and I was quite happy to see some people I’d never seen before.



Fernando Montealegre and Art Lozzi both worked for Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera at the MGM studio and came along (Dan Bessie, an assistant at MGM, notes in his autobiography there were two Fernandos at MGM, both from Costa Rica). Art is still living in Greece as far as I know, and I would love to hear from him some time.



Roberta Greutert, the head of ink and paint, worked under Art Goble at MGM. I’ve presumed as her married name was Marshall, she married Lew Marshall.



Frank Paiker (his name is misspelled in the caption) goes back to the silent era. He worked for the Bray Studio, then as an inker at the Fleischer Studio in the 1930s before he rose into management. He was an MGM refugee as well.



Alex Lovy’s career is pretty known. He worked in New York, came west to work at the Lantz studio, stopped for a time at Columbia before UPA took over its release schedule, then left Lantz a second time around the end of 1958 for a story director’s job at Hanna-Barbera.

The reposting of the full article is HERE.

Pixie and Dixie — Puss in Boats

Produced and Directed by Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna.
Credits: Animation – Dick Lundy, Layout – Paul Sommer, Backgrounds – Dick Thomas, Story – Mike Maltese, Story Director – Alex Lovy, Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Pixie, French Cat – Don Messick; Dixie, Jinks – Daws Butler.
Music: Bill Loose/John Seely, Spence Moore, Geordie Hormel, Lou De Francesco, Raoul Kraushaar.
First Aired: week of February 22, 1960 (rerun, week of August 1, 1960)
Episode: Huckleberry Hound Show K-39, Production E-104.
Plot: Jinks tries to get past a kicking Gallic cat and retrieve Pixie and Dixie on a French ocean liner.

Warren Foster was adept at fighting when the need arose, fellow Warner Bros. writer Lloyd Turner once observed. And perhaps that’s why Foster knew about the art of savate and incorporated it into this cartoon. You can read the history of it HERE.

This isn’t a bad little cartoon. There are some cute asides to the audience, and the timing’s good at the end which Jinks injures himself. Dick Lundy comes up with some nice angular stretches on the characters, though you can see how he could churn out footage if you check out how many times he uses cycles, eye blinks and holds on backgrounds. And I like the relationship between the cat and mice in Foster’s story.

The cartoon starts with Pixie and Dixie moving out forever because of the abuse Jinks inflicts on them. Right at the start, there’s little for Lundy to do. The shot is a close-up of the mouse hole on Dick Thomas’ background drawing. The camera trucks back to reveal Jinks standing there. The cat doesn’t even blink an eye for the first seven seconds. I like this little exchange:

Dixie: You got the tickets?
Pixie: Yup.
Dixie: Passports?
Pixie: Uh, huh. I picked them up while you were gettin’ your shots.

That’s right. Mice with passports and shots.

Jinks is lead to facetiousness and overacting when the mice tell him why they’re leaving. “You are breaking my heart,” is one of his phoney laments as he clutches his heart. Finally, he points and angrily tells the meeces to leave. The background drawing with the angular shadow on the wall was also in ‘Hi-Fido’ earlier in the season.



When the mice are gone, Jinks laughs about how peaceful it is with no meeces to make his life “miser-ab-ble.” Then his expression changes in five drawings on twos. I’ve slowed it down.



He starts crying. He wants his meeces back. Aww. It’s a shame TV animation forced Lundy to keep Jinks’ body on one cell and his head drawings on others. The body remains rigid while he cries which looks a little awkward.

Jinks follows them down the street up the gangway of a French ship. “Let’s let gone-byes be byegones,” he pleads. He’s tapped on the shoulder. It’s the ship’s cat, who claims all mice on the ship are his, and French. “Just one parlez-vous minute,” says Jinks (echoing Daffy Duck’s “Just a parbroiled minute,” during a cooking discussion in the Maltese-written ‘Duck! Rabbit, Duck!) as he explains there are two American meeces on board.. But when Pixie and Dixie appear, they speak French with the weakest accents imaginable, though the French cat is fully convinced.

Jinks (to French cat): Your mice, my foot.
French Cat: No, no, Monsieur. My mice, my foot.

That’s when the cat kicks Jinks off the ship into the water and Dixie explains savate to us all (though it keeps being pronounced “sabatt” during the whole cartoon). And when Pixie and Dixie tell the French cat they want to go home to their mouse hole and Jinks, he threatens to kick them, too. Then he locks them in the hold. Oh, you just know M. Chat is going to get his.



The meece cry for help. Jinks’ hears them and does his best to rescue them. Lundy gets a chance to stretch the characters a bit. First Jinks dashes along the wharf and up the gangway. He’s kicked back down off-camera (all we see is Jinks rolling backward on the wharf). Then he hangs onto a rope and inches his way toward a porthole on the ship. “Okay, wise guy, there’s more than one way to skin a cat,” he cries. Then he stops and turns to the audience. “Shee. Whoever started that expression?” Cut to Jinks in the porthole. The French cat apparently loves Frank Sinatra. “One for my baby and one more for the road,” he exclaims as he kicks Jinks out of the porthole.



Dixie sees Jinks taking a beating and decides they have to save him. Wait a minute. I thought they couldn’t get out and that’s why they were yelling for Jinks to help them. Well, let’s ignore that for now. Pixie ties a rope to the French cat’s tail while Dixie ties the other end to a signal rocket. Look at the stretches.



More Sinatra, this time from the Cole Porter songbook. The French cat says of Jinks “I get a kick out of ‘eem.” Jinks comes up the stairs onto the deck. The French cat is about to kick him accompanied with his “Viva la savate!” cry when he’s suddenly pulled off the ship by the rocket and disappears into the distance. So it turns out the climax, as Frank might sing, involves flying too high with some guy in the sky.



We switch to the Wizard of Oz as the meece tell Jinks they’ve learned “there’s no place like home.” Jinks has learned something, too. The French cat’s savate foot work. He starts chasing the mice. The last gag’s set up really well. Jinks misses the first time his leg takes a swing at the mice. The second time, he unexpectedly kicks a table that happens to appear. He dances around in pain. It’s pretty funny. And the meece pulls a Scooby by laughing together as the cartoons fades out.

There’s no Sinatra on the soundtrack, but we get that echo-ey clarinet and muted trumpet cue by Raoul Kraushaar. And there’s a galop by Lou De Francesco, The March of Time’s musical director before Jack Shaindlin.

0:00 - Pixie and Dixie Main Title theme (Curtin, Hanna, Barbera, Shows).
0:13 - TC-202 ECCENTRIC COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Pixie and Dixie bid Jinks goodbye, Jinks emotes “You are breakin’ my heart.”
1:09 - C-3 DOMESTIC CHILDREN (Loose) – “How can I ever get along...,” meeces leave, Jinks lonesome.
1:50 - L-1139 ANIMATION COMEDY (Moore) – Jinks wants to talk to meeces.
2:03 - L-75 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – Jinks chases after meeces, meeces scurry up gang plant, Jinks on deck calls out to meeces.
2:44 - C-14 DOMESTIC LIGHT (Loose) – Tap on shoulder, “Mice on board are mine.”
3:10 - ZR-51 LIGHT ANIMATION (Hormel) – “Oh, now look...,” Pixie and Dixie have fake accents, Jinks kicked, lands in water, French cat threatens meece.
4:32 - 8-MR-377 creepy reverb muted trumpet (Kraushaar) – Meece call to Jinks through porthole, Jinks runs off scene.
5:02 - SF-10 SKI(ING) GALOP (DeFrancesco) – Jinks runs on deck, kicked off boat.
5:15 - LAF-10-7 GROTESQUE No 2 (Shaindlin) – Jinks on rope, kicked out of porthole, Pixie ties French cat’s tail.
5:57 - LAF-20-5 TOBOGGAN RUN (Shaindlin) – Pixie runs away, French cat zooms into the distance.
6:13 - TC-437 SHOPPING DAY (Loose-Seely) – Pixie, Dixie and Jinks in living room, Jinks kicks.
6:30 - SF-10 SKI(ING) GALOP (DeFrancesco) – Meece leap into the air, Jinks kicks table.
6:57 - Pixie and Dixie Sub End Title theme (Curtin).

Yowp Note: With this cartoon, the blog has reviewed all 13 cartoons in Pixie and Dixie’s second season on the air.

Ride With Fred, Bathe With Huck

You almost have to wonder why Pebbles had to be created. Hanna-Barbera didn’t need to make money off an oh-so-cute kid doll from Ideal Toys. It was already marketing the crap out of the Flintstones before Pebbles was around.

Roving correspondent Billie Towzer has found pictures of yet more H-B merchandise on the internet which is generously being passed on to you.

If you play a word-association game with anyone who watched Saturday morning TV, say about 1964, and said “Marx” (as in ‘toys’, not ‘brothers’), the response will likely be “Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots.” They must have been advertised on every cartoon show at one time. Nevertheless, Louis Marx and Co. made heaps of other things for kids, including Flintstones items licensed from Hanna-Barbera. Among them were wind-up toy tricycles, made in Japan in 1962, featuring Fred, Wilma and Dino.





Kids love trains, or they used to. Marx came through for them with a couple of train sets. The Flintstones Bedrock Express was kind of cheesy. It had Fred and Barney on a handcar which went around a moulded plastic track surrounding a few houses, streets and three palm trees. This is from about 1962 as well.



How many Perry Gunite toys are there? At least one. It’s a wind-up train, by Marx. Bonus points for an on-model drawing of Baby Puss (by Dick Bickenbach?). The description I found on the internet says:

...train depicts all the various Flintstone characters looking out of the windows. Fred and Wilma ride in the locomotive. On both sides of the train is written in white letters "Bedrock Express." On each of the three cars, as if carved in stone, is text "The Flintstone/Choo Choo/Train." Other characters appear in car windows w/names above. Included are Barney/Betty/Rodney/Rocky/Baby Puss/Dino/Perry Gunite/Stanley Stonedome/Mrs. Dweller. On the back of the train is a .75 x 7/8" bw image w/four main characters w/names below. .25 x 3/8" cast metal bell on locomotive top.



Before we leave the Flintstones, check out a series of buttons. 1964 or so, maybe?



Whitman had a series of Huckleberry Hound colouring books in the early ‘60s. Here’s the cover from one of them, copyright December 23, 1960. The drawings are by John Carey and Bill Edwards. Yes, the same John Carey who animated at Warner Bros. in the ‘30s and ‘40s.



I’ve never heard of Milvern but it seems they were in the bath business. They licensed bath soap with the cast of ‘The Huckleberry Hound Show’ on the box. The artwork’s fun. I love the pissed-off Jinks.



There was a time long before computer games when children could amuse themselves with a simple deck of cards. There was a gin rummy set that my parents bought me which featured Yowp and the always fun Fibber Fox. But this is a different set altogether. I can’t remember if I had these but I’m pretty sure I saw them when they came out. If you look closely, you’ll see they’ve been cut from stiff paper. Perhaps they were on the back of a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes box.



My thanks again to Billie. We’ll have more in a future post.