3-D House of Huck

It was the 1960s. We had a View-Master. Who didn’t?

There were slides depicting the Taj Mahal and other sites around the world. But there were cartoons, too. Only they weren’t really cartoons because they had a weird 3-D effect. Okay, it seems that’s what animated cartoons are today, but let’s not get into that here.

We’ve posted a couple of these pictures here before. A nice guy named Dom Giansante has collected a bunch of Hanna-Barbera View-Master slides, some from his own collection I gather, and we pass them on as a public service. The Yogi ones are really neat.



Seeing them now reminds me of the old George Pal Puppetoons. It might have been interesting to make a little Huck film in stop-motion, but it would have felt an awful lot different. No run cycles in front of a repeating background, for one thing. And then there’s that thing called “cost” that Bill Hanna used to go on about a lot. Ah, well. We have a few old View-Master frames—and our imaginations—to give us a bit of an idea of what it might have been like.

Snooper and Blabber — Gem Jams

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – John Boersma, Layout – Walt Clinton, Backgrounds – Fernando Montealegre, Written by Mike Maltese, Story Director – Lew Marshall, Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Snooper, Blabber, J. Richley Richley – Daws Butler; Hazel – Jean Vander Pyl; Grimes, Circus Barker – Don Messick.
Music: Hoyt Curtin.
First Aired: 1961-62 season.
Plot: Snooper finds a millionaire’s butler is shrinking himself to steal gems.

Mike Maltese puts together some variations on some of his old favourites in this story. There were several cartoons featuring fleas and a couple involving gems thieves. “Flea For All” (1960-61 season) combined the two. And there were a couple of Quick Draw cartoons where the bad guy declared he was off for “jolly fun” or a “jolly time.” Well, the bad guy does the same thing here. So what we get is a bunch of teeny flea-like silhouettes fighting with regular-sized objects in a regular-sized world—like below.


Except the flea-like silhouettes are Snooper, Blabber and the bad guy.

There’s no office door with an eyeball on its window, no Duffy’s Tavern-like opening rhyme from Snoop when he answers the phone in this cartoon. He and Blab are riding a bike. Their car has been repossessed. They must still have an office as Hazel, their secretary, is yelling at them (their phone is disconnected) about a job. Monte is the background artist in this cartoon; I like his trees in the opening scene.



So off they go to the mansion of J. Richley Richley, with Blab doing his “sireen” impression. “Try not to look hungry, Blab,” Snoop advises. Richley answers the doorbell. “That must be those two-bit private eyes,” he grumbles in an English accent that sounds somewhat like James Mason. “All the good ones are out of town.” Here’s part of a background of the Richley mansion.



“You sent for us, I take it? Or we wouldn’t be here, would we?” asks Blab, who’s a dullard in this one. Richley suspects his butler, Grimes, is stealing his gems, even though Snooper assures him “the only times the butler did it is in those old, old movies on the late, late show.” Here’s a pan of the fabulous gem collection.



So our heroes pose as window washers to keep an eye on Grimes, “even though this ain’t the Late, Late Show.” In the next scene, Snooper spots a clue; “something we missed before.” Well, it was pretty easy to miss it as it wasn’t on the background drawing above—footprints getting smaller and leading into a mouse hole. “Hark, as they say,” remarks Blab, and the scene cuts to Grimes drinking some kind of potion to shrink so that he can get under the door of the vault to steal another gem and run into the mouse hole with it for safe keeping. “Soon, I’ll have the ‘hole ruddy lot. Then it’s me to the Orkney Islands for a jolly time,” exclaims Grimes.



“Okay, Blab, go after him,” orders Snoop, handing the bottle of potion to Blabber. “You’re askin’ me to drink that stuff, Snoop?” “Socially, I would ask you. But, officially, it’s an order.” So Blab drinks the stuff and shrinks. Don’t ask why it is Blab is a mouse but he has to shrink to be able to fit through a mouse hole. Anyway, Grimes has a gun that he can somehow lift despite his extremely small size. In fact he’s about the third the size of Blabber but when the fight scenes take place, the two (and Snooper, who has shrunk himself to come to the rescue) are all the same size.

“Stop in the name of the Private Eye Institute Fife and Drum Corps,” yells Snoop. There’s a fight scene with the characters in little silhouettes. Snooper is tossed into a fish bowl (with water but no fish) by Grimes who tries to grab the potion to grow back to full size. Wait. The potion makes you shrink AND grow? How? Oh, well. Best not to ask. Blabber stops Grimes from reaching it by knocking him out with a golf ball in a perfectly swung drive. But then booby Blab throws the bottle of potion through the window. They can’t grow back. And when Snooper and Blabber try to collect their $50,000 reward (Grimes is now taller than Blabber), Richley thinks they’re fleas and tries to kill them with a fly-swatter. Snooper, Blabber and Grimes retreat under the door.



The potion won’t wear off for six weeks. So they do the only thing they can. Become an act in a flea circus, with Blab somersaulting in the air between Grimes and Snooper. “It was either this or go to the dogs,” exclaims Snoop. Blab gets the pun and snickers as the iris closes to end the cartoon. You’ll notice a sign says “Fink’s Flea Circus.” No doubt Maltese recalled years earlier in vaudeville there was a popular act called Fink’s Mules that toured for decades.

Hoyt Curtin’s music works well here. The cutter uses a jaunty little march during the scene at Richley’s door. There’s also a version of “Man on the Flying Trapeze” when the circus barker is shilling that was used in a number of H-B cartoons about this time, followed by the xylophone version of “Over the Waves.” You’ll recognise the “hurry” music from “Top Cat” during the fight scene.

Yogi Bear Weekend Comics, April 1964

For the first time in a long time, the Hanna-Barbera “Kellogg’s” characters get together in one of the Sunday comics as we look back at 50 years ago this month. Attempts to do this sort of thing on TV in the 1970s never worked for me for a variety of reasons. But in this comic, at least, the situation isn’t contrived, and it makes sense for the characters to be together. That’s even though Quick Draw McGraw belongs in a nether-world that is sort of the Old West but isn’t.

I again apologise for the lousy quality of these comics but they’re the best I can find on the internet.



The April 5th plot is imaginative, if nothing else. I like the galloping beavers in the last panel. There’s a lot of content in the panel but the composition is such that it’s not cluttered. And there’s perspective, too.



Did Ranger Smith ever get as emotional on TV as he did in the first panel of the April 12th comic? In his first appearances, he had a quiet annoyance. Pretty good expression on Yogi, too.



Sorry, I have trouble believing Yogi’s so stupid, he doesn’t know what a fossilised skeleton is. This is from April 19th.



I don’t see Snooper in the April 26th comic, but Blabber’s there. We get Huck, the meeces, Mr. Jinks, Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy, Quick Draw and Baba Looey, Snagglepuss, Chopper, Yakky and Hokey Wolf. Oh, and Boo Boo, Cindy and Ranger Smith. And three silhouette piles of characters.

Click on each comic to enlarge.

Huckleberry Hound — The Scrubby Brush Man

Produced and Directed by Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna.
Credits: Animation – Edwin Parks, Layout – Jim Carmichael, Backgrounds – Dick Thomas, Written by Tony Benedict, Story Director – John Freeman, Titles – Art Goble, Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Huckleberry Hound – Daws Butler; Narrator, Scrubby President, Customer, Butch – Don Messick.
Music: Hoyt Curtin.
First Aired: 1961-62 season.
Plot: Huck, the Scrubby Brush Man, tried to sell a brush to a recalcitrant would-be customer.

The Hanna-Barbera studio kept adding cartoons to its drawing boards and had to keep adding staff as a result. So in Huckleberry Hound’s 1961-62 season (his last with new cartoons), we start to see new names in the credits replacing Ed Love, Ken Muse and others who were moved over to the prime time “Flintstones” and “Top Cat.”

Ed Parks was an animation veteran. He was born on August 25, 1915 in Waterbury, Connecticut, where he grew up. He and his widowed mother arrived in Los Angeles in the mid to late 30s; the 1940 Census lists him as a cartoonist. An inside reference is made to him in the 1949 Goofy cartoon “Tennis Racket.” Parks left Disney in 1961 during/after production of “1001 Dalmations” and spent the rest of his career at Hanna-Barbera, working on pretty much everything the studio produced over the next 15 years. “The Scrubby Brush Man” was either his first or second cartoon for H-B. Parks died on January 31, 1999. You can read more about him HERE.

Among layout artist Jim Carmichael’s stops in animation was Columbia’s Screen Gems studio. During the war, he was employed at the Combat Intelligence Section at Air Force HQ. And writer Tony Benedict had just arrived from UPA. He took over writing most of the Hucks from Warren Foster, who was busy with “The Flintstones,” and rightfully decided Huck would be perfect to drop into a send-up of Fuller Brush door-to-door salesmen. The cartoon has a quick set up before getting into a string of Huck-fails-to-sell-a-brush-to-an-angry-guy gags. Huck, as usual, comments to us on each failure before moving on.

The set-up: no Scrubby Brush salesman has ever returned from, let alone made a sale in, the 13th District, so the boss sends for super-salesman Huck. He’s not considered a dolt by management in this cartoon.

Huck: Howdy, Pres. You wanna buy one of our new brushes? You can have it at half-price, what with you bein’ the boss and all.
President: That’s what I like, Huck. Always pitching.

Huck arrives at a house owned by a guy who clearly doesn’t want to be bothered. Here are the gags:

● Huck tries subliminal advertising by chanting a “buy” suggestion outside a window, then ducking out of sight when the guy inside turns around. But the guy catches Huck and slams the window on his snout.
● Huck sings a commercial jingle through the window on a bullhorn. The guy punches Huck in the head right through the bullhorn. “Some folks don’t know good music when it hits them right smack-dab in the face,” Huck tells us.
● Huck uses a remote camera to hook into the guy’s TV set to give a commercial. The guy punches the screen and his fist comes through the camera and hits Huck in the face. “It’s gettin’ so the commercials have commercials,” growls the guy. Huck decides the customer “has had enough softenin’ up.”
● He ignores signs like “Salesman Go Home” (“Sure signs of weak sales resistance,” Huck opines to us) and rings the doorbell. When the guy answers, Huck observes “I see you have one of our products in your hand there.” The guy bashes Huck on the head with the huge brush. “That’s what we call in the trade ‘the brush off’,” Huck chuckles.



● Huck puts his foot in the door. We hear a chomp. A bulldog clamps on Huck’s leg, runs into the yard and buries him.
● Trying to win the customer’s confidence, Huck gives him a gift of colog-nee. The guy gives Huck a gift. “I think I know what it is on account of it’s tickin’.” Kaboom! “How about that. I was right. A home-made bomb. You get to know all the tricks after awhile.
● A crash helmet doesn’t stop Huck from being crushed by a chest of drawers dropped on top of him from the second storey of the house.

● The best gag is an old one but it’s still funny. Huck knocks on the back door. The door opens and crashes him against the side of the house. Huck tries knocking from the other side. The door opens the other way and crashes him against the other side of the house. “How about that? A two-way door.”

Huck now returns to headquarters. The anxious president wants to know about the sale. It turns out Huck sold a back brush to himself because he needed it. The boss faints. “Hmm. I guess he just couldn’t stand success.” The next five seconds is filled with music and Huck turning to and from the audience to fill the cartoon’s allotted time.

Ah, yes, Hoyt Curtin’s music. We get urgent “Top Cat” music when Huck saunters to the 13th District through the television punch scene. The odd thing is he’s sings ‘Clementine’ during part of the time. The music doesn’t work. Either play ‘Clementine’ in the background or let Daws Butler sing a capella. Later, Huck sings a jingle to the ‘Clementine’ music and the “Top Cat” music is playing. More “Top Cat” music follows during the brush bash scene. The gift exchange scene has a cue used in several series of that era but without the melody line. It should be mentioned Curtin never gave formal names to any of his cues; what names we have here were, I suspect, given to the cues by the late Earl Kress when he was assembling the Pic-a-nic Basket Hanna-Barbera music set for Rhino Records a number of years ago.

Wave Goodbye, Yogi

A few of the earliest Yogi Bear cartoons didn’t involve rangers, pic-a-nic baskets and non-stop hey-hey-hey-HEY dialogue. Joe Barbera, Charlie Shows and Dan Gordon combined on a spot-gag format which, frankly, I wish had not been abandoned. One of the spot-gaggers was “Baffled Bear” (1958).

And in some of the earliest cartoons, Mike Lah was assigned to animate two or three scenes. One of them was in “Baffled Bear.” The expressions are not as outrageous as some in his other cartoons, but they’re effective because you know exactly what Yogi’s thinking, even though he says nothing.

Yogi invents a balloon-o-copter to get across a busy freeway. It works.



Oh, wait. It doesn’t work. Yogi winces when the balloons break, and keeps looking up at the balloons and then at us, back and forth. It’s a really clever use of limited animation. There aren’t many drawings but the combination of Yogi moving his head combined with the moving background drawing of the sky makes it appear lots is happening. Simple drawings, but they work.



Finally, the last balloon breaks. In a Wile E. Coyote-esque moment, Yogi turns to the camera and waves goodbye. Here it is in an endless cycle.



Yogi drops. Ken Muse animated most of this cartoon. He’d never draw Yogi with an open little mouth like this.



My personal preference would be for some Tex Avery-like takes—Lah, as you likely know, animated for Avery for a number of years—and he drew a few in other cartoons, but there’s nothing wrong with the simpler approach.

Lah didn’t stay at Hanna-Barbera long. He opened Cinema Ad in 1958 then moved on to Quartet Films a few years later. It’s too bad because his take on the Flintstones would have been interesting (and probably very off-model).

Pixie and Dixie — Fresh Heir

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – La Verne Harding, Layout – Tony Rivera, Backgrounds – Dick Thomas, Written by Warren Foster, Story Director – Lew Marshall, Titles – Art Goble, Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Mr Jinks, Dixie – Daws Butler; Pixie – Don Messick.
Music: Hoyt Curtin.
First Aired: 1961.
Episode: Production E-171.
Plot: Pixie and Dixie try to scare Jinks out of his new mansion.

Jinks inherits a run-down, empty old mansion from a widow no one has heard of and decides to desert the meeces, who ignore the rejection and scare Jinks back into their happy home. The End.

You know, there isn’t much more to say about this cartoon. It’s not full of witty responses by Mr. Jinks to his spooky predicament. Warren Foster doesn’t seem to be as inspired by the orange house cat as much as he was by a blue hound dog, who comments with ridiculous appropriateness about his situation. Foster could have probably included a scene in about the joyful meece happy to be rid of the cat but then find life dull and plot to bring him back (a kind of reverse of “Lend Lease Meece”). However he spends so much time with the opening scene at the door when the mail arrives there’s no time. And, of course, the Hanna-Barbera animation had started to get so stiff by the fourth season of “The Huckleberry Hound Show;” there are none of the takes like the kind we saw in the first season to enliven the proceedings.

Maybe the most interesting things in the cartoon are some of Dick Thomas’ backgrounds. Well, actually, my favourite part is the smiling, bug-eyed bats.



Thomas went for textured clouds, too.



La Verne Harding is the credited animator. Below, you can see her angular Jinks (and meeces with their eyes wide apart), a weird little run by Pixie where he’s bent over at 90 degrees with arms hanging down, and an outline of Dixie as he runs out of the scene, very much like Brad Case.



Favourite line? Foster pulls off an almost Cole Porter-like rhyme: “This feline is making a bee-line immediately.” And Jinks butchers a word:

Jinks: I do not subscribe to silly stupid-stitions like ghosts and goblins and spooks, or, uh, any of those figments made of, like, uh, ectoplastic.

This and “Bombay Mouse” were the only Pixie and Dixie cartoons to have “Hanna-Barbera” in script on the title card.

Greg Watson or whoever was cutting for him dredges up all kinds of Flintstones music in this cartoon. The minor key not-yet-Flintstones theme is played when Jinks is at the entrance to the mansion, and “Bridge” when Jinks is on the ground until the end of the cartoon. “And That’s the Story” is heard when Jinks is walking away from the meece and they plot to get him out of the mansion. Hoyt Curtin had a pretty good collection of creepy cues, including some with a solo organ.