“I’m pop-a-lar. Mighty pop-a-lar,” Huckleberry Hound might say. And he’d be right. Critics loved his show when it debuted in 1958; we’ve posted a number of old columns here. But Huck kind of became the Florence Lawrence of TV cartoons. Lawrence was the world’s first movie star identified by her real name, but she soon was eclipsed by Mary Pickford and other talent. Huck soon found himself taking a back seat at the Hanna-Barbera empire to Yogi Bear, then the Flintstones, then Scooby Doo, and, well, you get the idea. Despite that, the low-key Huck can still bring a smile in his best cartoons.
For the time the “Huckleberry Hound Show” was in first run, 1958 to 1962, Huck got a fair amount of publicity. Let’s go on a Huck treasure hunt (say, that’d be a great name for a show. Oh, wait. They gave it to Yogi) and see what publicity art we can find. You can click on each picture to enlarge it in a new tab.
Here’s our star with his creators in a publicity shot. I wonder how many of these cardboard stand-ups were hanging around the Hanna-Barbera studios? You’ve no doubt seen pictures of Daws next to a couple, and the voice actors of the Flintstones next to their characters. Note the little window on Huck’s nose. I wish I could see the photos on the wall. I guess this was taken at the Kling (formerly Chaplin, later AMCO) studio on La Brea, where Hanna-Barbera resided from July 1957 to April 1962.
This is from a 1959 TV Guide. It would seem the ad was designed to have Yogi and Boo Boo on a page to the left, but this ad has only one page.
This is from a post card and features the original main cast of the Huck show. I don’t know if Dick Bickenbach or Art Goble did the writing (it might be Joe Barbera’s) but it looks original, not the retro style that popped up after the Cartoon Network debuted in the U.S., so this would be from some time in the late ‘50s. I suspect Bick did the artwork. A lovely rendering of the characters. (A side gripe: it appears to be a hard cartoon art rule today that each character must, without exception, have a huge open grinning mouth. What’s wrong with a smile, like you see here?).
These photos I grabbed off eBay (hence the marring watermark) are what prompted this post. I saw them and decided to hunt through the Chicago Tribune’s on-line archives to find the articles they went with. Unfortunately, the folks at the Trib didn’t scan the “T.V. Pictorial” supplement so the articles are unavailable.
The first publicity photo is dated October 3, 1962 and the caption reads: “Hollywood, California- - Huckleberry Hound, a firm believer in dogma that every hound must have its day has boned up on the closing baseball season and is once again ready to embark on his annual All Star K-Nine. Skowron, Jay, Moran, Wills, Davenport, Berra and N.Y. Mets among those mentioned by mentioned by Huck.” Well, naturally, Berra would be mentioned!
The second one features what is a drawing based on “Lion Tamer Huck” but there was never a cartoon (unless it was unmade or one of those cartoons-between-the-cartoons) featuring Huck and a fish (designed similarly to the Wily Trout in Yogi’s “The Stout Trout”). There’s a date written on the picture, presumably when the story appeared on page 6 of Chicago’s American TV Pictorial. There are also dates on the back of October 21, 1959 and November 9, 1961 but I can’t find articles about Huck in the papers of those dates, let alone the picture.
The third photo is stamped May 17, 1961 on the reserve but it’s obviously from 1960 judging by the suggested caption from Screen Gems in New York City (with misplaced punctuation): “Fast talker....Huckleberry Hound (right) introduces Hokey (center), the glib wolf who assumes co-star status in January, replacing Yogi Bear, who gets to head up his own show. With Hokey is Ding A Ling (left), a nebbish wolf who believes almost everything Hokey says. “Huckleberry Hound,” the Emmy winning animated series, is produced for Screen Gems by Hanna-Barbera. Productions and telecast on 180 TV stations in the U.S.” The first Hokey cartoon I can find in TV listings is for the week of March 23, 1961; I admit I don’t have listings for the previous three weeks of the Huck show.
But I did find this in the Tribune of June 3, 1961, congratulating the editor of the Saturday TV Week section on its fifth anniversary.
Since we’re passing on Huck stuff, here are a couple of more things you might like.
The cover of a ViewMaster booklet, 1960. It’d be nice if someone took the time to digitise all those old slides from the early Hanna-Barbera days. A few are on-line and we’ve posted some here.
A letter from Huckleberry Hound? This envelope is from the Huckleberry Hound Fan Club from way back years ago. I wonder if the New York address was marketing man Ed Justin’s, who was based in New York.
The first time I saw this version of the Huck intro, I was disappointed. Where’s the rooster? Isn’t he supposed to be doing this? This drawing is from the re-done animation when Huck was first placed in syndication without a Kellogg’s sponsorship, 1966 I’m led to believe.
Lastly, a sketch for what appears to be a greeting card from long after Huck was in first-run.
This post is dedicated to Greg Chenoweth, who has proclaimed on many occasions to be the world’s biggest Huckleberry Hound fan. If Greg wasn’t the first reader of this blog six years ago, he was pretty close to being the first. Greg’s “purty nice people,” as Huck might say, and that could be why he has an affinity with a purty nice blue hound dog.
Here’s Fred Flintstone peeking at the voice of Fred Flintstone, and he may be a little confused. That’s because the guy at the microphone isn’t Alan Reed, who provided Fred’s voice during the run of the original series from 1960 to 1966.
Well, Reed provided Fred’s speaking voice. There were a few cartoons where someone else was brought in to sing for Fred. Reed was a versatile dialectician during his days on network radio in the ‘30s and ‘40s but he was no swingin’ lounge cat.
But Duke Mitchell was. That’s Mitchell in the studio you see in the picture. He was tapped by Hanna-Barbera to sing jazzed-up versions of “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In” (in the “Hot Lips Hannigan” episode) and “Listen to the Mockingbird” (in “The Girls’ Night Out”) in the show’s first season. You can also hear him as Boppy Barrin in the half-hour “Yogi’s Birthday Party” (aired October 1961). The cartoon studio had other plans for Mitchell, too. Reported Variety on April 13, 1961:
[Palm Springs’] Ranch Club’s Duke Mitchell, the recorded singing voice of animated Fred Flintstone, will double as a hepcat when Hanna-Barbera roll “Five Cats” pilot next month.
We presume the squib is referring to “Top Cat.” Nonetheless, Mitchell never got a voice role on the show. Perhaps his schedule didn’t allow for regular recording sessions.
Mitchell will forever go down in history as the co-star of the Martin and Lewis knock-off film “Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla” (1952). A United Press column at the time of release quotes the movie’s producer as saying any resemblance between Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo and Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis was “coincidental.” The line was probably funnier than anything that was in the movie. Mitchell and Petrillo were single acts that hooked up around the end of 1951. Eventually, Martin and Lewis ended up copying them. Mitchell and Petrillo split up by 1954—Martin and Lewis called it quits two years later—and Mitchell resumed his solo singing career. He was featured in the “New Acts” column of Weekly Variety, April 21, 1954.
DUKE MITCHELL
Songs
15 Mins.
Magic Inn, Seattle
Duke Mitchell (formerly & Petrillo) shapes up as a good single act in his bow here, first date on his own. Small, but energetic, lad socks over blend of standard songs and sharp impressions for good response, scoring particularly with vignettes of Vaughn Monroe, Frankie Laine and Billy Daniels. Brief act could easily be expanded. Mitchell’s selling of “Rags to Riches” and “Got You Under My Skin” reveal savvy as a crowd pleaser, with reliance more on entertainment than on showcasing of voice.
In here for two weeks and should be good draw for Magic Inn, currently only spot in town using acts. Reed.
Those of you who appreciate irony will like the fact that Mitchell performed in the late ‘60s at Dino’s Lodge in Hollywood (Dino as in Martin, not Flintstones pet). My favourite Duke Mitchell story, though, is post-Flintstones. Harrison Carroll had a couple of lines about it in his syndicated show biz column of July 9, 1963.
SINGER Duke Mitchell knocked two teeth out of a persistent heckler at the Marine Room of the Hotel Olympic in Seattle. Heckler was introduced as the son of one of the most important political figures in the country, but I think he was an impostor.
Variety’s Army Archerd revealed about nine months earlier that Mitchell, who was 5’ 8” at best, tossed a 6’ 2” drunk out of one of his shows in a lounge in Beverly Hills.
Petrillo was on the road with partner Suzie Petrovic when Mitchell died in Hollywood on December 2, 1981.
There’s a blog devoted to Duke you can check out.
There’s one other cartoon where someone else “sang” for Fred. Kind of. In the third season, Fred enlists Rock Roll (played by Hal Smith) to perform at Wilma’s show but has to take the stage himself and do “The Twitch.” But neither Reed nor Smith is singing. Do you know who is? Since you don’t, here’s the answer, thanks to the April 18, 1962 edition of Variety:
Jerry Wallace exits Challenge [his record label] next month; reportedly "very unhappy." He's not unhappy over new Hanna-Barbera voice he'll do in "The Flintstones" though. He'll do "Rock Roll," latest character for the tv series, a "singer" yet!
Like Mitchell, Wallace made his own cult movie in the ‘50s, starring in 1955’s obscure “Corn’s A-Poppin’” (gripping scene from the film to your right). Wallace has another connection with Hanna-Barbera. During the 1950s, he performed as half of a duo with Red Coffey, who provided the voice for a pestering little duck in the early Yogi Bear cartoons. The duck was modified a bit and became Yakky Doodle (voiced by Jimmy Weldon).
Note: I realise Henry Corden sang for Reed in the Alice
special and elsewhere; this post just deals with the “Flintstones” series.
It’s always nice to see Huckleberry Hound pay a visit to Yogi Bear, though Huck probably wishes he hasn’t, judging by the punch line of the comic that ran in papers on the first weekend of March, 50 years ago (Saturdays in Canada, Sundays in the U.S.).
I’m not of the generation that watched those Hanna-Barbera competition cartoon shows where all manner of the studio’s funny characters were tossed in together like so many corn flakes in a Kellogg’s box. Since I grew up in the ‘60s, I like seeing the “Kellogg’s” characters kibbitz once in a while (Yogi, Huck, Quick Draw, etc.), but anyone else seems out of place. Top Cat doesn’t really belong with them, to me, but there he is nonetheless in the March 7th comic. I guess it just shows you T.C. was a bigger star than Super Snooper (since they’re in the mountains, Snagglepuss the mountain lion might have been a better choice). And I don’t think I’ve ever seen Top Cat wearing a tie before.
Some of Harvey Eisenberg’s silhouettes grace the March 14th comic. It’s hard to get the effect of the joke with this scan of a photocopy of the panels. I suspect Mark Kausler’s blog will have a full-colour version where you can get a better look. The top panel is the only appearance of Ranger Smith this month.
A rather large blue jay highlights the March 21st comic, with an interesting perspective layout in the final panel. We also get a cutsy-utsy squirrel who Screwy Squirrel would beat up. Instead, Yogi rhymes. “Squirms” and “worms”?
Pic-a-nic baskets? Nah. Yogi’s stealing hotel towels now. Maybe he got them on a tour pushing “Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear.” All the hotels in the final frame of the March 28th comic are legit, as best as I can tell. The Mark Hopkins is on San Francisco’s Nob Hill.
Unfortunately, the last newspaper I could find running these comics in full no longer has its weekend comic section available on-line past March 1965. So this will be the final Yogi comic post.
Remember the cartoon where Pixie and Dixie called on their Uncle Egghead, who gives them an electromagnet that Jinks swallows (thinking it’s candy) and then all kinds of metal becomes attracted to him? You don’t? It’s probably because the cartoon never aired or copyrighted.
But a storyboard was made for it. You won’t see these small story sketches very well because that’s the size they were on a web site. I imagine the story is by Warren Foster; the sketches certainly aren’t Dan Gordon’s from the first season.
“I’m having a nightmare—only in the daytime,” says the cat, reminiscent of “Light-Headed Cat,” which has a similar plot, with an anti-gravity machine lifting Jinks airborne every time a button is pushed. Daws Butler uses the term “night-time mare” in that one, just like he did in the Pixie and Dixie cartoon “Batty Bat.” Frankly, neither of the aforementioned cartoons were that great. (“Night-time mare” was heard in two other Foster-written cartoons: the much funnier “Snow White Bear,” with Yogi, and the Pixie and Dixie short “Hi Fido”). The magnet-in-the-stomach-attracting-stuff idea was also utilised by Joe Barbera in the Tom and Jerry cartoon “Old Rockin’ Chair Tom.” And there’s a Twilight Zone reference in one of the story panels but really no great one-liners. The Pixie and Dixie cartoons don’t seem to have inspired Foster as much as Yogi or Huck.
Whether Foster drew the board, I don’t know. And when it was drawn, I couldn’t tell you. But it’s always interesting to find unmade cartoons (we posted story panels from Earl Kress’ collection of an unmade El Kabong cartoon here). You can click on them to try to see them but I don’t know how much bigger they’ll be.
We’ve got another full storyboard for an unmade cartoon we’ll endeavour to post some time in the future.
