The Cry of Pinky

We’ve used up our supply of complete storyboards, but still have some spare story panels around. Here are three sheets from the Ruff and Reddy cartoon Hot Shot’s Plot, the second adventure in the series. Our heroes try to help Pinky the elephant find his mother in Africa while avoiding hunter Harry Safari (they succeed thanks to a lion and a jammed rifle).

It looks like Joe Barbera’s writing on the dialogue below the panels but I don’t know if he did the drawings. I don’t think they’re Dan Gordon’s.

Hecky, Ghosts and Augie Doggie

This blog was started ages ago because of stock music cues. The intention was to have a place on the internet listing the library music heard behind the cartoons in The Huckleberry Hound Show’s first season, along with some random notes and screen grabs about each cartoon. Well, it’s gone a little bit past that.

Anyway, long-time readers will know I don’t have names for quite a number of the cues, mainly the Jack Shaindlin pieces from the Langlois Filmusic library. The late Earl Kress had them but he never was able to remember where he put the list. There are several others, one of which is a little sweet potato “toodle-oodle” cue that found its way into Augie Doggie cartoons—“Mars Little Precious,” “Yuk-Yuk Duck,” and “Peck O' Trouble.”

Well, the identity of the cue has been discovered.

We have the greatest readers here. Evan Schad alerted me to a disc of a Hecky Krasnow cue called The Happy Cobbler that’s kicking around. Hermann “Hecky” Krasnow was the head of children’s records at Columbia then moved to a subsidiary of Sam Fox music in early 1957. The Sam Fox library was used in a number of Hanna-Barbera cartoons. I checked out the label on the disc and discovered the flip side was another Krasnow cue called Swinging Ghosts. A little search on the internet for a tune by that name and... you guessed correctly. It was copyrighted on January 9, 1959, so it was a new tune when Augie first aired.

Both songs weren’t only found on the Sam Fox library (known as Synchro-Fox in Canada and Synchro in Britain). They were released on the Gallant label in April 1960 by the Hecky Kay Octet. I can’t find any indication that they charted, but the flip side was recorded by several groups. Perhaps some day we’ll be able to post links to both cues on the blog but this will have to do for now.

One spot on the internet says it was the theme to the BBC series A Mask For Alexis.



And another version by The Vampires. It features a flute instead of an ocarina.

Jetsons – Las Venus

Why can’t sitcom characters just be honest?

Why can’t they say “Honey, the boss has forced me to have dinner tonight with a female client to get a contact signed”? No, sitcom writers would rather drag out the anxious-married-man-has-uncomfortable-dinner-with-beautiful-single-woman plot. We know how it’s going to end, because the plot never changes. The wife and the woman come face-to-face in the climax scene, the misunderstanding is cleared up and the husband and wife tag out the show happy and hugging.

That’s what we get from Barry Blitzer in the Jetsons episode “Las Venus.”

And why is it that boss Spacely thinks George Jetson is an imbecile but still has him close out important business deals?

Sorry, but the plot in this one is a little too old, tired and predictable for my liking, though Blitzer adds a little change at the end. So let’s, instead, concentrate on the best part of any Jetsons episode that isn’t named Astro—the designs.

George is taking Jane on a second honeymoon to Las Vegas, which has morphed for futuristic space pun purposes as Las Venus. The Jetsons, of course, is a product of the early ‘60s, a time in Vegas of flashing neon and the Rat Pack, where a little casino action translated into innocent fun (and generally within one’s financial means for the average suburbanite). The various casinos we see in this episode all have bright lights going on and off and the designs, as usual, are imaginative. Click on them to make them bigger.



Dean Martian is about the only nod to the Rat Pack in the cartoon. I thought Frank Star-natra might be part of the bill, but we get enough “star” celebrity puns. George refers to that great dancer Fred Astar. And we get a performance from Starence Welcome, wunnerfully voiced by Daws Butler. I like how the dialogue refers to “space bubble music” but there are no bubbles in the scene. Bill Hanna saves on the animation budget.


Blitzer has some billboard sight gags. Note the parody of Williams Lectric Shave, which was advertised all over the place on TV in the ‘60s. The Cosmic Cola ad has an animated cycle of the Martian kids drinking while the lipstick ad talks to George who just can’t stop being distracted by women.



The credits were removed from the episode about 30 years ago so the cartoons in circulation now don’t tell you who is responsible for these great backgrounds. Or the animation, for that matter. My guessing average is pretty lousy for the Jetsons. I can safely say that several animators worked on it because George looks different in various parts of the cartoon. Whoever did the opening animation (and I believe he’s back at the end) has odd mouth movements. George exhibits a row of teeth, lip-biting and some tongue biting, too. George has a long neck.

What would a Jetsons cartoon be without a motorcycle traffic cop? This one includes a judge on a TV screen giving a ticket. The cop has those roundish eyes that I’ve seen Dick Lundy and Bob Bentley draw at Hanna-Barbera.

A different animator is at work here, giving George several facial expressions as he hears Jane win a jackpot from a robot one-armed bandit. He’s cross-eyed, beady-eyed and a little cockeyed in some of the drawings, though I’m only posting a few examples.



Here’s part of a take later in the act when Spacely promises Jetson a shapely secretary. I had guessed it was Don Patterson’s work, but Howard Fein notes in the comments that is not the case.



Part of one more take from later in the cartoon. George’s mouth is great. George Nicholas drew takes similar to this but it doesn’t look like his work.



And a couple of exit-from-frame drawings. George becomes an outline while G.G. (Gigi) Galaxy leaves behind a few multiples.



Besides the regular voice cast, Jean Vander Pyl dips into her voice collection and borrows Tallulah Bankhead for Miss Galaxy (it’s also her Mrs. J. Evil Scientist voice). She may have the best line in the cartoon; it’s a Groucho-like play on words: “In the meantime, I’ll take a good old-fashioned bath. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth the expense filling the tub with old fashioneds.” Don Messick has a bunch of roles, repeating his Uniblab voice for one of the mobile robot slot machines (Barry Blitzer also wrote the great episode where Uniblab turns himself into a robot gambling casino), and playing the cop. Mel Blanc is Spacely, Judge Fairly of Lunarville, a robot one-armed bandit and the doorman at the Las Venus Venus.

Whether Hoyt Curtin wrote some cues with this episode specifically in mind, I don’t know, but his space samba music heard in several cartoons (someone can tell me if a theremin is used) is worked into the plot of this one. One really interesting cue is when the scene cuts to a background drawing of the dog kennel where Astro is staying while George and Jane are in Las Venus. It’s a flute version of the Augie Doggie theme that was also used in the Pixie and Dixie cartoon Pied Piper Pipe.

Yogi Bear Weekend Comics, April 1966

Yogi vs Ranger Smith. Cindy vs Yogi. And Yogi demonstrating he’s smarter than the average bear. That pretty much sums up the Sunday Yogi Bear newspaper comics from 50 years ago this month.

One lovely black-and-white version came from an internet web site. The coloured tabloids are from Richard Holliss’ collection. The rest are from newspapers on-line in various states of ill-repair (why there is a dark line down the middle of each page of the Buffalo Courier, I don’t know.



Yogi finds ingenious ways to outsmart Ranger Smith. In the TV cartoons, he seems to get punished for his creativity more than in newsprint. This is from April 3rd.


Lots of little animals that H-B comic maven Gene Hazelton loved in the April 10th comic. I like the look of the wind against Yogi and Boo Boo.



The idea of practical jokes comes up for the second comic in a row. This April 17th comic is tough to see because the Courier’s photocopied version of the newspaper came out a little dark. The artist gets in a variety of poses for Yogi.



Ah, more woodland creatures in the April 27th comic. I’m not a Cindy Bear fan with her Leila Ransom-like gushing over Yogi but I like the idea of her standing up for herself in this comic. There’s varied perspective in the layouts and a silhouette shot.

You can click on any of the comics to try to see them a little better.

Yakky Doodle – Baddie Buddies

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Dick Lundy; Layout – Tony Rivera; Backgrounds – Dick Thomas; Written by Tony Benedict; Story Director – Lew Marshall; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Narrator, Desperado, Bank Teller, Engineer – Daws Butler; Yakky Doodle – Jimmy Weldon.
Music: Hoyt Curtin.
Episode: Production R-81 (seventh of eight Yakkys in 1961-62 season).
Copyright 1962 by Hanna-Barbera Productions.
Plot: Yakky Doodle tries to make friends with a bad guy in the Old West.

Yakky: Did I do something wrong?
Desperado: Did you do something wrong? (Laughs). Yeah. You were born.

Yes, Mr. Desperado, I feel the same way.

I don’t want to keep whining about how much I hate Yakky Doodle’s whining. But it really is annoying. This cartoon’s a really good example why.

It starts out with the duck moaning about being tired and lonely and having “no mamma to watch over me.” He tries making a friend of an armed Western bandit who decides to shoot him. But no. The bad guy takes pity on the duck who spouts a last request to his mamma: “Just tell her that I won’t be home for supper. Ever again.”

Wait a minute. Didn’t he just say he didn’t have a mamma? Why does he suddenly have one? I could understand if Yakky were playing some kind of con-artist trick on the bad guy, so beloved by Warners cartoon characters of the 1940s. But he’s not. And several times in the course of the cartoon he goes from morose and tearful to instantly bright and cheery. Of course, if the duck accepted the fact he’s a ruddy pain and nobody wants him, we wouldn’t have any cartoon.

Tony Benedict comes up with four gag sequences for the cartoon as Yakky unwittingly ruins every attempt by the unnamed bad guy to commit a crime, though two are similar. “Mr. Desperado,” as Yakky keeps calling him, tries to rob a bank. He pulls out Yakky from his holster instead of a gun (“Bang! Bang! Bang!” shouts the smiling duck). This gives the bank teller time to shoot at the bandit. The same thing happens when the crook tries to rob a stagecoach. The duck interrupts the proceedings with an apology, giving the people on the stage time to fire their rifles at the bad guy (with a crudely-drawn blast effect).



The other two sequences have the bad guy butted in the butt by a steer he tries to rustle when Yakky jumps on his hat and pushes it over his eyes, and getting clobbered by a locomotive engineer with a shovel after Yakky warns him the bad guy is going to rob the train.

The cartoon ends with the bad guy in jail. Yakky asks if they’ll still be friends when he gets out. The desperado says he’ll be in for 99 years. “You’re lucky, pal, you didn’t get life,” observes the laughing duck as the cartoon irises out.

Dick Lundy, known for his artistry with another duck at Disney some 25 years before this cartoon, is the animator. I really liked his work when he first arrived at Hanna-Barbara; he had some really funny extremes. By 1962, the studio’s cartoons were getting watered down. Lundy seems to have liked big eyes and big pupils in this one. He also draws Yakky doing the palm-up, finger-raised that John Boersma and other animators at the studio used.



Dick Thomas’ backgrounds feature the sketchy grass and mesa shading you’ll find in other cartoons. Tony Rivera did a nice job of designing the steam train.



Here’s part of the background in the opening pan. A narrator opened to put the story in an old west setting and then disappeared, which seems to be the usual procedure for narrators in H-B cartoons after Charlie Shows left the studio in 1959. Hoyt Curtin has a nice woodwind-ish, clip-clop cue to start the cartoon.


The rest of Curtin’s music should be familiar from other 1959-62 short cartoons and The Flintstones. It sets an appropriate mood.