Paddling Faster

Poor Huckleberry Hound. Usurped by a second-rate group of cartoons.

Our last post here dealt with the end of the Huckleberry Hound Show, as Hanna-Barbera and Screen Gems decided to test the syndication market away from a sponsored half-hour.

On Facebook, when I linked to the post, no one wanted to discuss that. They wanted to discuss the side note about Lippy the Lion and the other two cartoons syndicated with him.

Screen Gems sold the crap out of Lippy, Wally Gator and Touché Turtle. Two page ads—some in full colour—appeared in Variety, Broadcasting and other trade papers announcing the series and tallying up participating stations.


But, sorry, Mr. Twiddle. Sorry, Dum Dum. You guys just aren’t as funny as Quick Draw McGraw or Mr. Jinks. Your story plots are wearing thin. The late Earl Kress joked about how Lippy cartoons seemed to end with “Paddle faster, Hardy!” and the same Hoyt Curtin cue. Even the artwork and animation is far less inspiring than what the studio had been producing in 1958. The studio’s downfall had begun.

We’ve written about Touché and the rest in this post and this post. Let me leaf through some trade stuff from 1962 to fill in a few blanks.

But FIRST...

Lippy and Hardy (the hyena was a Mike Maltese creation, by the way) would have been on the air a lot sooner if Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera and Screen Gems had their way. But they had a problem. This syndicated column from March 10, 1961 explains it:

Cartoons Require New Blood
By EVE STARR
Hanna and Barbera are having a terrible time. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, that is. They have three TV series on order and so far haven’t been able to grind out a single foot of film on a one. The problem is manpower. There isn’t any.
Hanna Barbera Productions is the biggest TV cartoonery in the business. They have made national heroes out of “Huckleberry Hound” and “Yogi Bear," and this season, have introduced the first half-hour, nighttime network cartoon series, “The Flintstones.” And “Yogi Bear” enjoys the added distinction of being the first featured cartoon character ever to be elevated to stardom with a show of his own.

ALL THIS is fine and dandy with Hanna-Barbera, but now problems are beginning to get in the way. ABC has asked for full speed ahead on a new cartoon show, “Top Cat,” and the company is now scouring the woods trying to find cartoon artists and writers who fit in with the Hanna-Barbera way of doing things.
Anybody can find a producer, director or writer for a human-populated film series, but cartoon writers are a special breed and cartoon artists are as rare at experienced comics under 40.
Screen Gems, the Columbia TV subsidiary which first gave Hanna-Barbera their start, has long wanted the pair to turn out two five-minute series, “Hardy Har Har” (a non-laughing hyena) and “Lippy the Lion.”
THE STANDING order is for 52 episodes a year of each series for a period of five years, the kind of order any ordinary cartoon producer would cut off his left arm to get. Yet all Hanna-Barbera can do it sit there and stare at it.
Every artist and writer they can lay their hands on is working overtime on “Huckleberry Hound” and “Yogi Bear” and “The Flintstones” and the development work on “Top Cat” is crawling along at a tired snail’s pace.
Youngsters with an eye on a TV career could do a lot worse than to enrol in a cartoon course. Apparently it’s the rarest talent there is and the field for good jobs is not only wide open but crying out loud for new blood.

A story on Mel Blanc by Fred Remington in the August 8, 1961 edition of the Pittsburgh Press reported on Mel’s almost-fatal car crash but mentioned he had been picked for the voice of Hardy Har Har. A Minneapolis Star piece from October 5th stated Bill Thompson would be “Tooshay Turtle,” Daws Butler would be Lippy and Wally Gator’s voice was still being sought.

Now to 1962:

Screen Gems has decided to go ahead and spend approximately $1,500,000 to put out a total of 156 new five-minute cartoons by Hanna-Barbera. The stanzas are meant for first-run syndication.
SG, the distrib in this case, figures there is a sizeable market for new animations via syndication even if the rest of the first-run syndie market is terribly shrunken. The 156 pieces are being broken down into groups of 52, one called “Wally Gator,” another “Touche Turtle” and the last “Lippy.” Naturally, SG syndication has not ruled out large regional deals, but it is likely to depend on station-by-station sales, with the expectation that there is at least one station in every market (particularly three-station cities) where the late afternoon specialty is kidvid and where animation is always in demand.
“Wally,” “Touche” and “Lippy” can be tied into half-hours twice weekly or can be shown as inserts in existing kid formats. (Variety, Jan. 31, 1962)

Seven stations, including a New York outlet, signed for the 156 new five-minute cartoons being made by Hanna-Barbera.
Stanza, distribbed by Screen Gems and due for fall use, was sold to WPIX, N. Y.; WTTG, Washington: KPTV, Portland, Ore.; WTIC-TV, Hartford; WGAL-TV, Lancaster, Pa.; WOC-TV, Davenport, Ia.; and KOVR, Stockton, Calif.
Cartoons, divided into three groups of 52 each, are called “Touche Turtle,” “Lippy the Lion” and “Wally Gator.” SG says that it’ll cost about $1,500,000 to make the new animations, breaking down to nearly $9,600 per spot. (Variety, March 7, 1962)

A total of 19 tv stations so far have signed for the newly made Hanna-Barbera syndie cartoons. The 156 five-minute episodes of “Tooche Turtle,” [sic] “Lippy the Lion” and “Wally Gator” went most recently to three outlets in the Westinghouse chain.
WBZ-TV, in Boston, KPIX, in Frisco and WJZ-TV in Baltimore— all part of Westinghouse Broadcasting, signed on for the full series.
The nine others last month to purchase the H-B product for fall start were: WXYZ-TV, Detroit; WEWS. Cleveland; WDAF-TV, Kansas City: WCCO-TV, Minneapolis; KGMB-TV, Honolulu; WTVW, Evansville; WBNS-TV, Columbus; KCPX-TV, Salt Lake City, and WNDU-TV, South Bend. (Variety, May 9, 1962)

KCOP will expend $175,000 for unlimited runs of three new all-color cartoon shorts from Hanna-Barbera. Original asking price was $2,600 per title but understood KCOP paid around $1,200. Titles are “Touche Turtle,” “Lippy The Lion” and “Wally Gator.” (Variety, June 21, 1962)

KCOP will open the station earlier Monday morning to preview three new Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Starting at 7:30 a.m., the three five-minute color featurettes will be shown for the first time on tv. They are “Touche Turtle,” “Wally The Gator” and “Lippy the Lion.” Beginning Sept. 2, they will be seen as a weekly strip at 6:30 p.m. (Variety, August 24, 1962)

Screen Gems has added 17 markets in its syndicated sales of 156 five-minute Hanna-Barbera cartoons, “Touche Turtle,” “Lippy The Lion” and “Wally Gator,” the first made expressly for syndicated release by H-B. Bringing the total national sales to 51, new deals were made with WTEN, Albany; WCIV-TV, Charleston; WTVC, Chattanooga; WTVT, Washington, N.C.; KLFY-TV, Lafayette, La.; WWL-TV, New Orleans; KMID-TV, Midland, Tex.; WJRT, Flint; WHO-TV, Des Moines; KETV, Omaha; KARD-TV, Wichita; KBTV, Denver; KNTV, San Jose; KVAL-TV, Eugene, Ore.; KROL-TV, Reno; and KING-TV, Seattle.
Screen Gems also locked up three stations of the Newhouse chain for its latest package of 73 post-1950 Columbia films to bow on television. Newhouse group of WSYR-TV, Syracuse; WAPI-TV, Birmingham; and WPTA, Harrisburg, follows on the heels of a sale to the four CBS o&o’s in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and St. Louis. (Variety, October 31, 1962)

KCOP’s decision to buy the cartoons (at a cut rate, it seems) was part of a $2 million revitalisation of the station’s schedule by new company president John Hopkins (Broadcasting, August 6, 1962). It aired the cartoons as part of an umbrella show hosted by Beachcomber Bill Biery from 6:30 to 7 p.m. beginning September 3rd. It appeared opposite a bunch of newscasts, “Cartoon Express” on KHJ-TV and an improbable combination of “Space Angel” and “Mister Magoo” on KTTV.

Of course, cartoon stars aren’t just cartoon stars to Bill and Joe. They’re tools of tie-in commerce. Billboard revealed on September 1st that Golden Records had released a mixed chorus EP with songs about the Hanna-Barbera characters, mainly all the new ones appearing on TV. “Cute stuff, though it lacks the punch of the actual voices of the animal personalities,” opined the publication. Touché and Dum-Dum later appeared on a Hanna-Barbera Record about the tale of the Reluctant Dragon. There were Hallowe’en costumes. There were comic books, colouring books and story books. (And the prices!)



Who isn’t a sucker for board games? Okay, who that grew up before the internet isn’t a sucker for board games? Transogram put out a Lippy game. Lippy wore a crown in his first model sheets.



Transogram made Wally Gator and Touché Turtle games, too.

The cartoons lasted longer than the merchandise. Was there a time for the first 35 years after they first appeared that they were off the air? I doubt it.

As much as I appreciate people like Daws Butler, Art Lozzi and Mike Maltese, the five-minute shows didn’t really make me laugh. The Wally-Lippy-Touché cartoons were just kind of there. It’s a shame they weren’t more than that but, as you’ve just read, Hanna-Barbera was overtaxed. With a huge workload, some fine artists did the best they could. Sometimes, you just can’t paddle faster.

Season Four For Huckleberry Hound

Before anything else, I’d like to thank Denise Kress for sending me a bunch of documents that were in the files of her late husband Earl. That’s where the production numbers and so on have come from for this series of posts about the Huckleberry Hound Show.

Huck’s fourth season in 1961-62 was the final season. Things were petering out for ol’ Huck. Hanna-Barbera was winding up the Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and Quick Draw McGraw shows and concentrating on the prime-time Flintstones and Top Cat series, the drab theatrical Loopy De Loop cartoons and the new syndicated shorts starring Wally Gator, Touché Turtle and Lippy the Lion. (For the record, there was no such thing as “The New Hanna-Barbera Cartoon Series.” The internet won’t seem to let that one die ¹). The Jetsons would soon be going into production.

Only five Hucks, five Pixie and Dixies and four Hokey Wolfs were made for the final season, though there are some gaps in the production numbers. Other cartoons were begun, maybe even completed. For example, we posted this Pixie and Dixie storyboard for an unaired cartoon; unfortunately, the seller has plastered a graphic over top of puny image files so the production number is blocked out.

The numbers come from papers in a file at Leo Burnett, Kellogg’s agency, dated January 22, 1962. In total, 57 Pixie and Dixie and 57 Huckleberry Hound cartoons were made, along with 28 Hokey Wolfs.

Unfortunately, the credits for the Hokey cartoons are hiding somewhere; I don’t have them and don’t want to guess at them. Only one of the original Hanna-Barbera animators worked on Huck from the first to the last seasons—Carlo Vinci. He was spending more time on the half-hour shows. Ken O’Brien, Ed Parks and Ken Southworth were assigned to animate the shorts. The final cartoon was animated by Don Towsley, a former Disney artist who later worked for Chuck Jones and then at Filmation. As a boy, Towsley lived in Atlanta and there was taught dancing personally by Arthur Murray. Howard Beckerman recalled Towsley directed some animated openings used on I Love Lucy at Lee Blair’s Film Graphics in New York.

E-160 Loot to Boot (W-25) Hokey
‡E-161 Hokey cartoon for 1960-61 season.
‡E-162 Hokey cartoon for 1960-61 season.
‡E-163 Hokey cartoon for 1960-61 season.
‡E-164 Hokey cartoon for 1960-61 season.

‡E-165 Hokey cartoon for 1960-61 season.
‡E-166 Hokey cartoon for 1960-61 season.
E-167 Guesting Games (W-26) Hokey
‡E-168 Hokey cartoon for 1960-61 season.
‡E-169 Pixie and Dixie cartoon for 1960-61 season.
‡E-170 Huck cartoon for 1960-61 season.
‡E-171 Pixie and Dixie cartoon for 1960-61 season.
‡E-172 Huck cartoon for 1960-61 season.
‡E-173 Pixie and Dixie cartoon for 1960-61 season.
‡E-174 Huck cartoon for 1960-61 season.
E-175 Strong Mouse aka Hercules (P-53) P&D/Lokey
E-176 Bullfighter Huck (H-54) Huck/Southworth
‡E-177 Hokey cartoon for 1960-61 season.
‡E-178 Hokey cartoon for 1960-61 season.
‡E-179 Pixie and Dixie cartoon for 1960-61 season.
E-180 Mouse Trapped (P-54) P&D/O’Brien
‡E-181 Huck cartoon for 1960-61 season.
E-182 Huck dé Paree (H-53) Huck/Southworth
E-183 Aladdin’s Lamp Chops (W-28) Hokey
E-184 Magician Jinks (P-55) P&D/Parks

E-185 Bars and Stripes (H-56) Huck/Boersma
E-186 No production
E-187 Meece Missiles (P-56) P&D/Vinci
E-188 Scrubby Brush Man (H-57) Huck/Parks
E-189 Sick Sense (W-27) Hokey
E-190 Homeless Jinks (P-57) P&D/O’Brien
E-191 No production
E-192 No production
E-193 No production
E-194 No production
E-195 Two For Tee Vee (P-55) Huck/Towsley

---

1 Note: Jerry Beck has a better collection of, and access to, reference materials than I. He points out the Broadcast Information Bureau annuals for TV stations used that title. I've never seen it in any Screen Gems trade ads or preview stories at the time the three series were first aired and the title was never used on screen.^↩

Yogi Bear Weekend Comics, March 1970

Frank, Sammy, Dean—at Jellystone Park?

National parks must be raking in the coin if they can afford those acts. (Please don’t tell me I have to explain who the Rat Pack is).

They showed up in name only in the Yogi Bear weekend comics this month 49 years ago. Someone who didn’t show up was Boo Boo. He isn’t in any of the five comics published in March 1970.


Ranger Smith is being particularly jerkish in the March 1st comic. Who’s he to order people around and be verbally abusive? We get a talking squirrel in the unrelated gag in the first row, along with a silhouette panel in the second row.


Perhaps Mr. Ranger felt pangs of guilt. In the next comic on March 8th, he’s desperate to help Yogi. Out of the five, I like this story best. I marvel about how rain can be drawn without obscuring the characters and settings on the panel. Ranger Smith is named Bill this time.



Bear? More like wolf. In the March 15th comic, Yogi reveals he’s not faithful to Cindy, no doubt to anger people obsessed with continuity. Richard Holliss provided this comic from his collection, which has some colour troubles on one row. The reverse silhouette panel is nice. We get the same “Yogi Bear” sign in the opening panel for three weeks in a row and it’s hanging the same way in this comic as in the one published on the 8th.

I knew it couldn’t last. Yogi didn’t rhyme for two comics but he’s back at it in the March 22nd edition. Broken lines are used for the balloon when the ranger reads to himself. Is that common? The final drawing with the jeep engine in pieces is very admirable.


Back to the native stereotypes in the March 29th cartoon. At least they’re speaking English correctly (okay, the girl is speaking groovy English because it’s 1970). The smoke signal typewriter is ingenious, though, me think-um.



Click on any of the panels to enlarge them.

Big Hound on Campus

One of the things you have likely discovered if you’re a long-time reader of this blog is that there was a time when Huckleberry Hound had a cult-like status.

It didn’t last long (pop culture phenomena tend to be like that) but his personality gripped people of all ages. Nothing bothered him. No matter what happened to him, he’d take it in stride. And then he’d have a one-liner about it for the people watching on TV. This seemed fresh and new to the critics, but it really wasn’t. Tex Avery had a wolf with pretty much the same voice as Huck who did the same thing in MGM cartoons of the 1950s. But Huck came into people’s homes on a regular basis. He had funny friends that would interact with him between their own, separate cartoons. And, to be honest, Avery’s wolf was funny but Huck was likeable.

Here are a couple of short newspaper stories from Florida published during Huck’s first season. The first is from the Tampa Bay Times of March 29, 1959 and the second from the Miami News of August 13, 1959. The Huck show aired on Thursdays in both cities.

Is TV Going To The Dogs?
By BETSY ANDERSON
Who's the most popular TV personality? None other than Huckleberry Hound, as any informed teenager will tell you at the drop of a hat. If you don't agree, then, Brother, thems fightin' words!
Huck Hound, seen Thursdays on WFLA-TV, and his cohorts are the brain-children of Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna, cartoonists for H-B Enterprises, who also created the Tom and Jerry cartoons.
Huckleberry Hound is a slow-moving character that nothing can faze; he is the master of understatement. He falls, head first, off a skyscraper and, upon landing with a thud, drawls, "That was a purty big building."
"Huck Hound can be anything he wants to be," explains Barbera, "a cowboy, cave man, or lion tamer."
He continues "A cartoon character is never limited by restrictions of space or time. Yogi Bear can take enough buckshot in his hide to lay out a dozen real bears then laugh in the hunter's face."
ONE REASON a cartoon has such appeal, Mr. Barbera believes is that the cartoon is a medium of fantasy. A small child has just discovered that when you touch something hot you get burned. While this is true, it dismays the youngster no end. When he sees the cartoon character stroll through a forest fire without getting singed, he is "utterly delighted" Barbera explains.

OFFICIAL HONORS
Adults Like Huck Hound
Bv KRISTINE DUNN
TV Editor of the Miami News
The college kids of the nation are officially adopting Huckleberry Hound. Huckleberry Hound, or Channel 7 at 7 tonight, is that Southern-drawling pooch originally designed to amuse the kids.
He's the pen-and-ink child of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, the creators of Tom and Jerry. Tom the cat and Jerry the mouse have entertained movie-goers during the past 20 years. They also brought MGM seven Academy Awards.
But Huck's philosophy—and his friend, Yogi Bear—caught the fancy and affection of adults.
Right here at The Miami News, in fact, a few of our reporters and editors tote about a lofty disdain for television in general. But four words—"It's Huckleberry Hound time"—will send them sprinting for the tube. The college kids are proclaiming their esteem.

The University of Washington held a "Huck Hound Day" on campus and 11,000 students joined his fan club. Southern Methodist and Texas Christian Universities have dedicated days to Huck this October.
At UCLA, Alpha Tau Omega Fraternity initiated him and hung his portrait over the fireplace.
Homecoming Theme
In the Big Ten, Huckleberry Hound is the theme of Ohio State's homecoming celebration.
All the admiration isn't Ivy-League, either. Bars have been named for him; poker games adjourned for him; airplanes decorated with his picture and speed limits broken for him.
Why?
"Huck is put upon, embarrassed, taken advantage of and thrust into horrendous situations," said one professor. "But he never seems to mind."
Perhaps his ability not to mind is the key to his infectious popularity.
Hanna and Barbera also turn out the Ruff and Reddy cartoons seen Saturdays at 10:30 a.m. on Channel 7.
The duo used to produce 50 minutes of Tom and Jerry cartoons per year for MGM. Last television season, they did more than 900 minutes of cartoons.
Their 200 employes use more than a full tank-car of ink a year. It takes 90 separate drawings for one laugh movement, and 10,000 individual drawings for a half-hour cartoon sequence.

Incidentally, the frames in this post are from Skeeter Trouble (first aired in 1959), where Huck tries to get rid of a mosquito ruining his relaxing visit to the great outdoors. The animator is Carlo Vinci. We posted some of Carlo’s shake takes from this cartoon in this post. Carlo loved rubbery head shakes where one part of the head is facing one way, and the rest facing the other way (though not at 180 degrees to each other). Here’s how he turns Huck’s head.



The cartoon ends with an endless cycle of Huck driving stage right. It takes 16 drawings before the background by Monty repeats. There are four drawings in the cycle, animated on twos.



Besides the Vinci animation and Monty’s nice settings, I’ve always liked this cartoon because it’s the only one in which Daws Butler did his Fred Allen voice. It’s a shame he didn’t repeat it in narration in other cartoons, but Don Messick tended to be cast as the narrator in Huck’s first season.

Walking and Running by Carlo

Yogi Bear and Boo Boo dip their knees, tilt from side to side and then straighten up in a six-drawing walk cycle in the 1958 cartoon Big Bad Bully.



The animator is (as you may have guessed) Carlo Vinci. It takes 96 frames (one drawing shot on two frames) for the bears to get from one end of the background drawing to the other and repeat the cycle. Unfortunately, when the cartoon was shot, there were lighting flares from the camera. That’s in evidence if you isolate the cycle.



Yogi and Boo Boo disguise themselves as a cow to fool a bull in a farmyard. The bull accidentally strips the bears of their costume. Here’s Carlo’s drawing when they realise what’s happened.



When Yogi makes a break for it, there’s a high-step, three drawing cycle. The three drawings are animated on two frames, then Carlo reuses the second drawing of Yogi with his feet in mid-air as the fourth drawing.



Carlo liked to use a two-drawing stomp cycle before characters zipped out of a scene. Here’s an example in frames three and four. Yogi then leads with his chest to run to the left.



These are just a few examples. Carlo has some other walk/run cycles in the cartoon, including a version of the jaunty butt-walk he animated in several first-season cartoons. The animation was limited, but Carlo Vinci made sure it didn’t look too repetitious (imagine the same cycle all through the cartoon) and kept things fun for the viewer.

Flintstones Vs Jonny Quest

Doug Wildey, who gets credit for creating Jonny Quest, once grumbled about the artists working on the series as being, to paraphrase him, “Flintstones animators.”

That was true, but some of them had also come from Walt Disney, where they had animated on Sleeping Beauty. They weren’t hack artists who could draw nothing but talking animal caricatures.

I thought of that when I ran across this newspaper piece about the difference between Jonny Quest and The Flintstones. It’s unbylined, so it may have been a publicity handout from the PR department working alongside Wildey at Hanna-Barbera, or it could have been from ABC. It would seem self-evident what the differences are between the styles of the two shows, but perhaps it was written for publication before Quest debuted. It appeared in several papers; this one is from the News Leader of Staunton, Virginia, November 27, 1964.

There was one similarity between the two series, besides being made by the same studio. In a way, they had the same time-slots at ABC. The Flintstones was getting, er, stoned in the ratings by The Munsters on CBS, so ABC swapped time-slots. That saved The Flintstones from cancellation, allowing its huge merchandising to get another season of free TV publicity. Poor Jonny and Bandit didn’t attract enough adults in its new slot to entice sponsors to put up the kind of advertising money Quest needed to stay in production for another season, so it came to an end in 1965. (Later incarnations notwithstanding). Even if it had stayed on, one wonders how much longer Tim Matheson’s voice could hold out from the effects of time.

Cartoonist Compares Shows
HOLLYWOOD—"There's a big contrast between 'Jonny Quest' and 'The Flintstones,' and that's what makes the two series so much fun to work on," said Joe Barbera, co-producer with William Hanna of the two animated series airing in prime time on ABC-TV.
"I hate having the word educational used in connection with one of our shows, but truly, 'Jonny Quest' has many educational aspects for youngsters," stated Barbera.
"First of all, there's the magnificent art work which we used as backgrounds. It would be impossible for a live or filmed TV show to show such authentic and thoroughly beautiful surroundings as backgrounds for their shows. It would be far too expensive. In 'Jonny Quest,' we take viewers to all parts of the world with our unique backgrounds."
A product of over two years of research by Hanna-Barbera artists and story editors, "Jonny Quest" brings up-to-date adventure to the television screens. "The Flintstones" deals with adventures in the stone age.
The type of art work is different, also. In "Jonny Quest," the art style is illustrative, while "The Flintstones" is pure cartoon-art, using strictly cartoon characters. The characters in "Jonny Quest" are more life-like.

Explaining this difference in the type of characters, Bill Hanna said, "The idea actually stemmed from the beautiful color background drawings for 'Jonny Quest' which Joe and I thought were so stimulating. We realized that here was a different approach to animation, so we decided that the characters should be different by animating them in a life-like manner.
"In 'The Flintstones' it's entirely different," Hanna continued. "The backgrounds are strictly caricature, and we designed the characters to conform."
The stories used on "Jonny Quest" and "The Flintstones" also are contrasting. The only parallel drawn is that the stories for both series are written expressly for family viewing and not toward one age group above another. Barbera and Hanna insist that there be something for every member of the family in every story on both series.
The differences between the two series point up Bill Hanna's and Joe Barbera's versatility. The pair have parlayed two strongly contrasting shows into a real success story. "That's what keeps us going," concluded Barbera. "The contrast makes for more stimulating work and keeps us on our toes. That's what I mean by our work being fun."