The first Hanna-Barbera cartoon series were not only hits with viewers, but with critics and even watchdog groups.
A Catholic publication in March 1960 was complimentary about the H-B shows then on the air and quoted Joe Barbera about why he thought the cartoons were appealing.
A non-denominational publication akin to Reader’s Digest republished portions of the story. Here’s what the July 1960 issue of The Family Digest wrote. Note the original name of The Flintstones and the writer’s lack of knowledge of Jay Ward Productions.
Quick on the Draw
Condensed from The Catholic Preview of Entertainment
SOMETIME THIS year, a family known as The Flagstones will make their national television debut, tentatively set for the ABC-TV Network during the prime evening hours. Who are The Flagstones? They are a family of cartoon characters starring in the first full length half-hour animated series designed for adult viewing.
This newest television “first” marks a milestone in the long and successful partnership of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. For more than 20 years these two men have worked together to provide simple, honest and carefree humor for motion picture and television fans through the creation of such cartoon characters as Tom and Jerry, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Auggie Doggie and Quick Draw McGraw.
For Hanna and Barbera, The Flagstones complete the progression to more adult, satirical cartoons which began, almost accidentally, with Huckleberry Hound. Huck, as his many fans call him, was created primarily to keep the small fry amused, following in the footsteps of Ruff and Reddy and adventurous dog and cat team, the first H-B TV series for Screen Gems.
But Huck Hound’s hang-dog willingness to accept any herculean task and still come up smiling appealed to adults, who found his attitude admirable in a pass-the-buck age. College students across the nation began showering awards and honors on Huck, and many of them held special Huckleberry Hound Days on campus.
Sensing the value of this adult interest, the show’s sponsor, the Kellogg Company, ordered continuation of the series, which was the first half-hour television series consisting entirely of original cartoons. Hanna and Barbera quickly followed up with Quick Draw McGraw, a three-part series which spoofs television westerns, mysteries and situation comedies. Of course, the antics of McGraw, a gun-toting horse; Snooper and Blabber, cat and mouse detectives; and Auggie Doggie, the mischievous pup, keep the series alive with action the children love. But the adults see and enjoy the satire behind it all.
Now, with The Flagstones, Hanna and Barbera feel they have developed a new form of television entertainment. The series satirizes our way of life by dealing with the problems of a family living in the stone age, problems which could happen today. Mr. Flagstone drives a tractor, only it’s a dinosaur; the family car is made of stone.
“We think the popularity of our shows lies in providing a psychological release for human beings of all ages,” explains Barbera. “No one ever gets hurt despite clobberings and binding situations. We have tried to give the audience characters they can identify with themselves, then follow up with wild antics impossible to duplicate in real life. The adults have all taken to the satire while the children watch the programs for the face value of the action-packed story.”
Hanna and Barbera began working together over 20 years ago amid Hollywood’s famed atmosphere of jealousy, quarrelling and success at any price. They have found the success but have avoided the quarrelling. H-B Productions operates out of the world’s largest cartoon studio (a studio built by Charlie Chaplin) and is the only company turning out new and original cartoons especially for television consumption.
As Barbera puts it, “Everyone in the business predicted we would fall flat on our faces trying to do a half-hour cartoon show each week. Actually, careful planning makes it possible. For example, when the action calls for a character to change his facial expression, we save the body and simply draw another head. This way we use 80 percent fewer drawings to animate the story.”
Teamwork is also evident in the success of H-B Productions. The two men put in about 16 hours each, per day. They employ 150 artists and technicians in a 24-hour, round-the-clock operation.
Coordination, which can be difficult with so large a staff, is actually a simple matter; there are no vague memos, no closed doors, no time clock. Every worker knows his job and does it.
To the uninitiated, the job of “throwing together” a cartoon might seem like child’s play. Actually, the complicated and highly skilled technique boils down to this:
First the story is written, then a story board is made, composed of a number of rough drawings with the dialogue written underneath each square. Next, through the process of trial and error, the voice men develop the sounds for the cartoon characters.
The men begin working under a stop watch, until finally their voices are properly times and recorded. The recording and the story board go to the animators where action is matched to the sound. Scenic backgrounds are drawn, the penciled lines are “inked” in, a painter provides four color over-lays and then the finished drawings in color travel to the photographers. Altogether, 10,000 of these individual drawings are needed for a half-hour program.
The success of H-B Productions indicates that good wholesome laughter is marketable on television. At a time when charges of corruption, excess violence and lack of originality are being hurled at the entertainment industry, William Hanna and Joseph Barbara can be especially proud of their contributions to show business.
Before he played a cowardly Great Dane that solved mysteries (I’ve forgotten the character’s name, Scrubby or something), and before he portrayed Astro on The Jetsons, what was the first dog Don Messick voiced at Hanna-Barbera?
No, the answer isn’t me! Actually, his first pooch was Woolly the sheep dog on Ruff and Reddy, who first appeared on TV on March 22, 1958.
But forget Woolly. Who’s birthday is it today?
That’s right. Mine. Though judging by George Jetson, fans can just make up their own birthdays for characters and people will swallow it without question so long as it’s on the internet.
It was on this date in 1958 that Foxy Hound-Dog aired on a number of stations where Kellogg’s bought time.
Lew Marshall is the main animator of the cartoon (although the two frames above are by Mike Lah) and he saves Joe and Bill some money by coming up with a few cycles that take up a little more than the first 30 seconds of the cartoon. Here is an endless cycle of my initial run in the cartoon. It takes 32 frames to go from one end of the background to the other. Marshall uses only three drawings; one is used twice to create a four-position cycle, animated on twos.
You’ll notice the inconsistent colour separation. The head/trunk are on one frame, the legs and ears are on separate frames.
The Yowp debut cartoon has a few things old-time animation fans will remember. There’s a variation of the log-over-a-cliff gag that Tex Avery and writer Dave Monahan pulled off in All This And Rabbit Stew (1941). You’ll remember it from other Warners cartoons. I must have seen that, or the Bugs/Elmer version, as I realise my fate. Even with limited animation, Mike Lah draws a nice little expression. Wile E. Coyote could not have done it better. I emit a forlorn “yowp” before plummeting.
The old drag act appears, too. I think this is the only time Yogi did drag. Unlike similar dress-ups by Bugs Bunny or Woody Woodpecker, it isn’t being used to arouse and confuse but merely as a disguise. These two frames are consecutive. Hanna-Barbera was still employing pose-to-pose movement in its animation.
You’ll notice something else. Lah’s animation has my muzzle the same colour as the rest of my body. Marshall’s very is a sporty blue-ish grey. It could be whoever painted the Lah scenes didn’t get the correct colour chart.
There were three Yowp cartoons in all. Duck in Luck first aired on January 26, 1959, where the nemesis was the pre-Yakky Doodle duck, animated by Carlo Vinci. The final appearance came in the second season on Sept. 28, 1959 with Bare Face Bear, animated by Gerard Baldwin. By this time, Warren Foster was the sole writer of the Yogi Bear cartoons and a decision was made to permanently give Yogi (and Boo Boo) a home in Jellystone Park and Ranger Smith as a nemesis. “We’re going in a different direction,” they would say today, as I became unemployed (but that duck later got his own series. Drat!). It’s significant that neither Boo Boo nor Smith are in the final Yowptoon.
During the first year of the Huck Show, Hanna-Barbera marketed its characters, but since there were only five stars (Huck, Yogi, Pixie, Dixie, Jinks), secondary characters were included to round out things. Yes! There were Yowp toys and games at one time. Above is a Knickerbocker Roly Poly Target Game made in 1959. It came with a gun that shot corks and had some kind of tie-in with Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.
With that, I will wish myself a happy birthday. The blog is pretty much shut down but there are are still a few posts left in storage so we’ll try to get them published.
“What are you doin’ with the soap?” ringmaster Huckleberry Hound asks Pixie and Dixie, in one of those little cartoons between the cartoons.
“It’s for Jinks. He’s chasing us,” says Dixie. We hear Jinks off camera. The meeces, with their elfin eyes, take off with a high step.
Jinks runs into the scene . . .
. . . Slides into the washing machine . . .
. . . And into the wash cycle. Check out some of the drawings of Jinks. Pixie and Dixie just move their mouths and an arm comes up; otherwise, they’re rigid.
The frames come from a 16mm black and white reel courtesy of Steven Hanson’s YouTube channel.
Hanna-Barbera cartoons rarely made fun of themselves in the olden days, but it happened in one of those little cartoons between the cartoons on either The Huckleberry Hound Show or The Yogi Bear Show.
“Hey, Boob! Watcha doin’, Boob? I’ll bet you’re drowin’ our lawn, Boob,” says Yogi, walking over to his buddy Boo Boo. (Why a flower is in a pot not being watered, I don’t know).
“Keep up the good work, Boob. You’re a real buddy, Boob!” Boo Boo is less than happy with Yogi’s patter.
Silently, and with his expression unchanging, Boo Boo turns the hose on Yogi.
“Hey! What’s with you, Boob?”
“After all,” Boo Boo says to the TV audience, “How long can a guy stand being called ‘Boob’?”
For you younger readers, “boob” meant “idiot” until another definition was popularised on the 1970s version of The Match Game.
My guess is this was written by Warren Foster. No one else at the studio would have likely struck back at being forced to write dialogue a certain way (e.g., Yogi’s rhyming couplets).
The animator, I suspect, is Don Williams with the backgrounds by Bob Gentle. The beet-red, fading colours come through the courtesy of Eastmancolor and my inability to improve on them. The print is from the collection of Steven Hanson.
“The biggest show in town” debuted 64 years ago today.
To the right are the TV listings in the Monday, Sept. 29, 1958 edition of the Kittanning (Pa.) Leader-Times. You can see Pittsburgh’s WTAE-TV, which had signed on only two weeks earlier, was one of the first stations to broadcast The Huckleberry Hound Show. WLW-I in Indianapolis was another. So was WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which was picked up in Battle Creek, manufacturing home of Huck’s sponsor, Kellogg.
The cereal company bought the same time slot five nights a week, as it was also sponsoring The Woody Woodpecker Show, Superman and others aimed at kids. Who decided which shows would air on what nights is one of those mysteries lost in time, but an unofficial look at TV listings across the U.S. seems to indicate Thursday was a preference.
The Chicago Tribune’s Larry Wolters was probably the first critic to rave about Huck on the basis of a preview (oh, to know more about that footage!), accurately predicting “Huck and his pals will prove a smash hit in television not only among children but adults as well.” You can read his full review in this old post. Two days later, the Napa Valley Register spoke of “good reports” about the show. And, if you’ve been around this blog long enough, you will have seen all kinds of newspaper clippings that teens and adults tuned in Huck, how he was a hit on college campuses, at least one bar told patrons to stop making noise while the show was on, how an Antarctic island was named for him, and so on. The show came away with an Emmy in 1960, and an animated Huck and Yogi appeared at the ceremony the following year in the first cartoon ever to be part of an Emmy broadcast.
Alas for gentle Huck, whose personality owes as much to Tex Avery’s Southern Wolf cartoons at MGM as anything, he was eclipsed by the more boisterous Yogi Bear. As you can see, one paper used a picture of Yogi in its ad for Huck’s debut in 1958. Another didn’t name any Huck cartoon, instead telling the viewers the initial show would feature Yogi Bear’s Big Break. In fact, Break was the first cartoon aired in the half-hour; Huck was saved until the last segment.
Newspaper ads featuring the characters are always fun. Here are a couple from, I think, 1961. Screen Gems’ promotional department put people in Huck and Yogi costumes in 1959 and sent them all over the U.S. Eventually, a stage show emceed by Eddie Alberian was developed for county fairs and other outdoor events. The second ad is from a time when Hanna-Barbera took up three of Kellogg’s five half-hours purchased as a strip on local stations. (The artwork omits the one other character that appeared in the Yogi cartoon—Yowp).
The Huck DVD purports to have episodes as originally broadcast. That’s not the case. The announcer who provided voice overs for Kellogg’s commercials in 1958 was Art Gilmore. You can hear him over the closing animation in the reconstructed first episode, but a different announcer in the opening, the one hired for the following season.
However, animation with Gilmore providing the opening has been discovered by collector Steven Hanson. While the documentation I have from the studio states that only one opening was animated, that’s clearly not the case as the original backgrounds (and sound effects) were different.
You can play the opening theme song (with no announcer) as you look at some comparisons from seasons one and two:
Gilmore’s voiceover pushes only one cereal: “Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, the ‘get going’ cereal, presents....” And the Randy Van Horne singers take it from there. There’s no “the best to you each morning” yet. That came a year later.
Ten years ago, in this post, we put up a version of Huck’s theme song as played, cha-cha style, by the Scarlet Combo, released in October 1961. It’s a band out of Louisville, fronted by a guy named Jimmy Wayne. Kenny Brookshire’s daughter says that’s her dad on sax and clarinet. Cashbox magazine rated it a “B”.
And finally something I would have liked as a kid—A Huck in a Box. (I had a Cecil in a Box). Huck is the familiar red colour that Knickerbocker liked using; Huck was only broadcast in black and white when this appeared in stores in 1959.
This post is dedicated to Huck fan Greg Chenoweth, our first reader, who dropped away when he moved from Everett, Washington.
This ad appeared in the Los Angeles Times 63 years ago today, marking the debut of The Quick Draw McGraw Show, replacing Wild Bill Hickok in the Kellogg Monday through Friday line-up.
It seems Monday was a popular night for Quick Draw on the West Coast. Here are some other stations that aired the fastest-shootin’-est cowboy, er, cowhorse, er, horseboy on birthday night, September 28:
The ad shows the first Quick Draw cartoon was “Lamb Chopped” (Production J-11), featuring the orange, bad-guy Snagglepuss. The other cartoons were “Baby Rattled” (J-14) with Snooper and Blabber, and “Million Dollar Robbery” (J-31) with Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy.
78 cartoons were created for Quick Draw’s first season—all of them written by Mike Maltese. In Lamb Chopped, Maltese borrows from Pepe LePew, Robin Hood Daffy and Rabbit Fire, while Daws Butler grabs a voice from Bert Lahr, including a stretched, vibrating “n.” (Maltese pulls off an outrageous pun. When Pepe Le Mountain Goat is amorously chasing after Quick Draw dressed as a sheep, he cries “Wait, baby girl. Two can live as sheeply as one”).
Syndicated columnists Hal Humphrey wrote a column three days before the series debuted, talking about the $56,000 it cost each episode to be made. Cecil Smith of the Times wrote about the day it debuted. The Newspaper Enterprise Association's Erskine Johnson and Don Page of the Times praised the series in November. It wasn’t “violent” like those old movie cartoons. Humphrey talked about the series “good taste.”
16mm prints of the half-show show were not struck for all stations. Some were bicycled from station to station and if you read TV listings for the third season (most cartoons were reruns), you can see that different shows appeared in different cities on the same day.
