Yogi Bear — The Stout Trout

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Lew Marshall (Carlo Vinci and Mike Lah uncredited); Layout – Dick Bickenbach; Backgrounds – Fernando Montealegre; Dialogue and Story Sketches – Charlie Shows and Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Narrator – Don Messick; Yogi, fly – Daws Butler.
Production E-21, Huckleberry Hound Show K-012.
First aired: week of Monday, December 15, 1958.
Plot: Yogi vs. Trout. Yogi loses.

I’ve always liked the early Yogis because they don’t rely on a Yogi-Ranger-Jellystone crutch. There’s no Boo-Boo here, either, just Yogi and the title character in a series of black-out gags.

A cartoon like this would not be made a few years later. By 1960, Hanna-Barbera became reliant on the dialogue supplied by Mike Maltese or Warren Foster and the stellar voices of Daws Butler. It’s yack-yack-yack. Often really funny yack-yack-yack, to be sure. But cartoons consisting of sight gags, like this one, just weren’t made any more. Maybe it’s because they really need full animation to be at their best. Some of the drawing is stiff and crude in this one, but there are some clever bits, such as how the fish’s fins turn into arms with boxing gloves and then back into fins again.

We’re informed by the narrator the title character is named ‘Wily Trout’ (or is it ‘Wile E. Trout’?). The trout’s a good one-note character. He’s not stupid, wise-cracking or annoying. He’s just enjoying having some fun. A wise decision was made to make the trout mute. The chatter would have been superfluous. Yogi says little. Don Messick’s narration sets up the gags.

Following the usual H-B establishing shot and a pan to the right, the first set-up is a comparison of “two of nature’s most cunning creatures.” We see how the trout, then the bear are “smart, calculating and a natural fighter.” Yogi comes out in the short end in all departments, and you pretty well know after this how the plot will develop.



After being spewed in the face while trying to catch the trout with his paw, Yogi tries sex as a weapon. Evidently, this fish realises he’s not in Tex Avery ‘Red’ cartoon, or is a big fan of Cher and Liza Minnelli, as he shows more interest in food than females. See the thick row of teeth on Yogi? That’s a Carlo Vinci trademark.



Next, Yogi tries a fly lure. Unfortunately, the fly’s still alive and pulls Yogi into the water. He runs out of the lake after the old ‘strapping on a fin and pretending to be a shark’ gag. We get some nice limited animation here. See how Yogi stretches when the fly pulls him in? And he leads with his chest as he tries to escape from the “shark.” More signs of Carlo in action.





Yogi tries to club the fish in a bunch of cycle animation and then gets clubbed himself in a really funny pose.
Mike Lah has taken over the animation. Goggle eyes and Yogi talking out of the side of his mouth are giveaways that Lah is on the job. And look how big Yogi’s nose is here.

In the next gag, Lah handles the animation of the fish in the caught boot just before he kicks Yogi into the brink. Charlie Shows consecutively gives us a bunch of attack-the-rear jokes that I will leave for Freud or fans of Cher and Liza Minnelli to analyse.



Lah’s finished his work in this one. But the rear-end gags carry on. Carlo has a nice bit of TV animation as Yogi, now underwater, scrambles to escape the speargun-carrying trout. He fails. We get to see the, um, end result in a long shot.

We interrupt our butt commentary to remark on the cartoon’s background colours. Instead of a singular flat tone, there’s purple interlaced with the green of the slopes and in the brown in the soil. The trees are different shades of green. You’ll notice the salmon-coloured sky (appropriate for a cartoon about fish, I might add) in the other shots. There’s always something interesting in the background colour or design to augment the early H-B cartoons.

Now, back to our butt commentary. You’ll observe some rare continuity. Normally, cartoon characters are back in their usual shapes in the next scene. Not here. When Yogi accidentally starts his outboard motor (the boat to which it belongs is never seen in this cartoon) and it takes on a life of its own, he’s still sporting a reminder of his spear injury as he rides it across—and under—the water.

There’s a bit of Warner Bros. influence here as Yogi ducks underneath a pier, starts showing off for the camera à la Wile E. Coyote and then .. WHAM! And, if you lost count, he water-skies past the same mountain in the background 12 times (there’s a smudge on the background cell you can use for reference).



The cartoon ends with Yogi (with an overbite) still trying to catch the fish, who attaches the line to the outboard motor (now underwater). Yogi reprises his motor-jockeying, except this time it’s past a highway patrol cop. How many times is there one of these in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon? George Jetson seems to have been pulled over on every episode.



The sound cutter was content to let most of the stock music run its full length here and we get Jack Shaindlin’s Toboggan Run twice. The Huck DVD—a must for any fan of these cartoons—has an unusual vocal and musical arrangement for the early Yogi theme on this cartoon. The syllables in “Yo-gi” are sung in eighth notes; the more common version has the “Yo” a quarter note in length to make the name stand out more.

0:00 – Yogi opening theme (Bill Hanna-Joe Barbera-Hoyt Curtin).
0:24 – ZR-49 LIGHT EERIE (Geordie Hormel) - Establishing shot and character set-up.
2:07 – TC-201 PIXIE COMEDY (Bill Loose-John Seely) - Yogi tries fly fishing; shark, baseball bat bits.
3:24 – TC-202 WISTFUL COMEDY (Loose-Seely) - Fish in boot, Yogi in inflatable raft.
4:45 – L-81 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Spencer Moore) - Fish spears Yogi, Yogi's line caught in motor.
5:33 – LAF-20-5 TOBOGGAN RUN (Shaindlin) - Yogi rides boat motor.
6:34 – TC-303 ZANY COMEDY (Loose-Seely) - Fish hooks line to motor.
6:47 – LAF-20-5 TOBOGGAN RUN (Shaindlin) - Yogi rides motor past cop.
7:10 – Yogi closing theme (Curtin).

Huckleberry Hound — Tricky Trapper

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Ken Muse; Layout – Walt Clinton; Backgrounds – Bob Gentle; Dialogue and Story Sketches – Charlie Shows and Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Cast: Narrator, Mountie, Rover – Don Messick; Huck, Powerful Pierre – Daws Butler.
Production E-37, Huckleberry Hound Show K-016.
First Aired: week of Monday, October 13, 1958.
Plot: World-renowned Mountie Huck and his faithful dog are unwillingly put on the trail of Quebecois bad guy Powerful Pierre, who is captured with un grand boule de neige.

This really isn’t a remarkable cartoon, but it’s likeable. There are a few firsts here but there are a bunch of concepts used time after time in the early H-B cartoons. I think the little sled dog is the first H-B character to have little solid eyes, though he doesn’t in the title card. And this is the cartoon when Huck debuts his rendition of Clementine. On some of the early cartoons like this one, the sound cutter left the stock music in the background while Huck’s singing. Evidently, someone eventually picked up on the dissonance because in later cartoons, Hoyt Curtin or someone recorded a Clementine calliope accompaniment for Huck.



The opening is atypical. We get Don Messick narrating over an establishing shot that pans right. The shadows on the mountains and rolling foothills are a nice touch. Walt Clinton, who animated on most of Tex Avery’s greatest cartoons and even drew model sheets for his unit, laid out the backgrounds and Bob Gentle’s brush put them together (poor Bob; ending up being saddled with dreck like The Super Globetrotters and various incarnations of Scooby-Doo).

Oh, here’s yet another H-B character with a droopy white moustache. Judging by the insignia stripes on his sleeves (which should be on his upper arm; they’re not seen in the shot below left), he’s a corporal. And we get a variation on the old gag about asking for volunteers to step forward, and all but one step back; the 1951 Heckle and Jeckle cartoon “‘Sno Fun” opens with the same gag in a Mountie station. This being an H-B cartoon, all but one simply turn into a blur of lines that zip off stage to a familiar whisking vocal effect.



So Huck is on the trail of Pierre, muttering and reversing the words to “The Mountie motto: We get our man” (memo to Charlie Shows—it’s supposed to be “We always get our man”). Now we get some cute gags over narration about the buddy relationship between a dog (Huck) and his dog (Rover). Huh?? Anyway, they share their bed and their food. And they even sing Clementine together, though the sled dog avoids having to listen to the off-key rendition by putting on ear-muffs, in a gag that got mileage in a number of H-B cartoons.



They happen upon Pierre, wearing one of those H-B chequered jackets where the squares stay in place (how did they do that?). Pierre is H-B’s version of Warner’s Blacque Jacques Shellacque, though Daws doesn’t have to do any yelling au dessus de ses poumons like Mel Blanc did in the McKimson cartoons.

After a brief retreat into a hollow tree (the dog makes it; Huck doesn’t), the chase is on, though a chopped tree gets in the way (the dog makes it; Huck doesn’t), and the “cliff bit” results in a temporary setback as Huck flies into the sky and gets stuck on a nearby rock face. Incidentally, why is the narrator calling him “Sergeant Huck” when our hero has a constable’s insignia?



Snowballs come into play for the rest of the short. Pierre’s hiding behind a rock, as Huck hurls a snowball into his face. Then they play a game of tennis with a rock-concealed snowball, the two remarking to the audience all the while (we even gets a Charlie Shows rhyme: “Pierre does not scare. So there!”).



Pierre then tries to escape on skis down a mountain, but the resourceful Huck uses a tiny snowball which, as in a Buster Keaton comedy, grows into a large one as it gathers momentum and captures Pierre with a sputtering-lips vocal effect. And, no, those aren’t real sentences the Quebecois Pierre is speaking that I can tell, though there’s some real French in there.

The finale features Huck wailing Clementine, with the empathetic little sled dog taking sympathy on Pierre’s ears. Check the light brown clouds Gentle uses to add to some colour.

Pierre proved popular enough to return in “Ski Champ Chump” later in the season, with design modification and uncertainty over his name.

The Hi-Q library is put to good use again. This being a snow-filled cartoon, it’s appropriate Jack Shaindlin’s Toboggan Run makes an appearance, though a toboggan doesn’t. We get Geordie Hormel’s “Merrie Olde England frolicking music”, maybe because Canada was an English colony at one time. It seems like a bit of an odd choice. I don't know its name of the name of Shaindlin’s LAF-25-3.

0:00 – Huck snare drum theme open (Hoyt Curtin).
0:26 – EM-147 DOCUMENTARY MAIN TITLE (Green) - establishing shot of snowy Canada.
0:51 – ZR-103 PERIOD MAIN TITLE (Geordie Hormel) - Huck “volunteers.”
1:21 – L-1158 ANIMATION COMEDY (Spencer Moore) - Huck reminded “We get our man.”
1:29 – TC 204A WISTFUL COMEDY (Bill Loose-John Seely) - Huck and sled dog buddy gags.
2:24 – CLEMENTINE (trad.) over TC 204A - Huck and sled dog sing Clementine.
2:54 – TC 300 ECCENTRIC COMEDY (Loose-Seely) - Pierre scares dog into tree and skis away.
3:49 – TC 221A HEAVY AGITATO aka 3-M3-T1 (Loose-Seely) - Chopped tree falls on Huck.
4:13 – L-78 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) - Not the cliff bit!
5:36 – LAF-25-3 bassoon and zig-zag strings (Shaindlin) - Tennis match with rock in snowball.
6:13 – LAF-20-5 TOBOGGAN RUN (Shaindlin) - Huck gets Pierre with giant snowball.
6:45 – CLEMENTINE acapella (trad.) - Sled dog puts ear muffs on Pierre.
7:12 – Huck theme close (Curtin).

The Great Blabber Mouse Mystery

Yowp Note: Since this post was compiled, information has come to light that Jerry Hausner was not the voice of Blabber Mouse. Elliot Field was. However, we leave the post up because Jerry deserves to be remembered and there’s information here about his animation career.

Cartoon voice artistry is an awe-inspiring talent. Who doesn’t admire the abilities of the people who were part of one’s childhood—Mel Blanc, Daws Butler, June Foray, Bill Scott, Paul Frees and so many more? Growing up, I loved listening closely to cartoon voices and enjoyed picking out who was responsible for them. I was pretty good at it, too. But there were a few snags, thanks to a lack of credits on the cartoons. For example, I—like jillions of others around the world—believed Mel Blanc did all the voices (that weren’t June Foray) on the Warner Bros. cartoons. After all, the cartoons said so. It wasn’t until early adulthood before I learned, thanks to other childhood fans who had grown up to become cartoon detectives and authors, there had been a fellow named Arthur Q. Bryan. He was not Mel Blanc. But he was Elmer Fudd. The cartoons lied.

To your right, you see a couple of Hanna-Barbera characters who got to mouth the words of the great Mike Maltese. Everyone knows that Daws Butler and Don Messick supplied the main voices for all the early characters, and that Daws filled the larynxs of both Snooper and Blabber.

Afraid not.

If you watch any of the first four Snooper and Blabbers—‘Puss N’ Booty’, ‘Switch Witch’, ‘Real Gone Ghosts’, and ‘Desperate Diamond Dimwits’, you’ll notice Blabber sounds different. OK, then it must be Don Messick. He got all the other major roles, right? And this version of Blabber kinda sounds like he’s in Don’s vocal range, so it must be him.

Except it isn’t.

You may not recognise the middle character to your right. He’s Aloysius, the Puss who had the Booty. And you may not recognise his voice. But you can tell it’s neither Butler nor Messick. Nor is the Maudie Frickert-like falsetto of the title character in ‘Switch Witch.’ You can tell—especially in ‘Desperate Diamond Dimwits’—it’s whoever is voicing Blab.

So who is it?

Fortunately, there are still cartoon detectives out there revealing the presence of long-forgotten radio actors in animated films (Arthur Q. Bryan’s main employment was on Fibber McGee and Molly). And the successful sleuths in this caper are a couple of fine cartoon writers named Earl Kress and Mark Evanier, neither of whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting, though I read Mark’s blog and we were part of the same conversations on Usenet from time to time back when people read Usenet.

Some time ago, Earl surprised me with an internet forum post identifying Peter Leeds’ voice on at least one Quick Draw McGraw cartoon (Leeds worked with Stan Freberg, as did Daws). I pressed my luck and asked about the Aloysius voice. Whether Earl was on the trail before that, I don’t know, but I raised the question again not long ago on another forum, and Mark weighed in with the answer:

The first four Snooper & Blabber cartoons were recorded (probably all in one day) by Daws Butler and Jerry Hausner. For reasons unknown, Hausner was replaced as Blabber...and thereafter, Daws did both leads and they brought in other actors (most often, Messick) to do the other parts in those cartoons. Earl Kress and I figured this out. We were stumped for a time by the "other" Blabber voice. Hausner did most of his voice work for U.P.A. where he was also the voice director but he occasionally turned up in other places.

Later, Mark went on to give a little history about the H-B recording sessions in the late 1950s:

Daws got a certain fee. Everyone else got scale. So if they did a Snooper & Blabber with Daws as Snooper and Hausner as Blabber, the voice budget was Daws's fee plus one scale payment. And then if they later did a Snooper & Blabber with Daws as both characters plus Don Messick in incidental roles, the voice budget was Daws's fee plus one scale payment.

So who was Jerry Hausner? As Mark mentioned, he was at U.P.A.; Boxoffice magazine reveals on March 21, 1960 that studio head Steven Bosustow appointed him dialogue director. But he was there long before that. He originated the voice of Waldo on Ragtime Bear, the first Mr. Magoo cartoon in 1949. Magoo himself, Jim Backus, revealed in a 1976 interview with the Associated Press that Waldo was supposed to be the star. But Hausner suggested a voice that Backus had tried out on the Edgar Bergen radio programme would be perfect for Magoo. Backus’ character stole the show, and instead of being getting a starring role and fame, Hausner found himself playing supporting U.P.A. characters—the nadir one possibly being a best-left-forgotten Chinese stereotype houseboy in those cheap and lame made-for-TV “Mr. McGloo” cartoons.

Hausner excelled in radio, but he was rarely a series regular. Radio was full of top actors who were constantly in demand and went from show to show. They weren’t part of the cast every week, but were called back frequently; Mel Blanc, Frank Nelson, Bea Benaderet and Joe Kearns on Jack Benny’s show are good examples. Hausner was among them. His first regular role seems to have been on the Mutual network show Barrel of Fun in 1941 also featuring Verna Felton, Sara Berner, Harry Lang and Charlie Ruggles, who all later did cartoons. He went overseas in World War Two and ended up in Japan on Armed Forces Radio with Hans Conried. He often appeared on dramas, too, especially Suspense and Lux Radio Theatre, and anthologies like The Cavalcade of America. But his specialty was an imitation of a crying baby, which he pulled off on a number of top radio comedies, including Benny’s and My Favorite Husband. The latter starred Lucille Ball and was produced by Jess Oppenheimer, who cast him as Ricky Ricardo’s agent in the pilot of I Love Lucy. The role was intended to be a regular one, but then Oppenheimer decided to try different secondary characters—a couple named Fred and Ethel—and Hausner was downgraded to a semi-regular at $70 an appearance, and walked off the show for good in 1954 when Desi tore into him in front of the cast and crew over a technical problem that ruined a scene (and wasn’t his fault).

Considering his experience with Mr. Arnaz, Hausner might have been perfect for the role of Baba Looey. But he wasn’t at Hanna-Barbera by then. Mark and Earl haven’t found out why he left the studio after being handed a regular character and supporting work.

Hausner had a long and varied television career—including five episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show and three of Green Acres and an obscure show called Valentine’s Day—that you can read about on the occasionally-dubious Internet Movie Database.

James (Jerry) Bernard Hausner died on this date in 1993 at age 83 in Los Angeles, so it’s only fitting we remember the occasion by paying tribute to a radio and cartoon voice actor forgotten by many.

Pixie and Dixie — The Ghost With The Most

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Ken Muse, Mike Lah (uncredited); Layout – Dick Bickenbach; Backgrounds – Bob Gentle; Dialogue and Story Sketches – Charlie Shows and Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Cast: Jinks, Dixie - Daws Butler; Pixie - Don Messick.
Episode: Huckleberry Hound Show K-009, Production E-17, First aired: week of Monday, November 24, 1958.
Plot: Dixie pretends to be a ghost after Jinks bashes him with a coal scuttle. A frightened Jinks acts as a slave to Pixie until he finds out the truth and tries the ghost bit himself.

Daws Butler and Charlie Shows save this cartoon. Because the clean-up and painting work sure don’t.

People decry Hanna-Barbera’s original product for being devoid of animation and full of short-cuts. That’s understandable, given the fact they were created cheaply for television. Unfortunately, the low budgets apparently meant glaring errors couldn’t be fixed by the time the finished artwork was sent to the camera.

This cartoon has a bunch of examples. What happened to Pixie’s neck? Has he got some weird form of swelling that only affects cartoon mice? The ink-line for his head isn’t there. There’s another head-in-the-hole shot where there’s a mousey grey where there should be a wall.

The most glaring errors are in this sequence where Jinks’ arm continually passes his mouth when he pokes Dixie, but you can see his mouth through his hand. And, for a second, someone got the instructions screwed up and Jinks changed hands and lost his mouth for a few frames.



Setting that aside, it’s still a charming cartoon. The writing shows a nice relationship between between the mice and the cat. Sure, they’re playing their assigned roles in nature, but the adversaries actually care about each other. And Daws has great fun with the script, infusing extra syllables and pulling off goofy emphasis, as he is apt to do, which makes him a joy to hear.

Our cartoon starts with the mice roller-skating past the same window ten times before Jinks removes a furnace vent grate on the floor and down they go. An attempt to run away results in Pixie escaping, but Dixie is bopped with a coal scuttle.

I really like the triangular shapes on Jinks here; I’d have to check if Muse was the only animator who gave him the shape of teeth you see here. And Bick and Bob augment the background with some geometrical art.

It’s at this point where Jinks engages in the sloppy cartoon-work aforementioned then deposits the “dead” Dixie under a plant in a flowerpot on the window sill. You’ll notice in this shot, there’s a window in the background, but when they come back to it after the frames of sausage-neck Pixie (see above), the background’s different. Incidentally, I don’t know what happened with Don Messick’s voice, but during this bit Pixie sounds like the mouse professor from Little Bird-Mouse; the pitch is too low.

Jinks is worried he’s killed Dixie, so the mice conspire to scare him some more by putting a sheet on the southern mouse so he can pretend he’s a ghost. Pixie squeaks a door, rattles some chains, then rolls up a window shade as Jinks does this great shake-take. And like you’ll find in most early H-B cartoons, the take is made up of two frames alternated in a cycle in lieu of full animation. You can make an animated .gif of these and create your own Hanna-Barbera cartoon; I’ve tried it and may post them later.



This whole scene, including the take, is by Mike Lah, who takes over the animation after the sheet-clad Dixie leaves the mousehole (Dixie puns “Here ghosts” for “Here goes”). Muse is back when Jinks is in the chair saying “I’ll probably get the hot seat for this.” You can tell it’s Lah by the wide-eyed look he gives Pixie (and there’s no tongue as the mouse’s mouth moves on his face during dialogue) and the joint eyes and jagged teeth on Jinks. Lah’s versions of the characters tend to look less polished that Muse’s, but Hanna seems to have liked giving Lah scenes with fun expressions.

There’s a lot of smear animation in Pixie and Dixie cartoons, usually when someone’s starting to run off camera. But we get some here (Muse again) as Jinks tries to figure out who’s talking to him. Then the “ghost” of Dixie appears, and the guilt-ridden cat agrees to do anything the mice say. Daws is really tremendous. I love his read of “Service with a smile!” when he leaves Pixie some chocolate cake, sounding hopeful he’s appeased the “ghost.”

A nice touch is the two stray hairs on Jinks’ tail when Pixie (with all the ink-lines of his head visible this time) orders him to bark like a dog before telling him to jump out a window. Problem is the hairs keep appearing and vanishing depending on the pose.

Jinks looks in, sees the two mice laughing and realises Dixie isn’t dead. Daws channels the Mr. Kitzel character from the Jack Benny radio show and says “Hoo hoo HOO!” and then emphasizes the “b” as he turns to the audience and says “Ehhhh, soooo that is the way the cookie crum-bles.”

Jinks leaves behind a note (which is superfluously read for us by Dixie) and then does the ghost bit himself. Daws’ funniest reading may be right here, where Jinks lamely tries to impersonate a ghost. He manages to keep Jinks’ odd emphasis and stretched vowels while, at the same time, add the odd emphasis and stretched vowels like a clichéd ghost in a Boris Karloff movie. You try doing both. You can’t. Daws was a master.



And since Jinks did the meeces’ bidding when Dixie was a “ghost,” the mice pledge subservience to the cat, though they can see through the lame ghost impression as well as the viewer, and (are you surprised with this?) laugh as the camera irises out.

Bill Loose and John Seely are credited with a whole side of “Ghost” cuts in the Capitol Hi-Q library (‘L’ series, reel 39) and while “Sublime Ghost” is used fairly often in Hanna-Barbera cartoons, and several others appeared in the Looney Tune Gopher Broke, none of them appeared here.

0:00 - Pixie and Dixie opening theme (Hanna-Barbera-Hoyt Curtin).
0:26 - LAF-21-3 RECESS (Jack Shaindlin) - Jinks bashes Dixie; thinks he's killed him.
2:01 - TC 432 HOLLY DAY (Loose-Seely) - Dixie dresses up as ghost.
2:47 – ZR-49 LIGHT EERIE (Geordie Hormel) - Mice scare Jinks; Dixie promises to haunt Jinks.
4:28 - TC 201 PIXIE COMEDY (Loose-Seely) - Jinks becomes slave to mice; jumps out window.
5:52 - L-78 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Spencer Moore) - Mice think Jinks is dead; Jinks pretends to be ghost.
7:03 – PIXIE AND DIXIE THEME (Curtin) - Mice bow to Jinks and laugh.
7:10 - Pixie and Dixie closing theme.