Huckleberry Hound Meets Wee Willie

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Ken Muse, Layouts – Dick Bickenbach, Backgrounds – Sam Clayberger, Dialogue and Story Sketches – Charlie Shows and Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Cast: Huck - Daws Butler; Dispatcher, Willie - Don Messick.
Production E-35; Huckleberry Hound Show K-001.
First aired: week of Monday, September 29, 1958.
Plot: Officer Huckleberry tries to capture escaped gorilla Wee Willie. Willie captures him.

So, here we have it—the first Huckleberry Hound cartoon to hit the air. And you might expect a rollicking, laughter-in-the-aisles start to this beloved pioneer programme. A cartoon so good, it instantly catapulted Hanna-Barbera to success and an eventual animation empire.

Well, this cartoon did. I guess. But it didn’t really make me laugh. In the aisles or anywhere else. Oh, I smiled a couple of times.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I don’t like to see nice guys get bashed around for no reason and still lose at the end, unless it’s like the cat in Chuck Jones’ Fresh Airedale because that cartoon is a cynical look at Right vs. Wrong. But I just am not crazy about this cartoon.

And that’s not even considering the galling fact Bill and Joe ripped off the whole concept from the brilliant Tex Avery. For the uninitiated, Tex created a southern-accented wolf that was used in several of his theatrical cartoons at M-G-M, where Hanna and Barbera were playing cat (Tom) and mouse (Jerry) As Tex told Joe Adamson:

“This wolf would never get excited...We’d use him in very violent action, then we’d freeze him and he’d make his crack...even Quimby [Fred Quimby, head of cartoons at M.G.M.] was enthused. He said, ‘Yes, sir, them things are funny. Every time he opens his mouth, he gets a laugh.’”

So, if a humourless suit like Quimby would laugh at something like that, Joe and Bill must have figured anyone else would, too. So, they changed the wolf to a blue dog, Daws brightened the character’s voice slightly, and .. Ta-da! Huckleberry Hound!

Now, Huck isn’t a bad character. There are some cartoons I like him in. Even ones where he loses, such as Little Red Riding Huck because we get a few imaginative gags and voice work. But the elements of this cartoon really don’t add up.

I should mention this was the first Huck cartoon to air but the fifth put into production. The previous four were far from duds.

The cartoon has a promising start. There’s a neatly-designed, New York-inspired cityscape in the establishing shot. Charlie Shows takes a shot at Dragnet with Huck’s polite narration: “This is the big town. Millions of folks live here. My job—protect them. Because I’m a cop .. uh, PO-liceman.” Daws reads it in an appropriate monotone AND a North Carolinian accent. Is there anything Daws couldn’t do?

But then we get cost-cutting, almost non-existent animation. For almost the first minute of the cartoon, we see Huck in a car in long shot. All that moves is the background. Then we see Huck in a car in a medium shot. He blinks. His head turns toward the radio. Nothing else moves except the background, as Huck drives past the same brownish building 11 times. We see “voice lines” out of the police radio in a close-up. We see Huck again in a medium shot, blinking and turning his head, and passing the brownish building four more times. Then we see the long shot again and all that moves is the background. We then get a medium shot of a stationary Huck leaning in the car, then another close-up of the “voice lines.”

When is something going to happen in this cartoon?

Finally, Huck arrives at his destination—Main and Broadway (Hands up .. how many of you have a Main and Broadway where you live?). We can view what damage Willie has wrought. Below is the whole background used in a good portion of the cartoon, with some carnage temporarily added in the foreground.



Huck spies Willie, who is brown despite the dispatcher’s description of the gorilla as being “caucasian.” Oh, well.

The rest of the cartoon is Willie bashing the hound around and then the action freezing and Huck making his crack, sometimes at the camera. Fred Quimby would be enthused. First, Willie rips the roof off the squad car (which, being in a cartoon, miraculously repairs itself before its next appearance). Here’s a Ken Muse animation hint—look for the upper teeth that are drawn as one long tooth, and a tongue with a slit in it.

Huck is jumped on by Willie in some cycle animation as the police dispatcher tells Officer 13: “Remember, no rough stuff!” Willie then eats Huck’s gun, then his handcuffs, then starts chewing on his arm. Huck decides to tickle Willie to get free. Notice the difference in Willie’s proportions here compared with the previous shot. You’ll also observe some more labour-saving animation. The only thing that moves in this little chat-to-the-camera sequence is Huck’s arm (see the colour separation) and his head; everything else is rigid until Willie sneezes and Huck is blown into the Main Street signpost. Wait a minute! Wasn’t it destroyed by Willie in the earlier shot?



Next comes 11 seconds of a camera shaking over a stationary shot of the background as Huck and Willie fight out of our view and save Hanna-Barbera a few more bucks in cells and paint. Willie, for reasons unknown, takes Huck up the skeleton of a skyscraper under construction and, also for reasons unknown, takes offence when Huck calls him “a big ape.” Willie busts him through a beam and walks away in disgust. There are a couple of silhouette shots here to break up the monotony.

Huck apologises as the soundtrack plays a tinkly piano version of the 19th century weepy song “Hearts and Flowers.” Willie bashes him with a beam in between sentences. Huck next tries to hog-tie the gorilla but ends up roped instead and turned into a yo-yo. When the rope breaks, Willie—letting out nothing more than a continual “Eek! Eek!”—smacks Huck into a board, which sends him back up, only to be smacked down again in some cycled animation.



Laughing yet?

The board snaps and Huck splash-lands in a filled cement mixer. Finally, Huck captures Willie in a barrel as the gorilla hangs by his feet upside-down from a beam being lowered. Say, who’s lowering the beam? Wouldn’t a construction worker stop his rig if he saw a 350-pound gorilla attached to a girder? Oh, right. It’s a cartoon.

The capture is short-lived, as Willie’s too big for the barrel, and the police car for that matter, and decides to take Huck and the cruiser for a little walk, past the same building in the background four times.

The opening music in this cartoon is a nice little piece by Geordie Hormel that got more of a workout in the second-season Hucks. Victor Lamont’s arrangement of Theodore Moses Tobani’s Hearts and Flowers came from the Sam Fox library, parts of which found their way into the Capitol Hi-Q library used on these cartoons. The closing music is simply faded out, something done occasionally in the early cartoons.

0:00 – Huck sub main title (Hanna, Barbera, Curtin, Shows).
0:26 – ZR 45 METROPOLITAN (Hormel) - Huck dispatched to catch Willie.
1:20 – TC 301 ZANY WALTZ (Bill Loose-John Seely) - Huck finds carnage, Willie; ape jumps on him.
2:36 – TC 303 ZANY COMEDY (Loose-Seely) - Willie eats handcuffs and Huck's hand; sneezes Huck into lamppost.
3:31 – LAF-20-5 TOBOGGAN RUN (Jack Shaindlin) - Willie takes Huck up building skeleton.
4:24 – SF-? HEARTS AND FLOWERS (Tobani, arr. Victor Lamont) - Huck apologises to Willie for calling him an ape.
5:00 – LAF-2-12 ON THE RUN (Shaindlin) - Willie uses Huck as yo-yo; Huck lands in cement mixer.
6:01 – LAF-21-3 RECESS (Shaindlin) - Willie caught in barrel; walks away with Huck in police car.
7:10 – Huck sub ending title (Hanna, Barbera, Curtin, Shows).

Sam Clayberger — Huck Background Artist

When you think of the backgrounds in the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons, several names come to mind—generally Fernando Montealegre, Art Lozzi or Bob Gentle, all of whom worked at M.G.M. before moving to television animation when the studio closed.

But the distinction of doing the backgrounds for the first Huckleberry Hound cartoon goes to someone else, a man who made his name elsewhere—Sam Clayberger.

A little biography in Keith Scott’s exhaustively-researched The Moose That Roared tells us that Sam was born in Pennsylvania, and went to the Chouinard Art Institute after a hitch in the U.S. Air Force during the war. He ended up at U.P.A. for six years, then Graphic Films, and then worked for Jay Ward on Rocky and Bullwinkle, then later on George of the Jungle, both amongst the funniest TV cartoons ever made. Teaching art appears to have been a love as Sam was an Associate Professor at the Otis Art Institute in the mid ‘60s. Oddly enough, Keith’s rather detailed book hasn’t a peep about Sam’s work at Hanna-Barbera. You can read more about his career at the Toon In Animation podcast site.

Sam is still with us and he was interviewed about his life and career. Listen to the podcast here. It’s full of insight. Sam talks lucidly about his career but, oddly enough again, he makes no mention of his employment by Joe and Bill. Perhaps he was hired on a freelance basis.

Besides “Huckleberry Hound Meets Wee Willie,” Clayberger’s name can be found in the credits of “Cock-a-Doodle Huck,” “Two Corny Crows,” “Hookey Days” and “Mark of the Mouse.” There may have been other cartoons, as most of the Yogi Bear segments on the DVD of the first season of Huckleberry Hound don’t have credits. But, above, you see two examples of establishing shots of his, the top one from “Cock-a-Doodle Huck” with intelligently-chosen tint variations, and up and to the left from “Two Corny Crows” featuring corn stalks with leaves of different shades of green to add depth.

Sam’s colour schemes are certainly eye-pleasing but don’t overpower the action in the foreground. What more can you ask for?

Phil Green’s Music for Quick Draw and Augie

NOTE: The music in this post is not public domain. One can find the same audition-quality versions on the rights-holder’s web site. Yowp.

Everyone knows who Hoyt Curtin is. “Yeah, Yowp,” you’re saying. “He’s the guy that wrote all the music for Hanna-Barbera. You know, like that Flintstones song: ‘Let’s ride with the family down the street. Through the, um, something-or-other.’ There are CDs of the stuff out there.”

Does anyone know who Phil Green is?

He wrote a bunch of music in Hanna-Barbera cartoons, too. But there aren’t CDs of the stuff out there. Until maybe now.

When H-B Enterprises began to develop its first show, Ruff and Reddy in 1957, it did what many TV producers of the late ‘50s did. Instead of hiring a composer, it used music from stock libraries because that was cheaper. There were several libraries around at the time, and one of them was the Capitol Hi-Q library.

Not all the music in the library was composed specifically for it. Capitol either bought or leased library music from other companies. One of them was EMI—which might have been expected given the relationship between the two companies. EMI’s production library was called ‘Photoplay’ and the music was composed by one Harry Philip Green. Read Phil’s biography here. The music was designed solely for background use and not for at-home listening, so that’s why it—and other production libraries—are not commercially available like the latest überhyped pop junk.

For some reason, Hanna and Barbera didn’t use the Green cues in the Ruff and Reddy cartoons, nor in the first season of The Huckleberry Hound Show with one exception. Several cartoons opened, such as High-Fly Guy and Tricky Trapper, with a rolling bass drum and horns. In the Hi-Q library, it was known as “EM-147 Documentary Main Title.” But a year later in 1959 when they were developing a second half-hour show, Quick Draw McGraw, Green’s music started showing up (on both the Quick Draw and Huck shows)—most of it originally from Photoplay’s Q-2 ‘Comedy Cartoon’ set of discs.

A chap who has been mentioned on these cyber-pages before by the name of Earl Kress managed to help get several of those tunes released on Rhino’s Pic-A-Nic Basket of Cartoon Classics in 1996. Personally, I was delighted to hear these for the first time and to learn a little about them. Alas, since then, trying to get music clearance for all the pre-Curtin background melodies in the Huck and Quick Draw series has proven to be impossible; it’s one of the reasons the Quick Draw cartoons are not available on DVD where they belong.

However, I have been alerted by faithful reader—and Hi Q obsesso—Steve Carras that some of these Capitol/Photoplay Q-2 cues are, in audition quality, on-line.

For reasons I’ll never understand, companies re-name old production music when it’s re-released; Capitol did it to all the Photoplay stuff, too. So, as a public service, I am going to link to the music, and list the original Photoplay name. Click on the song name and listen (The “GR” is some kind of numerical code used by EMI):

GR-80 FRED KARNO’S ARMY
GR-84 THE BRAVEST WOODEN SOLDIER
GR-258 THE TIN DRAGOONS
GR-253 TOYLAND PARADE
GR-259 AND THEY ALL LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER
GR-254 CLOCKWORK CLOWNS
GR-93 DRESSED TO KILL
GR-74 POPCORN
GR-64 WINDLASS AND CAPSTAN
GR-456 DOCTOR QUACK
GR-453 THE ARTFUL DODGER
GR-87 SKELETON IN THE CUPBOARD
GR-90 THE CHEEKY CHAPPIE
GR-255 PUPPETRY COMEDY
GR 256 TOYLAND BURGLAR
GR-472 HICKSVILLE
GR-99 THE DIDDLECOMB HUNT
GR-96 BY JIMINY! IT’S JUMBO
GR-77 CUSTARD PIE CAPERS
GR-65 BUSH BABY
GR-63 THE GIRAFFE
GR-459 DAWN IN BIRDLAND
GR-257 BEDTIME STORY

Now, this isn’t the only material of Green’s that was used in Quick Draw, Augie or Snooper—the wonderful overture to what’s generally dubbed ‘Big City Suite 2’ isn’t here—but this is a pretty good sampling.

And, no, this isn’t intended to be a full history of all the music on the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons before Curtin wrote his own (somewhat inferior) tracking library. We’ll try to get around to discussing that in a future post.

Pixie and Dixie — Cousin Tex

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Carlo Vinci, Mike Lah; Layout – Ed Benedict; Backgrounds – Fernando Montealegre; Dialogue and Story Sketches – Charlie Shows and Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Cast: Jinks, Dixie, Cousin Tex - Daws Butler; Pixie, Cousin Pecos - Don Messick.
Production E-14; Huckleberry Hound Show K-001.
First Aired: week of September 29, 1958.
Plot: Cousin Tex pays a visit and treats Jinks like a horsie. Jinks’ plan to bring in his own Texan relative to retaliate is an (un)expected failure.

Some no-so-polished, goofy poses by Carlo Vinci make this a winning cartoon, though the story-line isn’t terrible funny. The plot is based on Mr. Jinks’ recitation of a Law of the Cartoon Universe at the beginning of the picture:

Jinks: Just remember, wise guys, that mices-beatin’-up-the-cat stuff, uh, happens only in cartoons.
Pixie: He’s so right, Dixie.

And he is right. Whether Jinks knows it or not, this is a cartoon. The cartoon turns out to be about a mouse beating up a cat. The Law is proven correct.

We start with a cartoon within a cartoon, maybe for the first time in television animation history. And it’s stick-figure style animation, like Tex Avery pulled off in Porky’s Preview when the pig unveiled his animated masterpiece for an audience within a cartoon. As you can see in this frame, the limited, black-and-white television drawings still obey the squash-and-stretch principle of theatrical animation.

Jinks doesn’t take kindly to the meece laughing at the cartoon cat’s fate, and decides to chase them (past the same light socket four times) into their hole, first engaging in a foot spin-cycle in mid-air made up of, well, limited “black-and-white” television drawings (were any stations broadcasting in colour when this originally aired?). We get more of Monte’s speckled painting here, this time on the couch where Pixie and Dixie were watching the cartoon. And we get one of those scare-take cycles made up of two drawings (see this thread).

After the dialogue above, a telegram arrives, which Dixie unnecessarily reads for us. It is at this point, we learn that Pixie and Dixie are somehow related, as Dixie asks “Have we got a cousin in Texas?” At least that explains why they are able to share the same bed in some cartoons without people saying, you know, they’re ‘the Snagglepuss way.’ It doesn’t explain why they have different accents, but maybe that’s in some other cartoon lawbook.

The sausage-shaped Tex then makes his entrance. Look at Dixie’s expression here. This zips by so fast you can’t see it on the screen. But Carlo tossed it in anyway. Think that would happen in a Pebbles and Bamm Bamm cartoon? Nah, they wouldn’t “waste” drawings. Thanks, Carlo.

Daws Butler picked a really interesting voice for Tex. Most cartoon Texans seem to be descended from Yosemite Sam, where the voice is REAL LOUD. Think of Hal Smith as Uncle Tex on The Flintstones, or Mel Blanc as the millionaire in the Bugs cartoon The Oily Hare. But Daws doesn’t yell here. He’s got a deeper, resonant read. And he doesn’t go overboard with a comedy drawl. It’s a pretty natural-sounding voice.

Tex is “plomb hongry” so he heads to the fridge for some grub. Here he meets up with Jinks who, for reasons unknown, has spilled the quart of milk and uses the bottle as a step. The rest of the cartoon is a Carlo Vinci showcase. Jinks decides to remove Tex from the premises in a great little walk cycle, where the cat’s butt goes up and down. The elongated mouse calls him “a mangy varmint.” Now the fun begins.



Jinks spends most of the rest of the cartoon being treated like a bronco by Tex. There’s a colour wheel blur of Tex and Jinks (not to be confused with radio’s Tex and Jinx, though they might have had a similar fight or two before their divorce) which ends with Jinks sliding. The drawings are later reversed and the whole bit is used again to save animation.



Here’s another one of those scare-take cycles. These two drawings are alternated several times to simulate full animation.



Carlo combines both savers here. Not only does the Jinks gallop consist of two alternated drawings (this is only one of them), the animation is reversed and reused later. Pixie and Dixie, who do little the rest of the cartoon, cheer on Tex, with Tex’s voice coming out of Dixie by mistake.

This may be my favourite bit in the whole cartoon, when Tex announces he’s going to brand Jinks and the cat tries to escape. It appears to be the work of Mike Lah, who did uncredited bits and pieces in some of the very first cartoons on the Huck show. I like the look of Jinks’ tail here. The sound editor used a great little clack noise as Jinks vamooses on his toes. I guess the editor used some kind of woodblock.

Jinks tries capturing Tex by putting a box over him (how’d he get his feet untied?). But Tex uses his branding iron to burn his way through after Jinks remarks, in the best line of the cartoon, “It smells like, you know, somebody’s roastin’ a overcoat.” Only Daws would mis-use the article “an” to enhance the dialogue. The off-kilter ears are a nice touch.

Back to Carlo’s animation now. Finally, Jinks decides to call his own Texas relative. Here’s a great little bit of animation. When Jinks is on the phone to Cousin Pecos, he grows when he yells “Come a-runnin’!” then shrinks back to his regular size.



The end gag could be handled better. Turns out Jinks’ Texas relative isn’t so big and bad. The gag is captured in this drawing—but then the cartoon keeps going with an unfunny explanation. If Mike Maltese were writing this one, we’d get some silly monologue, instead of Pecos repeating over and over he’s sick. Look how low Jinks’ crotch is here. Doesn’t this look like it could be a design in a Terrytoon?

This was the first Pixie and Dixie cartoon to air, though it was the fifth put into production. Now that Hanna and Barbera had started a studio, they got into the character marketing business, knowing that’s where the big money was. The stars got the big push but ancillary characters were used when necessary. Tex was one of them; perhaps Joe and Bill felt he was amongst the strongest of them. Tex appeared on children’s playing cards (I had a set as a kid) and other items which needed a family of characters. But as Hanna-Barbera developed Quick Draw McGraw, then the Yogi Bear show stable, then hit paydirt with The Flintstones, the old ancillary characters disappeared. Because that’s the Law of the Economic Universe.

The soundtrack features a rare appearance by Bill Loose and John Seely’s “Rural” (registered at BMI as "Rural Stage") as the Knockout Mouse theme. We’re also treated to the whole version of Jack Shaindlin’s “Grotesque No. 2.” It runs 2:38, which is a little longer than most of the stock music beds found in these cartoons.

0:00 – Pixie and Dixie vocal opening theme (Hanna-Barbera-Curtin-Shows).
0:26 – TC 42 RURAL STAGE (Loose-Seely) - Mice watch Knockout Mouse.
0:51 – L 81 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Spencer Moore) - Jinks appears from hiding.
0:57 – LAF-20-5 TOBOGGAN RUN (Shaindlin) - Jinks chases mice into hole.
1:31 – LAF-25-3 bassoon and zig-zag strings bed (Shaindlin) - Dixie reads telegram; Tex arrives, walks into living room.
2:54 – TC 303 ZANY COMEDY (Loose-Seely) - Jinks talks to Tex in fridge, takes him outside.
3:55 – LAF-2-12 ON THE RUN (Shaindlin) - Tex rides Jinks.
4:55 – LAF-10-7 GROTESQUE No 2 (Shaindlin) - Jinks branded, calls Cousin Pecos, "I've been sick" Pecos arrives.
7:10 – Pixie and Dixie closing theme (Curtin).

Some Notes About Ken Muse

When Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna got their studio rolling, and started their first major effort with the half-hour Huckleberry Hound Show, they relied on three main animators to handle the bulk of the work. Ken Muse and Lew Marshall had come with them from M-G-M while Carlo Vinci was imported from Terrytoons, where he had worked with Barbera a little over 20 years earlier.

(Yes, I realise Ruff and Reddy was H-B’s first television project, but I’ve never really considered it a “major” effort).

The internet may not be the best source of information, because anyone can post anything, but I’ll cobble together some of the stuff I’ve read here and there about Mr. Muse. If any of it is incorrect, please weigh in with the facts.

First, we can turn our attention to Ken’s obit. The Associated Press actually did a little story on him, which appeared in papers of July 29 and 30, 1987.

KENNETH L. MUSE, FILM ANIMATOR
TEMPLETON, CA.—Kenneth L. Muse, a Hollywood animator who drew Mickey Mouse for Walt Disney, Tom and Jerry for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the Flintstones for Hanna-Barbera, has died. He was 75.
Muse, who had lived in this San Luis Obispo County town since March, died Sunday, said Jay Sarbry, an animator at Hanna-Barbera.
“Walt (Disney) really liked him. He liked anyone who drew Mickey,” said Sarbry, who worked with Muse in drawing Mickey Mouse at Walt Disney Studios. Muse was paid $22 a week to draw Disney's most famous character, said his granddaughter, Deborah Delcoure.
Muse later moved to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where he worked on the movie “Anchors Aweigh,” starring Gene Kelly. In one extraordinary scene, the 1945 film combined live action and animation as Kelly danced with a cartoon mouse drawn by Muse.
When William Hanna and Joseph Barbera left to form Hanna-Barbera Productions in 1959, Muse went with them. At Hanna-Barbera, Muse worked on a variety of characters, including the Flintstones, the Jetsons, Scooby Doo, Yogi Bear and numerous others.

The respected Mark Mayerson, in Apatoons No. 44, discloses here that Muse worked under the wonderful Preston Blair on “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice;” both later ended up at M.G.M. A discussion on the Toonzone site awhile back states that Muse left Disney in January 1941, but he is first creditted at Metro on “Fine Feathered Friend” which was released on October 10, 1942. One would think he therefore worked uncredited for a bit, or the 1941 date is incorrect. As for his Disney work, Thad Komorowski’s blog mentions a couple of Mickey scenes by Muse identified by David Gerstein.

As for Muse’s work in the Hanna-Barbera unit at M-G-M, I’m not one of those people who can wax on about who did what scene in which cartoon, but Mark Kausler, in a Film Comment piece from 1975, is quoted in Mike Barrier’s Hollywood Cartoons describing a scene from Tom and Jerry’s “Tee For Two” where Muse did a scene of Tom with angry bees in his mouth (anyone who has seen this cartoon will surely remember it).

Muse worked at M-G-M until the cartoon studio closed, including on the unentertaining final cartoon “Tot Watchers.” Then came his work at Hanna-Barbera on Huck, Yogi, and the Flintstones. Various web sites insist one animator did each H-B cartoon in the early days, though Mike Lah would jump in and do a scene or two on someone else’s cartoon. Still, the ASIFA Hollywood site reveals Muse did the entire Flintstone episode “The Swimming Pool,” which first aired on October 15, 1960.

C.D. over at the Big Cartoon Database Forum very aptly describes Muse’s work in the early H-B cartoons as “basic straightforward animation, nothing fancy....when the mouth moves, you see one set of top teeth (like one long tooth) and tongue shows a slit in the middle.” Here’s Muse depicting Mr. Jinks in “Pistol Packin’ Pirate” (at the top of this post is a Muse frame from “Huckleberry Hound Meets Wee Willie”).

Alas, like many fine animators of the Golden Age of Animation, he was stuck working on television dreck, like innumerable Scooby spin-offs, The Smurfs, and The Trollkins. Not all his time was at Hanna-Barbera; he jumped to Depatie-Freleng in the early ‘70s on Roland and Ratfink and Hoot Kloot cartoons, and something abyssmal-looking and inexcuseably talent-wasting called Bailey’s Comets.

Muse had a hearing problem. And you can see Muse in this photo with a hearing aid.

The most bizarre claim about Muse I’ve read is in a Washington Post story from 2006; it’s a re-quote from a Rolling Stone article about Muse’s step-daughter, Judee Sill, singer, battler of personal demons and ultimately suicidal:

Sill hated Muse from the start: She called him “mean, dumb, narrow-minded -- he used to beat dogs.”

I’m presuming she’s not referring to Spike or Doggie Daddy on screen.

Muse is not to be confused with newspaper cartoonist Ken Muse, who worked at the Jam Handy studio in Detroit for a time, and had a strip syndicated through McNaught in the 1960s called Way Out. His name was Kenneth Howard Muse, born in Detroit on April 28, 1925 (late note: he died on June 19, 2010).

Kenneth Lee Muse was born in North Carolina July 26, 1912 and died on July 26, 1987.

Cousin Tex Scare Take

I’ve realised after putting this up that the endless frame flashing will just annoy people. So I think I’m going to take it down after a little while. Or you can just scroll past it if it starts to bother you. Or hit the ‘stop’ button on your browser, if your browser has one. It’s being posted as a little demonstration.

The earliest Hucks, Yogis and Meeces saved animation by using cycles, and they especially did this when characters registered fear. Instead of full animating a fear-struck character by drawing body parts going everywhere (and with great extremes like Tex Avery would do), the H-B artists took two “scared” drawings, and then alternated them for a couple of seconds in a little cycle. It’s cheap animation and, hey, they’re moving in fear, right?

Here’s an early example from the first Pixie and Dixie cartoon to be released, Cousin Tex, animated by Carlo Vinci. The same type of take is used on Jinks later in the short, but this comes right at the beginning when the cat (to the strains of Spencer Moore’s immortal L-81 Comedy Underscore) suddenly appears behind this Ed Benedict-designed couch to surprise the TV-watching mice. It’s been slowed down a bit to let you see the drawings.



It’s proof-positive you can make your own Hanna-Barbara cartoon, with a little help from some animated .gif software.