Pixie and Dixie — Puppet Pals

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Lew Marshall; Layout – Mike Lah; Backgrounds – Fernando Montealegre; Dialogue and Story Sketches – Charlie Shows and Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Cast: Pixie – Don Messick; Jinks, Dixie, Dog – Daws Butler.
Production E-26; Huckleberry Hound Show K-016.
First aired: week of Monday, January 12, 1959.
Plot: Jinks and a bulldog team up against Pixie and Dixie, who use a Jinks puppet to try to break them up. The plot is discovered and the dog and cat turn the mice into puppets.

Fans of Mr. Jinks will be happy to know he actually defeats the meece in this one, but the win is pretty unsatisfying because Jinks does it by—seeing a string?!

Yes, that’s how the plot turns around in this, and there’s not an awful lot of fun in getting there. Jinks just sees the string. There’s no syllable bending by Daws Butler nor a lot of violent action with interesting poses before-hand. In fact, the cartoon isn’t really centred around Jinks at all. It’s centred around the bulldog and writer Charlie Shows’ big joke is the dog is so dumb, he mistakes a stuffed marionette for a real cat. There’s no set up, like you’d see unfold when Hubie and Bertie played tricks on Claude Cat in the Warners shorts. We’re just supposed to accept the fact the dog is dumb. Combine that with lacklustre extremes and more running than a roomful of tourists who drank the water in Mexico, and it doesn’t add up to a great cartoon.

The cartoon opens with Pixie and Dixie waking up (the alarm clock on a spool is an imaginative touch) and then engaging in their first order of business—to goad Jinks into chasing them. We get a really odd cut here. We go from Jinks facing the meece with his eyes open and mouth closed to a close-up of Jinks facing the camera with his eyes closed and his mouth open. The change back to the medium shot is just as jarring.



Each of the animators seems to have found a different way for the characters to run. You’ll notice in this sequence, whoever it is (I suspect Lah actually animated most of this cartoon) outlines the legs and feet and then uses motion lines and puts a cycle of this on separate cells. Why he did it with Jinks’ tail, I don’t know.



The characters run outside and Jinks slides into the mice and a conveniently-placed snoozing bulldog. We get the old pull-the-eyelids-open bit and the dog sees the cat. There’s no real take here, just a bunch of jagged teeth. You can see how Jinks’ retreat is handled—smears and lots of motion lines and swirls.




Jinks temporarily dispatches the dog into the basement through a window in a nicely-timed bit but the chase is on again. You’ll notice we can see the legs this time.

Suddenly—why he just thought of it now is unclear—Jinks turns around and stops the dog with the palms of his hand and tells bow-bow to “play it cool.” The cat then convinces the dog to join with him in ganging up on the meeces because “two heads is better than none.” This sure looks like Mike Lah’s work here; Lah’s stuff just looks cruder, though I kind of like Jinks’ tail as they decide to get the mice.



We get a little Charlie Shows rhyme “It looks like we got ‘em on the run, son.” Pixie and Dixie then decide to break up “the beauuutiful friendship” by creating a puppet of Jinks. The mice then stroll to a tree near where the dog is sleeping (there must have been stairs inside the hollow trunk), station themselves on a branch and lower the puppet. The portion from the cycle of the snoozing dog to the end of the puppet cell being slid over the background takes 14 seconds of screen time.

The puppet is made to pound the dog on the head. Interestingly, the head of the puppet moves even though there’s no string attached. The dog thinks it’s the cat and we get an off-screen bashing of Jinks, with the sound-cutter cleverly using Big Ben-type chimes as the camera shakes. The same sort of chimes-over-violence sound gag was later part of the audio repertoire on The Flintstones. We see the after-effect as Jinks tells the audience you can’t trust a dog. It’s too bad Jinks’ pose isn’t stronger.



The puppet gets lowered again and we get repeat animation of the hand-thumping. The dog says “I’ll tear you apart!” So he does. The mice pull up the puppet, the real Jinks shows up and the dog is amazed the cat has three arms. That’s when the two catch on to the fact a string is tied to the fake arm and lead to the mice in the tree. Yeah. That’s the climax of the cartoon.



The end joke is cat and the dog playing puppeteers, with Jinks borrowing the old line “They’re daaancin’! They’re daaancin’!” as the mice look disgustedly at the camera before the scene fades out. Yeah, that’s the big finish.




Variations on the “Look/I’m dancin’” line popped up in cartoons, one of them being Tom and Jerry’s Baby Puss (1943). But Hanna and Barbera stole it from Warner’s; Tex Avery’s influence at MGM maybe? Avery put it in the mouth of a gleeful penguin in Penguin Parade (1938)—Bugs Bunny used it later in A Hare Grows in Manhattan (1947). But it originated from a scene about two-thirds of the way through the Warner Bros. film Dead End (1937) with Humphrey Bogart.

Jack Shaindlin’s music from the Langlois library was the big choice in this cartoon, including Toboggan Run. The cutter (Greg Watson?) decided to go with several cuts more than once. And we get three snippets of Bill Loose and John Seely’s Zany Comedy, the music with the tippy-toe xylophone and laughing clarinets.

0:00 - Pixie and Dixie sub-title theme (Hanna-Barbera-Curtin)
0:26 - LAF-10-7 (Shaindlin) - Mice wake up, toss milk dish into Jinks' face.
1:30 - LAF-2-12 ON THE RUN (Shaindlin) - Jinks chases Pixie and Dixie, skids to a stop.
1:49 - TC 303 ZANY COMEDY (Loose-Seely) - Pixie and Dixie open dog's eyes.
1:54 - LAF-5-20 TOBOGGAN RUN (Shaindlin) - Dog chases Jinks.
3:03 - TC 303 ZANY COMEDY (Loose-Seely) - Jinks and dog agree to deal, chase mice into basement.
3:43 - LAF-10-7 GROTESQUE No 2 (Shaindlin) - Dixie gets fiendish idea.
3:54 - LAF-4-6 PIXIE PRANKS (Shaindlin) - Mice create puppet.
4:34 - LAF-10-7 GROTESQUE No 2 (Shaindlin) - Puppet lowered, bashes dog, dog bashes Jinks.
5:35 - LAF-4-6 PIXIE PRANKS (Shaindlin) - Puppet bashes dog, dog rips off arm.
6:33 - TC 300 ECCENTRIC COMEDY (Loose-Seely) - Jinks and dog spot mice.
6:55 - TC 303 ZANY COMEDY (Loose-Seely) - Jinks and dog turn mice into puppets.
7:10 - Pixie and Dixie end title theme (Curtin).

How Ruff and Reddy Started It All

Ruff and Reddy may have been the cartoon that started the Hanna-Barbera empire but I never watched it as a child and still can’t get into it now almost 50 years later.

The problem for me as a child was the show was aimed at children.

My favourite cartoons were from Warner Bros. where the characters did and said funny or silly things. So did Quick Draw McGraw and Mr. Jinks. And if it’s the one thing that’s consistent in contemporary newspaper stories about Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and Quick Draw after their TV debut is the revelation—with some surprise, it seems—that adults were tuning in to those now-beloved cartoons.

You don’t read the same sort of thing back then about Ruff and Reddy. It’s because the cartoons were designed for, and broadcast on, children’s programming, while Yogi outwitted Ranger Smith in the pre-prime time hours of early evenings when dad could sneak a peak.

In fact, there wasn’t an awful lot written about Ruff and Reddy before or after it came on. The longest feature article was by syndicated writer Stephen H. Scheuer which I’ve spotted in several newspapers over the course of 1958 after the show had made its debut (on December 14, 1957). This is the earliest interview I can find of Joe and Bill about their TV cartoon studio. It’s interesting in light of where the studio was going.

Ruff ‘N Reddy Cartoons Are Custom-Made For TV
THE KIDS MAY not know it when they’re watching Ruff ‘N Reddy, the cat and dog cartoon series on Saturday mornings, but they’re looking at new cartoons made especially for TV, not old theatrical shorts already run thousands of times.
If Ruff ‘N Reddy capture the kiddies’ hearts, it will give hope to the deflated cartoon industry in Hollywood. Due to sky-rocketing costs and low rental rates grudgingly squeezed from exhibitors, the famed theatrical shorts of Disney and MGM’s Tom and Jerry are no more. Only UPA, Warner’s and Walter Lantz struggle to survive with film shorts.
Won 7 Awards
Ruff, the cat, and Reddy, the dog, are the brain children of mouse and cat creators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, who won seven Academy Awards for their Tom and Jerry shorts at MGM.
Facing the bleak future of theatrical shorts, Hanna and Barbera left MGM, taking half their crew with them and, with the help of movie director George Sidney, lined up capital, formed a company and quickly sold the Ruff ‘N Reddy idea for a TV series.
The TV market, glutted with old cartoons on tire and meat rationing and mentions of Hitler, seemed like it could use up-to-date cartoons and new techniques. Hanna and Barbera, though faced with making as many cartoons in one year for TV as they had in 10 for MGM at about one-fifth the cost. To do this meant stream-lining and eliminating the costly slow processes.
Cut Drawings
The two men first reduced the total number of drawings from 10,000 to 1,500 and still came up with a sufficient amount of motion. Next, time-consuming color tests and other tests were cut out. The experienced crew, many of whom have worked with Hanna and Barbera for more than 20 years, were to be their own judges. When the bosses see the cartoon it is finished.
“If we start making mistakes we’re in trouble,” said Hanna, because retakes are too expensive for TV.”
So far the results have been almost perfect. “We’ve left out an arm once in a frame and a couple of times we may have shot the wrong background,” said Barbera, “but on the whole, technically the shows are OK. I think the series is funnier and better than the Tom and Jerry film shorts. The people who work with us think so, too. We can survive on TV and do it well.”
Ruff ‘N Reddy cartoons run from four to six minutes in serial form with cliff hanger endings so kids will keep wondering during the week what the outcomes will be. Hanna and Barbera knock out a story about Africa in a helicopter, underwater adventure in submarines with such characters as Capt. Greedy, Salt Water Daffy and Prof. Gismo, an absent-minded genius who took Ruff and Reddy to the planet Muni-Mula (spell it backwards) last fall. Titles for episodes run to “Whirlybird Catches the Worm,” “Heels on Wheels.”
10-Year Option
NBC has a 10-year option on Ruff ‘N Reddy and evidently plans to continue running the show on Saturday morning. Of course, Hanna and Barbera would like an early evening spot to catch the adults, too, but they’re too busy turning out the cartoons to have any time to sit back and dream about ideal time spots.
Highly admired among cartoonists for their savvy and industry, Hanna and Barbera are taking all the risks in crashing a new industry and, if they make it, the cartoon industry has a new chance for survival.

There was a time when there was a big connection between cartoons and children’s records. Joe and Bill knew a potential money-maker for them when they saw it (or heard it) and jumped on board. Hanna-Barbera eventually had its own record label, but originally released material through Golden and Colpix Records. It took the voice track of some of its cartoons, added some sound effects, an organ, and had an instant children’s record (alas, no Hi-Q library music; that was licensed for TV use only). Ruff and Reddy’s first cartoon was repackaged in 1959 as “Adventures in Space” (Colpix 201). Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy to let you hear it (if someone has the .zip file of this that was on the web, let me know).

Other records featured re-worked versions of the cartoon’s themes with additional lyrics. You can listen to this kinda lame version of the Ruff and Reddy theme on a 1959 Golden Record 78 (R558). It was by Gil Mack with the Sandpipers, who aren’t the same ones that had the latin folk-tinged Guantanamera (“1966 solid gold!” screeched I in my disc jockey years).

It’s billed with an unknown song about Professor Gizmo, who appeared on at least one of the Ruff and Reddy story arcs. Unfortunately, Don Messick wasn’t hired to voice his own character on this record; it was entrusted to Mack. He’s no Don Messick. You can listen to it HERE.

These both appeared on a Golden Records LP (51) of Hanna-Barbera themes and character songs that range from mildly interesting to excruciatingly bad. I’ll get it up when I have a chance.

Yogi Bear — Big Brave Bear

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Carlo Vinci; Layouts – Dick Bickenbach; Backgrounds – Fernando Montealegre; Dialogue and Story Sketches – Charlie Shows and Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Cast: Yogi, Mac – Daws Butler; radio voice, Jack, ranger – Don Messick.
Production E-11, Huckleberry Hound Show K-006.
First aired: November 3, 1958.
Plot: Bank robbers hide out in Yogi’s cave. Yogi inadvertently captures them with the help of the aptly-named geyser, Old Dependable.

Any early H-B fan who has seen this cartoon is going to look at the credits that are posted and say “Lew Marshall?!” Because this short has Carlo Vinci written all over it.

No place is it more obvious than in the stomping-run/flying exit cycle that Carlo used on a whole bunch of characters in the first season of The Huckleberry Hound Show. It’s found several times here; in fact, it looks like an animation-saving device because it’s used over again.

Here it is when Boo-Boo realises Yogi is being held captive by crooks (you can click on a picture to enlarge it).



Boo-Boo breaks the news to a ranger, who does the same thing.


Boo-Boo follows in a re-used bit of animation and later in the cartoon, the two of them do it together.


So either Vinci animated part of the cartoon, Marshall copied his style, or the credit is wrong and Marshall wasn’t involved. It’s hard to tell because in some places, the animation is almost non existent.

We open with a shot of the Jellystone Park entrance followed by a right pan over the peaceful strains of Geordie Hormel to Yogi and Boo-Boo lazing around. Yogi is bored. The animator must have been, too, as the characters are practically stationary, other than some mouth movements. Yogi complains “Nothin’ ever happens around here.”


But that changes quickly. The scene dissolves to a car with no doors on a foreground cell, while the moving background cell does all the work. It cuts to the car interior—uh, aren’t those two right hands in the picture?—where a police radio (in a regular car?) warns bank robbers are on the loose. The bank robbers are the ones listening. After more footage of the car on top of a moving background (though the wheels are in an animation cycle now), the crooks decide to hide out in Jellystone. Specifically in Yogi’s cave.


This is a clue that the cartoon is in the early days of Yogi’s career when each and every character trait hadn’t been codified and used repetitively. It’s not Yogi vs. Ranger Smith. It’s Yogi vs. bank robbers. Another clues is in the next scene when Jack the Crook chows down on a bowl of berries. Berries?! Why would Yogi eat those? You’ll notice the raised pinky, showing Jack is a robber of quality. Incidentally, the crooked fingers are a Vinci trademark.

Another clue is Yogi and Boo-Boo don’t live together. Boo-Boo bids farewell as the bored Yogi goes into his cave for a nap. Writer Charlie Shows pulls out a Three Bears reference when Yogi remarks that someone has been eating his goodies, someone has been sitting in his chair, and someone is sleeping in his bed (which is more makeshift than in most cartoons). He yells it loud enough for Mac to get out of it, but the crook’s gun does the talking. Shows then pulls out one of his little rhymes based on the word ‘bed’ as Mac growls “You’re going to get it. Right in the head. And you’ll be dead, Fred.”

In the next scene, Mac forces Yogi to pose for Jack’s tourist-type pictures and this gives Shows a chance to get in one of those ass-violence jokes he loved so much. This touching sequence is interrupted by the ranger with Ranger Smith’s voice but has a buzzcut (he appeared in The Buzzin’ Bruin, drawn by Vinci). The ranger warns Yogi to be on the lookout for bank robbers.

Boo-Boo then shows up in a nodding-head, loping walk, asks the robbers if Yogi can come out and play. The robbers tell him “no,” Boo-Boo lopes out of the cave, then realises what’s going on, in a two-cell, throbbing-eye take. That brings about the stomping-run cycles mentioned already.

The crooks decide to make their escape by getting in the car and forcing Yogi at gunpoint to drive. Ranger Buzzcut calls the police who set up a roadblock, represented by a background cell where four seconds of a camera moving in and out substitutes for animation. During this time, we get the old ‘responding radio’ gag. The radio dispatcher says “Shoot to kill!” Yogi asks, “Me, too?” and radio responds, “Yes. You, too.”


Mac orders Yogi to turn around the car. But that uses up unnecessary animation. So the bear simply puts the car in reverse, and the background now slides left to right behind the car on a foreground cell. But he backs onto the top of Old Dependable Geyser, which fortunately erupts, sending the car into the sky. Yogi bails and the robbers, not wishing to do the follow the obvious lead and thus screw up the plot, are captured.

The final scene jumps to Yogi reading the newspaper headlines about how he captured the bandits. Mischievous Boo-Boo busts a paper-bag balloon, which scares the “hero” Yogi to the top of a Douglas fir. Yogi ends the cartoon by borrowing a line from Joe Penner: “Don’t ever doooo that!” which is apparently the best dialogue Shows could come up with as the strings of Geordie Hormel’s pick-up orchestra quietly fade out for a cute but not exactly a socko ending.

Hormel’s music takes up the beginning and end of the cartoon, but we get to hear one of Jack Shaindlin’s atypical pieces from the 1950s and a couple of cuts by Bill Loose and John Seely. There are a few places where there’s no music.

0:00 - Yogi sub title main theme (Hanna-Barbera-Curtin).
0:26 - ZR-51 LIGHT ANIMATION (Hormel) – Yogi is bored, shot of robbers’ car.
0:58 - ZR-49 LIGHT EERIE (Hormel) – Robbers listen to radio, hide-out in Yogi’s cave.
2:37 - TC-300 ZANY COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Yogi goes into cave, poses for camera.
4:08 - LAF-4-6 PIXIE PRANKS (Shaindlin) – Ranger calls for Yogi, Boo-Boo gets ranger.
5:18 - TC-217A CHASE MEDIUM (Loose-Seely) – Yogi and crooks drive out, drive onto geyser.
6:44 - ZR-48 FAST MOVEMENT (Hormel) – Car stuck up on waterspout, Yogi reads paper, scared by Boo-Boo.
7:10 - Yogi sub title end theme (Curtin).

Big Brave Bear Two-Cell Animation

Here are a couple of animated gifs to simulate the two-cell takes I mention in the cartoon.

First, here's Boo-Boo's reaction when he realises Yogi is being held at gunpoint:



Now, here's Boo-Boo getting ready to run away to see the ranger:



And here's the ranger getting ready to run away (note the hands):



I’ve slowed them down so you can have a better look at them. This is the work of Carlo Vinci. He animates the same kind of drawing pairs in many of his earliest Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

Tralfaz. Yeccchh!

Many mysteries grip the world of Hanna-Barbera cartoons, ones the Scooby-Doo gang in the Mystery Machine could never solve (like why some people enjoy Scooby-Doo cartoons). But none are more baffling as the origin of the word “Tralfaz”.

Those who have a love for the word remember it from the Jetsons. It surfaced on one episode, Millionaire Astro, which first aired January 6, 1963 (and forever after in reruns). Astro was originally owned by the fabulously wealthy J.P. Gottrockets, who called him Tralfaz. The plot sees a Jury-Vac award the dog to Gottrockets, who finally decides to return him to his adopted family which divests him of the unwanted moniker for good (Astro spends the cartoon going “Tralfaz. Yeccchh!”).

The episode was written by Tony Benedict, who I don’t ever think has commented on where he got the name. But cartoon watchers have heard it before. In fact, Benedict likely heard it only a few months earlier.

Fish and Slips was released by Warner Bros. on March 10, 1962, which opens Sylvester and son watching TV and Mel Blanc intoning “A record-breaking, sharp-nose tralfaz was caught by Mr. Treg Brown.” It was written by Dave Detiege. But before that, Sylvester and “Tralfaz” tangled again in the form of a sign outside a run-down mansion in The Slop-Happy Mouse, written by Tedd Pierce and released on September 1, 1956.


But before that, “Tralfaz” appears as the name of part of a secret weapon that Private Snafu tells his girl-friend about in the Warners-made short Going Home (1945). The cartoon was never released—something about a war ending was the reason—but an animation drawing of it can be found in Chuck Jones’ book Chuck Redux.

But before that...

Warners cartoons were known for grabbing all kinds of catch-phrases and personalities from network radio, far too many to even begin to mention here. One show they seem to have left alone was Burns and Allen. Maybe it’s because George Burns and Gracie Allen didn’t have catch-phrases (other than “Say goodnight, Gracie”), and their show changed formats several times. They adopted the format they later used on TV—George suffering through the illogical logic of his wife—after Burns decided a format with the two of them as single people just wasn’t working. That was despite the presence of Artie Shaw and his orchestra.

This incarnation of the show, on September 9, 1940, opens with the following dialogue with announcer Bud Hiestand (who, incidentally, was later the announcer on the Mel Blanc Show):

George: Am I happy tonight.
Bud: Well, you should be, George, winning that $200,000 breach of contract suit against Elsie Tralafaz.

And later:

George (to Gracie): Well, I’m going down to write out that check for $25 for court expenses which will clear up that Elsie Tralafaz case once and for all.

So what was all this about?

There were several consecutive episodes of the show beginning on August 19th where George meets a bimbo named Elsie Tralafaz at the beach and, fed up with Gracie, offers to make her his new radio partner. The following week (August 26), Elsie decides to sue George for reneging on the offer, then the following week (September 2), a judge dismisses the case. That brings us to the September 9 broadcast, after which the character disappeared for good. You can hear the broadcast here and have to cue in to about the four-minute mark for the first bit of dialogue.

I realise there’s an extra ‘a’ in the character’s name, but if you say the word fast enough, it sounds like “Tralfaz;” it did when I first heard the show and that prompted this post. It could very well be Tedd Pierce (who was writing for Jones when he was making the Snafu shorts) heard the shows and remembered (or misremembered) the funny name and pulled it out when he needed one.

Then, again, it could all be coincidence. But if someone has the definitive explanation, they can let me know.

There’s another little connection between “Tralfaz” and Hanna-Barbera, if you want to stretch things a bit. The Burns and Allen Show at the time all this happened was sponsored by Hormel. And Geordie Hormel (heir to the Spam fortune) wrote some of the background music picked up by the Capitol Hi-Q library which was used in the Hanna-Barbera cartoons.