Happy Birthday, Hanna-Barbera

Today marks the 52nd anniversary of the airing of Hanna-Barbera’s first series for TV. Joe and Bill basically expropriated the Crusader Rabbit format of an adventure serial and came up with dog-and-cat friends Ruff and Reddy. The drawing you see to the right is by Bick Bickenbach and found on the Animation Guild’s website where they have a little piece about the cat and dog here.

Robert L. Skolsky’s syndicated column “Looking and Listening” of November 18, 1957 revealed the show had been purchased by NBC about five weeks before it aired:

NIKITA KHRUSCHEV and his Iron Curtain playmates are not the only ones capable of sending dogs into outer space.
As a matter of fact, the National Broadcasting Co. is going the Russians one better. NBC is preparing to send up a dog and cat.
Not only that, they will have a definite destination in mind and will not merely circle about the earth.
Of course, NBC plans to do it the easy way — via animated cartoons. The network's two traveling animals are called Ruff and Reddy and they are getting ready to go to work every Saturday morning.
The series will be produced by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, creators of the famous “Tom and Jerry” movie cartoons. In their first episode Ruff and Reddy will go to the aluminum planet of “Muni-Mula.”
NBC is still debating whether to assign another animated character or a human host to the show. Ruff and Reddy may even get the job themselves.

The network apparently decided, maybe due to a lack of time, a human host would be best. For more on that, click on the TV Party web site. It has more on the Ruff and Reddy show than I’d even care to know about, though the character drawings on the site are interesting.

I’ve never warmed at all to Ruff and Reddy. Maybe it’s because it’s not a comedy format; it’s an adventure format with uninteresting animation and characters. Or maybe it’s because the show was designed for children, whereas Huck and the later cartoons were written like the theatricals, with not just kids in mind.

Just what were Saturday mornings like then? Those of us in the ‘60s knew it as a smorgasbord of animation with several channels to pick from. But that happened as a result of Hanna-Barbera’s huge success, which was a few years after the debut of Ruff and Reddy. The TV listings for the station in Zanesville, Ohio, announcing the cartoon’s birth give us an idea:

TWO AND one half wonderful hours of programs just for kids . . . that's what the youngsters find on Channel 18 Saturday mornings beginning at 9:30 with “Captain Kangaroo.”
At 10 it’s a visit to the famous community of Doodyville where Buffalo Bob and freckle-faced Howdy Doody have lots of fun. Then starting this coming Saturday at 10:30, there’s a brand new program — a top cartoon series, called “The Ruff and Reddy Show” — about a cat named Ruff, and a dog named Reddy.
After that, at 11 o’clock, it’s the fabulous “Susan’s Show” followed at 11:30 by “Andy's Gang,” starring that lovable comic, Andy Devine. It’ll be a new time for “Andy's Gang” this Saturday, but Midnight the Cat, Froggy the Gremlin and Squeekie the Hamster are as amusing as ever.



Ruff and Reddy were merchandised as much as the other H-B characters. Above left you see a Give-a-Show movie projector (my brother had one; it was a poor substitute for real cartoons), and above right, is a game with Pinky, Professor Gizmo, some mouse and Crossbones Jones’ parrot holding what looks like Piglet’s head. Judging by the calligraphy of ‘Hanna-Barbera’ on the box, the game is from 1961. There were, of course, records on Colpix starting in 1959, Dell Comics and Little Golden Books drawn by Harvey Eisenberg. But they were durable; to the right you see the cover of a video game from 1990, based on the space-travel premise of their first cartoon, “Planet Pirates.” Below, you see a muddy screen grab from the cartoon’s initial shot.

Like the Huck and Quick Draw shows, Ruff and Reddy cavorted to the melodies of the Capitol Hi-Q library. The very first cue used was TC-304 Fox Trot by Bill Loose and John Seely, a happy little tune which was never used in the Huck series for reasons I don’t understand. The other one that appeared in the first cartoon was L-1203 Heavy Eerie Echo by Spencer Moore, who has credit for all the spacey cues on reel D-24, a number of which were used in the Muni-Mula story arc.

Pixie and Dixie — Mouse-Nappers

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Ken Muse; Layout – Dick Bickenbach; Backgrounds – Bob Gentle; Dialogue and Story Sketches – Charlie Shows and Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Cast: Pixie, Shortie – Don Messick; Jinks, Dixie – Daws Butler.
Production E-62, Huckleberry Hound Show K-025.
Music: Jack Shaindlin, Geordie Hormel, Bill Loose/John Seely, Spencer Moore.
First aired: week of Monday, March 16, 1959.
Plot: Mr. Jinks and Shortie, a brown cat, fight over ownership of Pixie and Dixie.

Hanna-Barbera found ingenious ways to save money on its early cartoons—walk cycles, holds, mouth movements on one cell while the rest of the character remained stationary, reused animation and so on. But the award-winner has to be this cartoon, where most of the climax takes place off-camera. We get camera shakes of a background and character cells slid up and down as Jack Shaindlin’s On the Run emphasises the pace, all substituting for action.

It’s too bad. The premise of the cartoon is good, the ending is funny enough and Daws Butler does his best with the dialogue. But there really is only one main joke, repeated over and over. Someone gets socked in the face. Tex Avery could do variations of the same thing to perfection, but here, it just gets a little tiresome waiting for something else to happen.

The cartoon gets off to an odd and inexpensive start. Jinks walks out of the house holding the two mice—but he does it to the strains of Shaindlin’s Toboggan Run, a fast song used in fast action, not a casual stroll. The music’s all wrong.

Jinks heads to the sidewalk in front of the house and gives a warning. While he announces this, there is a close-up of Pixie and Dixie, doing nothing but blinking for seven seconds. Next, we get four more seconds of blinking and moving mouths. “Oh, thank you, kind cat,” says Pixie. “You are one of the good ones,” adds Dixie, a line used an awful lot by Yogi Bear, and no doubt one the H-B accountant was saying to Muse for the more-than-usual limited animation. And what’s with the “kind cat” business? Wouldn’t Pixie address Jinks by name? Here’s where someone like Warren Foster would have built up the adjective “kind” a bit to make it silly. Mike Maltese might have substituted a ridiculous one or a non sequitur. But Charlie Shows is simply satisfied with the idea of the fear-gripped mice kissing up to Jinks as being the joke.

Jinks tells them to “...go and never darken my door again.” After some unnecessary dialogue, Pixie and Dixie run away, slide to a stop (the two mice are on a held cell while the background moves for two seconds), then realise they’re “homeless meeces.” But then they brighten up and also realise they’re “catless mices.” Their giggling is stopped by a voice that editorialises “Oh, I wouldn’t say dat.”





They look up and see a bowler-topped brown cat with Don Messick’s back-of-the-throat voice. “You was expectin’ maybe a elephant?” asks Shortie. Then we get some more of Shows’ favourite kind of dialogue—rhyming pairs of words. “Scram, Sam!” “Let’s go, Joe,” say the two mice to each other as they run off camera in cycle animation, yelling for help.

Shortie catches the meece and blows off their attempts to kiss up to him. That’s when Jinks, who heard the cries for help, demands to know why he’s “app-rap-propriating” his property. During the tête-à-tête, Shortie responds by accepting Jinks’ dare to punch him in the nose. We get a nice pose of the end result with Jinks on a stone wall.



And so the punching punch-lines carry on through the picture. In one, Jinks drops a brick on Shortie, who is wistfully relating how he never had mice growing up because his family was too poor. The violence in that one happens off camera; all we get is a shake. Before one sock, there’s a cute bit of dialogue. “Ya mind holdin’ my mices for me?” requests Shortie. Immediately, Jinks jumps in and casually answers, “Oh, sure thing.” Here are a few shots.



Finally, after a bunch of running cycles of both cats individually, we get to the big scene. Shortie has jumped into the sewer. Jinks stops with Pixie and Dixie by a manhole, which Shortie lifts up from underneath, hauls Jinks (and the mice) by the tail into the sewer. Now comes the fight scene—entirely underground. For 40 seconds, the action consists of a camera shaking, a manhole cover moving and some stationary cells of each of the cats sliding up and down, simulating going in and out of the sewer. Okay, there’s one of Jinks with his feet moving in a blur. For almost 12 more seconds, the animation is simply the heads of Pixie and Dixie going up and down watching the sliding cells of each cat go in and out of the hole. Then, for seven more seconds, we get a medium shot of the same thing. It’s probably the longest cartoon fight you never saw, but the substitution for action, coupled with Shaindlin’s stock music, Greg Watson’s sound effects and fight noises ad-libbed by Daws and Don make it seem like you’re watching something.



But that’s not all. We cut to a medium-close shot of the mice enjoying the fight (they’re looking into the hole so they can presumably see it), giving encouragement to each of the cats and calling to them to come up for advice. Shows gets in some dialogue that’s like something from Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In when Alan Sues came up from a hatch in the floor to reel off an old vaudeville bit. Dixie: “Shortie’s a sucker for a left hook.” Jinks: “Yeah. Gee, it’s a real shame I haven’t got one.” And back down the cat goes.

Unfortunately, the mice switch sides and start encouraging the other combatant and the cats finally realise they’re being had. Jinks and Shortie stop fighting and stick their heads out of the sewer hole together (that part we finally can see). Pixie and Dixie realise the jig is up and make a run for it. The cats chase after them together. In the wind-up gag on a park bench Jinks and Shortie are buddies, each with a mouse that they’ve turned into yo-yos, happily unspooling them and laughing as the cartoon fades out. Laughing at the end of a cartoon would seem to become an unbreakable rule at Hanna-Barbera not too many years later.

Shaindlin’s music dominates the soundtrack, including versions of On the Run, though we get two shots of one melody by Geordie Hormel.

0:00 - PIXIE AND DIXIE (Hanna, Barbera, Curtin, Shows) – Opening titles.
0:26 - LAF-20-5 TOBOGGAN RUN (Shaindlin) – Jinks kicked mice out of house.
1:35 - L-81 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Spencer Moore) – Shortie chases mice, Jinks punched, lands on stone wall.
2:56 - ZR-47 LIGHT MOVEMENT (Hormel) – Shortie punches again; gives sob story to the mice.
3:27 - TC 300 ECCENTRIC COMEDY (Bill Loose-John Seely) – Jinks drops brick on Shortie.
3:36 - ZR-47 LIGHT MOVEMENT (Hormel) – Jinks runs into phoney detour, Shortie punches Jinks, Jinks punches “with interest.”
4:30 - LAF-21-3 RECESS (Shaindlin) – Jinks runs away with mice, Shortie goes into sewer, grabs Jinks’ tail.
4:53 - LAF-2-12 ON THE RUN (Shaindlin) – Fight scene to “You called?”
5:53 - LAF-2-12 ON THE RUN (Shaindlin) – Fight continues until cats wise up, chase mice.
6:43 - LAF-21-3 RECESS (Shaindlin) – Buddy-buddy cats make yo-yos of mice.
7:10 - PIXIE AND DIXIE (Hanna, Barbera, Curtin, Shows) – End titles.

The Flagstones in an Infomercial

Advertising masquerading as something else is as old as, well, we’ll let you finish the cliché. In recent times, we get TV “call-in” or audience-participation half-hours that are pushing exercise equipment or spray-on ‘hair’ (is there anyone who doesn’t love Ron Popeil)? In the old days, newspapers featured “advice” columns that were really shilling for medicine, car repairs and other things. One ingenious electronics store used his ad space as kind of an ersatz TV column, and it actually contains more review than plug.

Today, we know The Flagstones as some kind of footnote in cartoon history. To avoid a lawsuit from the syndicator of the comic strip Hi and Lois (whose last name is ‘Flagston’), Bill and Joe reluctantly changed the name of their stone-age family to The Flintstones. While we know about it now, cartoon-lovers don’t seem to remember this at the time it happened. There are few contemporary references to the H-B Flagstones that I can find, but here’s one of them from the phoney TV column in the Greeley Daily Tribune of January 6, 1960. Click to enlarge.

The only other reference I can find to The Flagstones is in a blurb in the Chicago Tribune’s TV column (a real one, not an ad) of February 14, 1960:

Screen Gems has in preparation the first half-hour situation comedy series for TV produced in animation. The ABC network has purchased the series for next fall. “The Flagstones” is the title of the series, which will be prehistoric as to costumes, sets, and props, but will deal satirically with family life from a recognizable modern viewpoint. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera created the series.

I thought there were Flagstones model sheets on the web but they are actually The Gladstones model sheets by Ed Benedict instead. Here’s Wilma below. Did they ever draw Wilma from the back, or was the model made in case the character turned around?


The name must have gone from ‘Flagstones’ to ‘Gladstones’ to ‘Flintstones’ quickly. The New York Times reported in Val Adams’ Sunday TV and radio column on April 3, 1961:

CARTOONS: The American Broadcasting Company, always on the lookout for new talent, has obtained the services of a newcomer named Fred Flintstone, an animated cartoon character. Flintstone (how about Skin for a nickname?) is the head of a stone age family living in a cave. Family members, who speak contemporary language in a prehistoric setting, will be featured in a situation comedy to be televised on Fridays from 8:30 to 9 PM beginning next fall. The series, which is titled “The Flintstones,” will be produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions in association with Screen Gems, Inc. Its stories and situations are expected to serve as a parody of conventional situation comedies about family life.

Broadcasting magazine in its April 4, 1960 edition still called the show ‘Flagstones’ but in its next edition a week later, revealed:

'Flintstones' set Miles Labs, Elkhart, Ind. (Wade Adv.), and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., N.Y. (Wm. Esty), signed to co-sponsor new situation comedy series, The Flintstones, next season on ABC -TV (Fri. 8:30 -9 p.m.). Previously titled The Flagstones, animated series relates contemporary language, behavior and problems to prehistoric setting. Network purchased series from Screen Gems, tv subsidiary of Columbia Pictures.

Mercifully, ‘Gladstones’ (what were Bill and Joe on when they came up with that one?) has been assigned to the rubbish bin of animation along with the equally-misguided ‘Huckleberry Bear.’ ‘Flintstones’ is a good name and we’re all used to it now anyway. But it’s too bad a silly letter from King Features (Hi and Lois co-creator Mort Walker revealed it in his book) put an end to ‘Flagstones’ because I like it too. So thus I pay a little tribute to it in this post.

Augie Doggie — Good Mouse Keeping

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Animation – George Nicholas, Layout - ?, Backgrounds – Fernando Montealegre, Story – Mike Maltese, Story Sketches – Dan Gordon, Titles – Art Goble, Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Cast: Doggie Daddy – Doug Young; Augie Doggie, Mouse – Daws Butler.
Released: December 22, 1959.
Plot: Doggie Daddy tries to rid his house of a mouse.

The late ‘30s and early ‘40s were the Golden Age of Cartoon Hecklers. Almost every studio had one—Daffy, then Bugs, at Warners; Woody at Lantz; Heckle and Jeckle at TerryToons and even the underrated Screwy Squirrel at MGM. Audiences were ready for them after tiring of what sound cartoons had wrought—cutsie fairy stories or all manner of happy characters singing and dancing.

But, eventually, the novelty wore off there, too, and the hecklers got toned down as life headed toward the toned-down, suburban world of the 1950s. So it was the Daffy Duck who tormented a movie director (Daffy Duck in Hollywood, 1938) became a fall-guy to Porky Pig (Robin Hood Daffy, 1958). Bugs Bunny, who mercilessly picked on Elmer Fudd for sport (The Wabbit Who Came to Supper, 1942) turned into revenge-seeker (Long-Haired Hare, 1949), as if he turned to directors Jones and Freleng like a method actor and said “What’s my motivation?”

Still, the heckling cartoons had been very popular, so when Mike Maltese arrived at the Hanna-Barbera doorstep with his bag of tried and true story ideas from Warners, he pulled out the idea of a wise-cracking character triumphantly picking on others just for the hell of it. He used it in a few cartoons, and this one is probably the most Warner-esque. The heckling mouse is full of non-sequiturs, the gags are familiar and the cartoon moves along at a fast pace.

The only problem I have with the cartoon is subjective. Why is Doggie Daddy being picked on? What did he do to deserve it? I can accept him causing harm to himself by being a bit of a boob. And I can accept a natural protagonist-antagonist relationship, like Sylvester and Tweety. But I have trouble laughing at a nice guy like Doggie Daddy being bashed around by a one-shot character. This may be the reason Jones insisted on “motivation,” to create a logical reason behind the premise for the audience to accept. If you’re willing to overlook that, the cartoon’s a good one.

We open with Augie and Daddy getting ready to have cheese for dessert (apparently, Daddy can’t afford crackers to go with them). That brings a perennially-smiling, buck-toothed mouse out of his hole. He zips through the air, excuses himself, grabs Doggie Daddy’s portion, then zooms to the kitchen to a mustard pot. “Mustard is good on cheese,” he remarks as he slathers on some with a brush. Then he rushes back to Doggie Daddy, pulls out his tongue, and adds “Mustard is good on tongue, too,” as he coats Daddy’s tongue with mustard from the brush and zips away.


“I wonder where he came from?” asks the puzzled Daddy. The mouse zips back into the scene. “Well, I didn’t come from the moon,” heckles the mouse, who honks Daddy’s nose and zooms into a bread-box, closing the door. He quickly opens it again to spurt “Nighty, night” and slams it shut. All this happens in the span of 40 seconds, which gives you an idea of the pace Maltese establishes.

And it also gives you an idea where Maltese is getting his jokes. The nose-honking was used by the cartoon world’s first heckler in Daffy Duck and Egghead (1938), though Daffy bit a porcine proboscis in Porky’s Duck Hunt (1937). Avery later used it for his heckling duckling in Lucky Ducky (1948). A lot of old friends re-worked from Warner’s storyboards make an appearance here, but the cartoon nips along at a nice gallop so they don’t seem old and tired.

Daffy lifts the door of the bread-box but lets it fall on his thumb. “Quiet! Can’t you see I’m taking a nap,” chides the annoyed mouse, who lifts the door, says his line, then slams it shut. Seconds later, out he comes sleepwalking (with the requisite arms hanging straight out). Maltese then gives us another well-used gag (such as in Hanna and Barbera’s Quiet Please! or Avery’s Doggone Tired) where Augie lifts the mouse’s eyelid and sees a sign reading “Sh!” substituting for an eyeball. The mouse walks over to the cheese and starts gulping it down. Daddy is suspicious. So when the mouse walks back, Daddy uses a glass and the palm of his hand to trap him. Maltese digs up another old favourite from Tweetie Pie (1947). The mouse instantly produces a pin and stabs Doggie Daddy’s hand. We don’t see it; we get a reaction take before the mouse runs into its hole.


Now, let’s spot another Warners gag. Daddy reaches into the hole and promises to squish the mouse “like a to-maty-o. Or is it to-matty-o?” So the mouse whips out a tomato and Daddie squishes it instead. But the mouse pretends he’s been squished, puts on a sheet and pretends to be a mouse ghost. If you thought “Tomato? Pretend to be dead? Isn’t that what Bugs Bunny did in Heckling Hare (1941)? And didn’t the woodpecker in Peck Up Your Troubles (1945) substitute a tomato for himself and pretend to be an angel after getting squished? And weren’t both those cartoons written by Mike Maltese, too? Yes, you’d be correct on all counts. For good measure, we get Augie doing his Sylvester, Jr. routine again, putting the back of his paw to his forehead and crying “Oh, the shame of it!” like in Mouse-Taken Identity (1957) and others.


Daddy offers the little mouse ghost some cheese, who accepts in a clichéd wavering ghost voice, but then jumps out of the sheet and into Daddy’s face to scream “Don’t let it happen again!” The mouse adds a nose honk for good measure before zipping out of the scene.

In the next gag, Daddy gets out a rifle and aims it into the mouse hole. But the mouse bends the barrel so it now stick through a grate above the hole (which hadn’t been there before in the cartoon). Daddy fires and blasts himself. Nicholas used a teeny-eye take like that in The Flintstones.

Ready to spot the Warners gag again? Daddy rigs a bowling ball in a bag above the entrance to the hole with cheese as bait. But Daddy can’t clobber the mouse with the ball because he can’t get the zipper of the bag to open. When Daddy goes to investigate, the mouse grabs the string, easily opens the zipper and ‘wham’ goes the ball on Daddy’s head. The delayed-reaction-clobber type gag was used with weights in Ready, Set, Zoom! (1955) and rocks in There They Go-Go-Go! (1956), both written by… well, you can guess. The difference is the clobbering in the Warners shorts was caused by some kind of Law of the Cartoon Universe against Wile E. Coyote, not by the direct action of his prey, as in this one.

Next, Daddy lays a bunch of mouse traps in an empty room. An “eeeek” through a megaphone by the mouse causes Daddy to land on the traps. It’s a combination of the mousetrap-laying done by Wile E. in Zipping Along (1953) and any number of cartoons where the Roadrunner comes up behind him and scares him with a “beep beep.”

A hoary old gag is next. “I’ll holler ‘now’ and you let him have it,” Daddy instructs the mallet-laden Augie. Daddy’s snares the mouse with cheese on the end of a fishing line. “He won’t be able to get away from me now,” says Daddy. I don’t need to explain what happened next.

Finally, Augie comes up with a ‘James Dandy’ idea. He and Daddy engage in phoney dialogue, where it is declared there will never be cheese in the house again, ever. The mouse put on his hat, leaves a ‘For Rent’ sign on a nail (where did that come from?) above the hole and walks away. As Daddy congratulates his son on “being a reasonable face-a-simile” of him for coming up with such a brilliant idea. The mouse hears all this and pretends to leave by slamming the door. However in the wind-up gag, as Daddy and Augie are sitting down to cheese for dessert, Daddy quotes Yogi Bear that they’re smarter than the average mouse. Daddy lifts up the cover on the dish and there we see the mouse eating what’s left of the dessert. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” cracks the mouse to end the cartoon, just as Bugs did in The Old Grey Hare (1944) and The Goofy Gophers (1947).



Besides the re-worked Warners jokes, there’s enough to enjoy here. The mouse has a silly grin a lot of the time and his expressions read well, even in limited animation. Doug Young has a wonderful warmth about him as Doggie Daddy, adding to the Durante voice and word-mangling with chuckles and an upbeat read. He’s another guy who doesn’t get a lot of credit in these cartoons.

Just about all the music is by Phil Green and you can hear where it has been edited to fit a scene or scenes. If someone has a copy of the final cue they are able to send me, could you please e-mail me?

0:00 - Augie Doggie sub-main title theme (Hoyt Curtin)
0:05 - EM-107D LIGHT MOVEMENT (Green) – Mouse grabs cheese.
0:48 - GR-65 BUSH BABY (Green) – Breadbox gag, sleep-eating mouse; Daddy stabbed with pin.
2:20 - GR-255 PUPPETRY COMEDY (Green) – Tomato-squishing scene.
3:28 - GR-258 THE TIN DRAGOONS (Green) – Rifle-in-hole scene, bowling ball scene.
4:46 - CB-83A MR. TIPPY TOES (Emil Cadkin-Harry Bluestone) – Mousetrap and fishing line scenes.
5:54 - EM-107D LIGHT MOVEMENT (Green) – “Never have cheese” scene.
6:29 - SF-? THE HAPPY COBBLER (Hecky Krasnow) – Daddy lifts cover to find mouse eating.

A Knockout Mouse Cartoon

Cartoons within cartoons are always fun. Porky’s Preview is a silly parody of animation. And one of the best bits ever on The Simpsons was Krusty’s substitute short ‘Worker and Parasite.’

The concept wasn’t used much on Hanna-Barbera cartoons, though the one that may come immediately to mind is the episode of The Jetsons where Elroy’s classmate is watching the one-billionth rerun of The Flintstones. But a better example may be in the Pixie and Dixie short Cousin Tex, which opens with the mice watching ‘Knockout Mouse.’

This little sequence shows that you can animate anything. These are nothing but stick figures, like in Porky’s Preview, and Carlo Vinci still employs the old principle of squash and stretch that you’d find in old Warners shorts. See how the shape of the cat’s head changes. The body even reacts. Think you’d see that in Hanna-Barbera cartoons in the ‘70s?





As an added bonus, we get a little run cycle animated on ones.




Here it is, slower than in the actual cartoon. I like the way the cat’s outline tie moves as he’s running.


Since you’re curious, the music played during the whole ‘Knockout Mouse’ sequence is TC-42 Rural (registered with BMI as “Rural Stage”) credited to Bill Loose and John Seely. It was one of the rare times being used in an H-B cartoon (see comment below).