Snooper and Blabber — Wild Man, Wild!

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Ken Muse; Layout – Ed Benedict; Backgrounds – Bob Gentle; Story – Mike Maltese; Story Director – Alex Lovy; Titles – Lawrence Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Snooper, Blabber, Professor Schloompf – Daws Butler; Narrator, Gubba-Gubba – Don Messick; Hazel, Eloise – Jean Vander Pyl.
Music: Jack Shaindlin, Phil Green, Harry Bluestone-Emil Cadkin.
First Aired: week of March 14, 1960 (repeat, week of Sept. 19, 1960).
Production: Quick Draw McGraw M-026; Production No J-75.
Plot: Snooper and Blabber are hired to find Gubba-Gubba, who escaped after being brought to North America from the jungle.

With Mike Maltese and Ed Benedict on board, you’d expect a stronger, funnier cartoon than this. Benedict provides a pre-Flintstone, loinskin-wearing character and Maltese has a great ending (showing why reviewers kept calling the show “satiric”) but the rest of the cartoon really lacks punch. It’s too bad, because Maltese might have taken parts of the storyline of Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942) and stirred in the bumbling detectives to make a great parody. This was the fourth-last of 78 cartoons put into production in the 1959-60 season and Maltese may have been running on fumes considering the workload. Tony Benedict, a clever writer who arrived at Hanna-Barbera some time in 1960, wrote on a web-site not too long ago:

Mike Maltese deserves a great deal more recognition. Besides everything else he did, Mike wrote an entire television series for Hanna Barbera (Quick Draw McGraw) including every bit of dialogue, story and staging. No script, just storyboards. This happened before the tv networks discovered the gold in them thar cartoon hills. The shows were extremely cheap to produce and the networks could not get enough of them fast enough. Script approvals were not in place yet. Mike only had to please Joe Barbera with his stuff and it went straight into production. From 1960 to 1966 was the sweet age of tv H&B cartoons before it was sold thanks to Mike Maltese.

So, you can’t blame Maltese for a weary misstep along the way.


It takes awhile for Snooper and Blabber to do much in this cartoon. They don’t even appear at the beginning as we focus on the Explorers Club (different than the Adventurers Club that Maltese invented for the Snagglepuss cartoons). First, Professor Schloompf (which is how TV listings show his name) announces to a motley group of explorers he is going to civilise Gubba-Gubba, a wild man from some unnamed jungle where blonds apparently reside. The term “Gubba Gubba” is close enough to Charlie Shows’ baby-talk in the Yogi Bear cartoon Bear on a Picnic from the previous TV season.



After Gubba eats a banana peel and a watch, the professor opens a window to show the wild man civilisation. The noise scares him and he jumps out the window and runs away on a rooftop past the same fire escape three times. So we’re two minutes into the cartoon and we haven’t heard much of Maltese’s famed off-beat dialogue yet.



And we haven’t really reached the plot, either. We have a little diversion now as Snooper launches into what was becoming an increasingly common routine—dialogue between Snoop and his secretary Hazel via radio. The device served a few good purposes. It gave Maltese a place to toss in some dialogue gags that didn’t have anything to do with the plot. It also gave Maltese a chance to have Snoop work off another character than just Blab to freshen the series. And it gave the animators easy footage because Hazel was never seen; all they had to do was animate a cycle of dashes or lines from a background drawing of a car radio speaker.

Maltese doesn’t come up with a gem this time:

Hazel: Hazel to Snoop. Hazel to Snoop. Come in, Snoop. Come in, Snoop.
Snoop: Snoop to Hazel. Snoop to et cetera. Uh, go ahead, et cetera.
Hazel: Hey, Chief. This is Hazel. What’s this “et cetera” stuff?
Snoop: “Et cetera” is Latin for “telephone gal.”

Hazel sends them off to the Explorers Club on their latest case. Blab looks out the window and all he sees is “a nice-looking TV repairman.” There’s a shot of Gubba on a TV antennae. “Eureka, Blab. I think you’ve spotted our quandary,” says Snoop, who dispatches Blab with a violin onto the roof to sooth the savage beast “into a pair of handcuffs.” Even Maltese is wearying of his own puns:

Blab: I’ll play ‘Humoresque.’ Maybe it’ll humour him.
Snoop (tiredly): Oh, boy.

And, indeed, Blab (well, perhaps someone hired by Hoyt Curtin) does start to play Anton Dvořák’s famous piece. Off-camera, Gubba smashes the violin over Blab. “It’s a good thing I wasn’t playing a piana,” opines Blab.

Maltese doesn’t even give us a “Stop in the name of...” pun. We get a dull “Stop in the name of the law” from Snoop. Let’s go through the other gags.

• Snoop corners Gubba at the edge of the roof and whips out a match. “It’s fire. You are paralysed with ignoramus fear,” cries Snoop. Gubba whips out a cigar. You know what a cigar means in a cartoon. Kaboom.



• Blab is dressed as a blond wildman to befriend and trap Gubba (“here’s where the thick plottens,” says Snoop). Gubba instead grabs the mouse and runs off with him into a laundry. Gubba sees Snoop, drops Blab and jumps into a washer. (“Maybe he’ll come clean and give himself up,” giggles Blab).



• After more jokeless dialogue, the professor arrives at the laundry. Blab opens the top of the washer and Gubba floats up and out of trap door of some kind on the roof. Gubba’s hair has been fluff-dried into a curly mass which, for reasons of cartoon comedy, gives it a helium quality.

As hard as it is to believe, the cartoon’s just about over. We’ve reached the final scene where Snooper and Blabber are driving through the middle of downtown wondering about the fate of Gubba-Gubba, who they gave up chasing a year earlier. (“The only blotch on me brilliant et-scutcheon,” says Snoop). But suddenly, downtown turns into a suburb where our heroes spot Gubba in a Hawaiian shirt mowing the lawn. Gubba’s forlorn explanation is interrupted by his henpecking wife, who has the same head design as he does. “She captured me,” he moans. “Did you finish the lawn? Did you beat the rugs?” she nags as she tells him to take the triplets to the playground. Then comes the best line of the cartoon:



Snooper: Isn’t it great what civilisation has done for Gubba-Gubba, Blab?

Yes, a woman has done what the professor could not: turn a wild man into the typical, average, modern, North American husband. Cartoon style.

Eloise: Don’t let the children get dirty.
Gabba: Yes, dear.
Eloise: And pick up the groceries.
Gabba: Yes, dear.
Eloise: And blah, blah, blah, blah.
Gabba: Yes, dear. Yes, dear. Yes, dear. Yes, dear.

In case you were wondering, Mike and Florrie Maltese had a long, happy marriage that ended only with his death in 1981. They wed (in New York?) before he arrived at Warners in 1937.

The sound cutter actually has a piece of ‘Humoresque’ on the sound track. Snippets of classical music weren’t generally used as gags at H-B. The little hoppy music when the professor opens the windows is actually the introductory bars to Jack Shaindlin’s piece that reminds me of happy, frolicking squirrels heard in several different series at that time.

0:00 - Snooper and Blabber Main Title theme (Curtin).
0:25 - GR-74 POPCORN (Green) – Shot of Explorers Club, Schloompf takes the stage.
0:42 - CAPERS (Shaindlin) – Gubba-Gubba in cage, drops professor.
1:12 - CB-85A STEALTHY MOUSE (Cadkin-Bluestone) – Gubba eats banana and watch.
1:40 - jaunty bassoon and skippy strings intro (Shaindlin) – Professor opens window, Gabba jumps off flag pole.
2:00 - LFU-117-2 MAD RUSH No. 2 (Shaindlin) – Gubba runs on rooftop.
2:12 - GR-58 GOING SHOPPING (Green) – Snoop and Blab in car, Hazel dialogue.
2:58 - GR-93 DRESSED TO KILL (Green) – Snooper talks to professor, Gubba on antenna, Blab walks with violin.
3:36 - HUMORESQUE (Dvořák) – Blab plays violin, instrument crushed.
3:40 - GR-76 POPCORN SHORT BRIDGE No. 2 (Green) – Blab ‘piano’ line.
3:45 - LFU-117-2 MAD RUSH No. 2 (Shaindlin) – Gubba runs away, stops at edge of roof.
3:57 - GR-457 THE ARTFUL DODGER (Green) – Fire/cigar scene.
4:28 - GR-456 DOCTOR QUACK (Green) – Blab pretends to be wild man, grabbed by Gubba-Gubba.
4:52 - ASININE (Shaindlin) – Gubba runs off with Blab into laundry; jumps into washer, “come clean.”
5:17 - GR-456 DOCTOR QUACK (Green) – Snooper on phone to professor, Gubba floats into the sky.
6:00 - LFU-117-1 MAD RUSH No. 1 (Shaindlin) – Snoop and Blab in car, Gubba mowing lawn.
6:22 - GR-90 THE CHEEKY CHAPPIE (Green) – Snoop calls to Gubba, wife nags him to take triplets to playground. Gubba starts walking with kids.
6:57 - rising scale music (Shaindlin) – Wife nags Gubba about children, groceries, etc.
7:09 - Snooper and Blabber end title theme (Curtin).

Daws, Don, Doug and Dummies

Animator Mike Kazaleh has given up a rare piece of personal property for Jerry Beck to post over at Cartoon Brew. It’s a promotional record featuring H-B regular voice artists Daws Butler, Don Messick and Doug Young, along with the First Lady of Cartoon Voice Actors, June Foray.

Even the label’s cool. The caricatures were done by T. Hee, noted for his work at UPA and, before that, Disney, but who also spent time in the mid ‘30s at Warner Bros.

I can do no better than to link to the disc on Jerry’s site. Click here.

Well, yes, I can. Let me link to the background behind this. The disc is a sequel to another disc for ad-agency-ears-only called ‘All That Jazz—Blooper’s Soap.’ It’s a satire of how interfering clients, agencies and the people afraid losing their business can completely screw up even the simplest commercial. Anyone who was worked in commercial copywriting or production probably must have experienced that kind of thing at least once.

The script to the original disc can be found by clicking here.

Thanks Mike and Jerry for a chance to hear these fine cartoon voices in a recording likely few people reading have heard before.

The Many Lives of Ranger Smith

Everyone remembers Yogi Bear mentally duelling with Ranger Smith so well, it’s surprising to realise there was a whole season of Yogi cartoons—when he rose to fame—that there was no Ranger Smith. Yogi debuted on The Huckleberry Hound Show in 1958 and in his 26 cartoons that season, nary a hair of R. Smith can be found. The first season featured rangers in various sizes, shapes, voices and names. The pair in “The Buzzin’ Bear” are “Joe and “Bill” (sound familiar?) while the Ed Benedict-designed Ranger Mack makes a couple of appearances, including one in “Scooter Looter” where he’s animated by Carlo Vinci.

When the second year of the Huck show began, it looked like the idea of generic rangers was going to continue. The debut Yogi cartoon of the season, “Show Biz Bear,” had a military buzz-cut ranger. But writer Warren Foster, who had been hired for the 1959-60 season to replace Charlie Shows, seems to have concluded a regular park-uniformed foe for Yogi would be a good idea. But that took a bit of time. In the meantime, there was no model sheet for Ranger Smith, since he still wasn’t technically a regular character, so his design varied a bit from cartoon to cartoon. Four designers worked on the cartoons that year—Benedict, Dick Bickenbach, Walt Clinton and Tony Rivera (I don’t know if Bob Givens did any Yogis). Almost all of the cartoons are shorn of credits, so don’t count on most of the layout artists listed being correct.

The first Smith cartoon to air was “Lullabye-Bye Bear,” expressively animated by George Nicholas. Smith spent a lot of time on the phone in cartoons. He appears to be a corporal in the Canadian Army, judging by the uniform. If the ranger’s nose is any indication, Bick did the layouts. That shouldn’t be surprising. Everyone’s favourite grumpy designer, Ed Benedict, once told John Kricfalusi that the ranger was the only character Bick designed.


Nicholas is back again with “Papa Yogi,” with layouts by Walt Clinton. Smith apparently didn’t comb his hair.


“Stranger Ranger” followed. The Ranger has a thin head. Tony Rivera is likely the layout man here. Ken Muse animated.


“Rah Rah Bear” technically doesn’t include Ranger Smith. There’s the Rivera-head Smith design but a different voice. The animation is by Carlo Vinci.


In “Bear for Punishment,” Mr. Ranger has a potato nose and is talking out of the side of his mouth. Note the mouth and jaw lines. The animator on this was Gerard Baldwin, who came up with a stretch-necked, rubber-muzzled Yogi in some scenes. Tony Rivera is my wild guess as the layout designer.


Here’s the most stylised Ranger Smith you’ll ever see. It screams Ed Benedict (maybe that should be “field and screams.”) “Nowhere Bear” was animated by Ed Love. Smith was never designed like this again; maybe someone thought the design didn’t mesh with the more conservative Yogi’s.


The last three cartoons aired in the 1959-60 season were all animated by Don Patterson. They don’t even look like same animator, do they? The first is from “Wound-Up Bear,” the second from “Bewitched Bear” and the third from “Space Bear.” Smith seems to have gained weight between the first and second cartoons and is wearing jodhpurs in the third (he is never shown walking in the cartoon, so Patterson doesn’t have to animate the pants). You’ll notice no line in the ear in the first design. I suspect the first was laid out by Rivera, the second by Bick and the last by Clinton, but I’ll stand corrected. There are trees in the second one you’ll find in Rivera’s cartoons.


New animators and layout people came in the following year and the design started getting a little more consistent as Smith was now a full-fledged regular character. Yogi was on the Huck show until January 1961 when he got his own programme; a look at a handful of TV listings show when new Huck and Pixie and Dixie cartoons aired, an old Yogi rounded out the half-hour and vice-versa.

Artie Davis animated a Rivera stem-legged Smith in “Bear Face Disguise.” Smith has a turned-up nose and a simple uniform in this one.


And here’s Smith courtesy of Dan Noonan in the Yogi cartoon some people love to hate: “Queen Bee for a Day.” Don Williams is the animator. Smith has a different colour for his mouth/jaw separation and his legs are longer. His uniform looks pretty form-fitting and he apparently was the victim of a tired practical joke because his tie is short like someone cut it off.


My favourite Smith visual moment comes thanks to George Nicholas in that very first cartoon. Here are two drawings from a shock take. Notice how the ranger has four fingers and a thumb.



You’d never see Wally Gator doing something like that. To be honest, Ranger Smith never did it again, either. Too bad. He had great veteran animators whose work many years ago gave him a life. Judging by the drawings, many of them, actually.

Huckleberry Hound — Lion Tamer Huck

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation and Layout – Mike Lah, Backgrounds – Bob Gentle; Dialogue – Charlie Shows; Story Sketches – Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Narrator, Sick Lion – Don Messick; Huck, Lion – Daws Butler.
First aired: week of March 10, 1959 (rerun, week of Sept. 8, 1959).
Music: Lou De Francesco, David Buttolph, Jack Shaindlin, Bill Loose-John Seely, Spencer Moore, Geordie Hormel.
Plot: Huck demonstrates how to tame a lion.

Mike Lah’s name isn’t found in very many cartoons on the Huck show, understandable considering he was working for Quartet Films during his stay at Hanna-Barbera. The two times he received an animation credit, he also handled the layouts—in this cartoon and in Pie-Pirates, apparently the first Yogi Bear short in production. It’s unclear when Lah worked on this one. His uncredited animation is found in first few cartoons to be aired, but this cartoon was the 24th of the 26 first-season Huck half-hours to be seen.

There’s no animation at all at the start of the cartoon. It’s all camera work and still drawings, held together by Don Messick’s narration. It opens with a shot of the cover of an instructional manual on taming lions. Then we switch to the inside of a lion cage where various taming tools simply appear in the middle of the screen—“A whip. A pistol. A chair. And a fool-hardy, uh, fearless individual.” Huck pops into the picture. “That’s me, folks!” he cheerly exclaims. It sounds like the sound effects accompanying each item were made by hitting different sized glass bottles.



The camera pans to the right and “a ferocious lion” pops in. “That’s me, folks,” says the lion, with Daws using his Ralph Cramden voice. One of my favourite parts of the cartoon is next. “Some beginners prefer to start with a more puny type lion.” The scrawny lion is told to get lost by the big one, so he gets up and walks out of the cartoon. I love his design.

So now Huck teaches us how to be a lion tamer. He shows no fear. From the waist up, anyway.



The lion sharpens his claw on a grindstone and his tooth with a file.



Narrator: Remember, that lion may be just as frightened as you are.
(Lion makes loud roar)
Narrator: Although we sincerely doubt it.

Lah has some nice poses and expressions throughout the cartoon, like when the lion’s hands tremble while in pain after Huck ignores the narration to only lightly whip the animal on the nose. It’s a two-drawing cycle on twos. Here is is slowed down.



He uses three drawings on Huck reacting to the pain he’s inflicted on the lion, then two more as Huck looks at us in reaction.



Huck ignores the narrator’s advice to avoid using a whip and chair on a lion (“king of beast-ses,” as Huck dubs him) while the animal is eating. The lion’s annoyed then just plain pissed off about the whole thing. He smashes the chair on Huck and chases after him. Huck’s angular run reminds me of something you’d see Spike do in one of the flat-style MGM cartoons of the ‘50s, especially the way Huck’s mouth is drawn small, open and downward.



The lion’s annoyed again. “Listen, youuu. Are you going to get tamed?” asks Huck. You can see the answer.



Huck pulls out a pistol and starts firing into the air. Time for one of Charlie Shows’ rhyming words. “Don’t shoot that gun, son!” Ah, but the “li-ron” (as Huck consistently calls lions in various cartoons) is only faking. He grabs the gun, assumes a western drawl and gives him “until sundown to get out of town. Okay, lion-tamer. Start a-runnin’. I’m a-gunnin’.” Huck escapes to a separate cage. “I knowed all the time he was shootin’ blanks,” he confides in us. The old ‘leaking body’ gag follows that we saw in Yogi’s Tally Ho Ho Ho. When was this first used in a cartoon? And why is the water blue?

“Training a lion to overcome his natural fear of fire,” intones the narrator, “is a neat feat. And sometimes a lion tamer, to instil confidence in the animal, has to set an example by leaping through a burning ring of fire.” This sets up the old ‘charred body’ gag Huck brags about his accomplishment when we can see his tail on fire. This being 1958, he doesn’t utter do a Jolson-esque “Mammy!” Notice Lah draws the lion’s eyes together. He also puts together a five-drawing cycle of the fire burning, on twos.



In a couple of places in the dialogue, Charlie Shows has the narrator use the same word or phrase used by a character in the previous scene. That happens in the final bit when Messick starts out: “Most experts agree that teaching a li-ron, uh, lion, to walk a tightrope is the most difficult stunt of them all.” Huck cracks his whip for no reason other than lion tamers are supposed to. The li-ron, uh, lion, borrows a John L.C. Sivoney catchphrase, exclaiming to Huck “you make me so ner-vous.” More nice expressions from Lah. He has both Huck and the lion bite their lower lip when elongating an “f” or a “v.”



The lion gets one of his dizzy spells. Huck can’t run away from the falling lion in time. More poses.




The cartoon ends with a lame bit of dialogue. “It’s just as well,” laughs the lion, “This kid wasn’t going to make it anyhow.” The lion’s been commenting on Huck lack of lion-taming ability throughout the cartoon, and not really all that cleverly. It’s the last gag so Shows should have written a topper. Instead, the line isn’t any stronger than what he said before. This shows you why Warren Foster and Mike Maltese were such better writers. Their dialogue was much punchier and they brought with them from Warners a sense of verbal oddities and ridiculousness when they replaced Shows.

And so we wave goodbye to Mike Lah, as he carried on with his career in award-winning commercial and industrial animation, eventually taking over as company president. And here’s a note about the company from Boxoffice magazine, dated July 21, 1956.

Quartet Films Is Formed By Storyboard Toppers
With the shuttering of Storyboard’s west coast offices, a new TV unit, Quartet Films, headed by top personnel formerly associated with Storyboard, has been organized and will launch operations. It is headed by Arthur Babbitt as president and also comprises Arnold Gillespie, Stan L. Walsh and Les Goldman.

Two cues dominate the soundtrack, both originally from the Sam Fox library. One is a trombone march called ‘Cockeyed Colonel’ written by David Buttolph. It was rarely used after Ruff and Reddy. At the time of this cartoon, Buttolph was employed by Warners Bros. television, for whom he composed the theme for Maverick and provided underscores for The Virginian and Wagon Train. By an odd coincidence, he also wrote the score to the movie My Darling Clementine (1946). Huck hums the song of the same name from the 1:27 to 1:33 mark when he's checking out his fingernails. ‘Cockeyed Colonel’ was copyrighted on May 23, 1935.

The other main cue is heard twice. SF-10 is either ‘Ski Galop’ or ‘Skiing Galop’ and was written by Louis De Francesco, at one time in the ‘30s the general musical director of Sam Fox. He, too, had a long career in film, both features and shorts. Among many accomplishments, he worked until 1940 on the March of Time, which later employed Jack Shaindlin as its musical director. A number of De Francesco cues in the Sam Fox library could easily be mistaken for Shaindlin judging by the arrangements. De Francesco’s connection with cartoon music goes back long before this. Starting in 1913, Sam Fox provided sheet music for silent film accompaniment. On April 9, 1931, the company copyrighted “incidental music; for news reels, cartoons, pictorial reviews, etc., by Edward Kilenyi, L.E. De Francesco and others.” Eventually, this morphed into a recorded music library and among the Sam Fox composers were Bill Loose and John Seely.

Speaking of Shaindlin, the two standard cues of his used in running scenes, ‘On the Run’ and ‘Toboggan Run,’ are found here. And the sound cutter has used the laughing trombones of Spencer Moore’s ‘L-78’ as a kind of musical effect.

0:00 - Huckleberry Hound sub-main title theme (Hoyt Curtin).
0:25 - medium circus march (Shaindlin) – Narrator sets up cartoon, Huck appears, lion appears.
1:03 - SF-14 THE COCKEYED COLONEL (Buttolph) – Scrawny lion appears, Huck shows no fear.
1:41 - ZR-49 LIGHT EERIE (Hormel) – Lion’s claws come out, whipped on nose.
2:33 - SF-10 SKI(ING) GALOP (DeFrancesco) – Lion turns and runs after Huck; skids to a stop.
2:48 - TC-301 ZANY WALTZ (Loose-Seely) – “Doggone amateurs!” Lion eats; grabs chair.
3:32 - L-78 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – Lion hits Huck with chair.
3:44 - LAF-5-20 TOBOGGAN RUN (Shaindlin) – Lion chases Huck, Huck closes door.
3:48 - TC-303 ZANY COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Huck lets lion back into own cage; fires into the air, Lion grabs gun and threatens Huck.
5:01 - LAF-2-12 ON THE RUN (Shaindlin) – Lion twirls gun. Huck runs into cage and closes door.
5:08 - SF-14 COCKEYED COLONEL (Buttolph) – Huck leaks.
5:47 - SF-10 SKI(ING) GALOP (DeFrancesco) – “You cowardly type lion!” Huck leaps, catches on fire, tightrope scene.
7:08 - Huckleberry Hound sub-end title theme (Curtin).