The Gruesomes Vs Television

Loud, brash, fast-talking P.R. people didn’t really exist, did they?

Apparently, they did. At least that’s the impression I get reading about Arnie Carr, whose hyperbole pushing Hanna-Barbera cartoons on television writers seems to have amused columnist Hal Humphrey of the Associated Press.

Arnie was born August 9, 1931 in Chicago and after graduating from the University of Missouri, got a job conducting tours for the U.S. State Department. Evidently, Arnie was looking for more glamour. In the ‘50s, he came west and landed a gig handling publicity for KABC-TV in Los Angeles. He moved over to Screen Gems and that’s how Hanna-Barbera inherited him. He’s the short guy in this drawing by H-B writer Tony Benedict. Arnie started his own company in 1962 but kept the cartoon studio as a client. He died on February 11, 2001.

Hal had some words to say about Arnie in THIS column and couldn’t resist ribbing him in another piece dated December 11, 1964. It also gave Humphrey a chance to comment on the latest fad in TV at the time—what we now call “the high-concept show.” Beautiful genies in bottles, housewives who are witches, antique cars that are the reincarnation of Ann Sothern, and two gothic comedies that battled each other for ratings—one having a far-too-close connection with a certain animated sitcom.

Stark Cartoon Drama Too Realistic For TV
By HAL HUMPHREY
For years now the press agent for “The Flintstones” has pestered me to write something about his cartoon series, and I’ve brushed him off on the grounds that I prefer to write about shows with real people in them.
“I suppose you are going to tell me now those geeks in ‘The Addams Family’ and ‘The Munsters’ are real people,” shouted Arnie Carr, the press agent in question. Particularly galling to Arnie is the fact “The Munsters” is in the same Thursday night time slot as “The Flintstones” and presently beating them to death in the Nielsen rating poll.
THE FINAL INSULT is the fact that the Hanna-Barbera Co., creator of “The Flintstones” and Arnie’s bosses, tried several years ago to sell another animated TV series called “The Gruesomes” and were told by the networks it was “too frightening” and the humor “too gruesome.”
In an episode of “The Flintstones” last month Hanna-Barbera brought “The Gruesomes” (Creepella, Weirdly and son Gobby) on as guests, and the ABC censorship department apparently okayed it as good clean fun.
But Arnie knows it is too late to outmonster “The Munsters,” so he is taking the tack that Fred and Wilma Flintstone are just plain folks (“My kind of folk” is the way he puts it).
“YOU CAN IDENTIFY with the Flintstones because they have the same problems as you or I,” adds Arnie, warming to his subject. “And think of future generations. Don’t tell me you want your grandchildren to watch reruns of ‘The Munsters.’ It’s un-American. Where is the empathy? The feeling of belonging?”
A session like this with Arnie may not convince the trapped listener that a cartoon family is something to identify with, but it does start a person thinking about one of Madison Avenue’s cardinal commandments, which up to now has been emblazoned on the wall of every TV producer: “Thou shall create only characters with whom everyone can identify.”
As Arnie heatedly points out —and admittedly with some validity— how does one identify with a character whose head is attached through his neck (Human Munster)?
FOR THAT MATTER, who ever has lived next door to a family where the mail is delivered by a hand called “Thing” or there is a beautiful witch named Samantha who does dishes without an advertised cleaner?
As recently as a year ago anyone submitting such characters to the men running TV would have been read out of the league, but now the further into fantasy you go, the better your chances of winding up on TV next season. A comedy starring a car which talks is already under serious consideration for 1965-66.
It isn’t easy to analyze the motivation for this radical switch in the thinking along Madison Avenue. Maybe it is simply the ultimate rejection of reality by the men wearing the oxford gray flannel suits. Either their analysts or Sen. Thomas Dodd’s juvenile delinquency investigating committee have scared them into this fantasyland.
ANOTHER SEASON of this sort of thing and “The Flintstones” will look to the Madison Avenue crowd like a Paddy Chayefsky drama about tenement life in Brooklyn with Ernie Borgnine and Thelma Ritter.
Arnie the press agent believes we need TV shows like “The Flintstones,” but I am not sure any more that he is right. Look at what happened to “Playhouse 90.” People don’t want problem shows.
If Arnie and the Hanna-Barbera Co. are smart, they’ll turn Fred and Wilma Flintstone into Martians with butterfly wings.

Nostalgia may have coloured people’s memories, but I never liked the Gruesomes. Hanna-Barbera simply took the ugly-is-beautiful schtick overused in The Addams Family, cartoonised it, and ran it into the ground even more. If there’s a storm out, it’s a “lovely night.” If there’s a growling gila monster, it’s a “cute pet.” Hey, Bill, Joe! We got the joke already.

Hal Humphrey may have been a little psychic. Hanna-Barbera didn’t turn Fred Flintstone into an alien. They merely imported one from the planet Ziltox. Methinks if Arnie Carr couldn’t sell Pebbles and the Gruesomes to the sceptical press, he’d have an even tougher time with Gazoo. And, probably to his chagrin, grandkids of TV viewers in 1964 are enjoying Al Lewis as a hammy vampire. People don’t want “belonging” in comedy. They want laughs. The copycat Gruesomes never had them.

Quick Draw McGraw — Elephant Boy Oh Boy!

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Ken Muse; Layouts – Paul Sommer; Backgrounds – Art Lozzi; Story – Mike Maltese; Story Sketches – Dan Gordon; Titles – Lawrence Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Narrator, Ol’ Vacuum – Hal Smith; Quick Draw, Baba Looey, Barker – Daws Butler.
Music: Phil Green; Jack Shaindlin, Vic Lamont, J. Louis Merkur.
Production: Quick Draw Show M-022, Production No J-66.
First aired: week of February 22, 1960 (rerun, week of August 22, 1960).
Plot: Quick Draw can’t get away from a grateful circus elephant.

Thanks to Mr. Cro for the credits.

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera must have loved circuses. The circus motif popped up in their cartoons from time-to-time and, of course, the opening and closing of The Huckleberry Hound Show (and some of the fun little in-between cartoons) were set in a circus.

And they must have loved circus elephants, too, though they waited until 1977 before giving an elephant his own cartoon show (Undercover Elephant). Yogi Bear hid an elephant (Hide and Go Peek, 1958) who escaped from a circus. Before that, Ruff and Reddy set off on an adventure with an elephant (starting with Pinky, the Pint-Sized Pachyderm, 1957) who escaped from a circus. Before that, Jerry Mouse hid an elephant (Jerry and Jumbo, 1951) who had accidentally escaped from a circus. Actually, Tom and Jerry also found themselves involved with a lion, a seal and a bear, all of which escaped from a circus. It’s a wonder the circus had any animals left.

Maybe Joe Barbera was fond of elephants because he said one of “the first cartoons I had a hand in actually creating from the beginning” (along with Dan Gordon and Jack Zander) was Pink Elephants, a 1937 Terrytoons effort.

Regardless, this cartoon doesn’t get to the elephant right away. But it gets to the circus part right away—in this case, it’s a “travelling show”—and we get a couple of “drop everything and run” gags. As soon as the cry “travellin’ show” is heard, a masked bank robber hands back his ill-gotten loot and makes a run for it (followed by the teller), and two gunslingers who shoot and kill each other come back to life and zip off camera toward the fun. By the way, has anyone seen a less appealing cartoon lion than the one in the shot of the caravan?



There’s eight seconds of a camera pan and zoom over a circus-tent background to save animation (is it a coincidence, or did this always happen in Ken Muse cartoons?) and the shot switches to a walk cycle of Quick Draw (childishly holding a balloon) and Baba Looey, who say hello to the audience at an appropriate break in the narration.

Narrator: Oh, Quick Draw.
Quick Draw: Yes?
Narrator: I see you’re enjoying temporary surcease from your legalistic peregrinations.
Quick Draw (looking annoyed): That’s a terrible thing to say about anybody.

Don’t worry, Quick Draw. I can’t recall using “surcease” in a sentence very often, either. There’s something amusing about the fact the line was written by Mike Maltese, the poor kid from the New York slums who never finished school. Maltese surprises veteran Quick Draw fans with the next gag, where Baba urges our eponymous star to show off his fancy shooting. No, the gun doesn’t blow up in his face. It merely comes apart in his hand. The next gag’s a little more routine. Quick Draw throws some darts to win a doll. Cut to a shot of three darts in the nose of the barker. Is that a Pixie doll in his booth?



Baba reads a sign that says ‘Don’t Feed the Animals,’ but Quick Draw doesn’t think one peanut will hurt an elephant, who uses its trunk to vacuum one peanut, then the whole bag, then Quick Draw (apparently an elephant’s trunk can make a kissing noise) in a bit of animation that gets reused later in the cartoon. The vacuuming is appropriate as the elephant’s name is Ol’ Vacuum. “I wonder if it’s true about elephants...They say an elephant never forgets a favour,” says Quick Draw as he and Baba walk away from the travelling show. Yes, it’s true and Ol’ Vacuum comes running after them. So the rest of the cartoon is spent trying to ditch the elephant.

Quick Draw gets in two of his three catchphrases right away. “Hold on thar!” he shouts at the elephant, who skids to a stop by backing into Quick Draw’s arm (“Now look whacha done. You got my arm all curly-cued!”). The elephant straightens it out. “Oooh. That smarts,” Quick Draw observes.



The moaning elephant is sent away by Quick Draw (over the upright piano sound of ‘Winter Tales’ aka ‘Hearts and Flowers’) but the animal decides to follow him again (with xylophone notes simulating a fast tippy-toe) and conceals his bulk behind a convenient cactus. Eventually, Quick Draw tries to sneak away by having the animal, which is pretending it’s a dog, roll over and play dead. That doesn’t work for long, and the animal follows Quick Draw on a tight-rope strung between two sides of a canyon. The elephant’s weight sends him, Quick Draw and the rope to the bottom of the canyon.



There’s not a lot of clever or funny dialogue through all this from Maltese, who pads for time by having Quick Draw explain to the audience he’s going to get off the rope and the elephant will fly into the air. Anyone who’s seen enough cartoons knows what’s going to happen. Yeah, the elephant crashes on Quick Draw, who does that cartoon thing of running in place for almost three seconds while talking before the elephant lands on him. Apparently, it’s a law of cartoon physics. And there’s more camera work covering up the absence of animation by Muse. For nine seconds, the camera trucks out and in on the cel of the elephant, making it appear he’s disappearing into the stratosphere then coming back down.

If you’re still waiting for funny stuff, you’re out of luck. We’re now at the final scene, where the narrator has inexplicably disappeared and Baba takes over the job. Quick Draw rides Ol’ Vacuum into the sunset, which mainly consists of five seconds of cycle animation with clever camerawork making it look like the two are heading into the distance.

This is one of the few cartoons with an appearance by an underscore version of the Quick Draw theme used in the little between-cartoons on the half hour show. And there are a couple of cues at the end that may be from the Sam Fox library. The second last one is a violin version of the music used at the opening of Doggone Prairie Dog, possibly by Lou De Francesco.

0:00 - Quick Draw McGraw Sub Main Title theme (Curtin)
0:15 - O Susannah (?) – Gunfire lifts roofs of buildings.
0:30 -(That’s) Quick Draw McGraw (Curtin-Hanna-Barbera) – Travelling Show passes, bank robber, gunfight gags, Quick Draw and Baba walking.
1:16 - GR-472 HICKSVILLE (Green) – “Temporary surcease” line, Quick Draw pulls out gun.
1:42 - GR-78 CUSTARD PIE CAPERS BRIDGE No 1 (Green) – Quick Draw twirls gun, falls apart.
1:54 - CRAZY GOOF (Shaindlin) – Darts scene, Ol’ Vacuum eats all the peanuts, kisses Quick Draw, Quick Draw and Baba walk away.
3:16 - fast circus chase music (Shaindlin) – Ol’ Vacuum runs, skids into Quick Draw’s arm.
3:28 - GR-99 THE DIDDLECOMB HUNT (Green) – Quick Draw’s arm sproings, “Stop being grateful.”
3:44 - WINTER TALES (arr. Vic Lamont) – “And git!”, Ol’ Vacuum crawls behind rock.
3:56 - ‘FIREMAN’ (Shaindlin) – Quick Draw and Baba run away, Ol’ Vacuum ducks behind cactus.
4:17 - SF-11 LIGHT MOVEMENT/MOUNAINEERS' HOEDOWN (Merkur) – Quick Draw walks away from cactus, kissed by Ol’ Vacuum, dog routine, Ol’ Vacuum opens eye.

5:14 - rising scale show biz music (Shaindlin) – Quick Draw and Baba run, tightrope scene, Ol’ Vacuum lands on Quick Draw. 6:15 - GR-81 FRED KARNO’S ARMY BRIDGE No. 1 (Green) – Quick Draw under Ol’ Vacuum, “Peel me off.” 6:27 - plaintive Western theme (?) – Baba narrates.
6:47 - medium dance (?) – “Ol’ Vacuum,” Quick Draw rides into sunset.
6:59 - Quick Draw McGraw Sub End Title theme (Curtin)

Yogi Bear, Sunday, June 1961

One of the fun things about the original Hanna-Barbera half-hour shows was watching the interaction between the characters in the little cartoons between the cartoons. There wasn’t a lot of that going on the Yogi Bear newspaper comic. Gene Hazelton, and whoever else came up with the premises for the Sunday colour strip, treated it more like a Yogi cartoon, which encompasses a world of Jellystone Park, Ranger Smith and Boo Boo. But in the June 4 cartoon, Huckleberry Hound makes a cameo appearance.

This one borrows the idea of a love bug from Love Bugged Bear (1961) which, oddly, doesn’t contain any love bugs. Nor does it contain Cindy Bear; it features a generic female bear voiced in falsetto by Don Messick. Cindy’s first cartoon was Acrobatty Yogi in the 1961-62 season and would have aired after this comic strip was published, though I suspect both were in development at the same time. Cindy is nameless in this strip, but the original 1961-64 Cindy design is used here.

“The Love Bug Will Bite You (If You Don’t Watch Out)” was a song written in 1937 by Pinky Tomlin for the movie Thanks For Listening. It was heard a couple of times on the Jack Benny radio show and was recorded by people like Jimmy Dorsey and Fats Waller. And it was the centrepiece in a copyright suit against Walt Disney Productions after the studio released The Love Bug in 1968.



The St. Louis Zoo must have been known across the U.S., at one time, for its collection of animals. There are references to it in several Yogi cartoons as a destination where Ranger Smith threatens to ship his troublesome bear. Here’s another one in the June 11 comic. That lion looks like the Flintstones’ cat with a blown up head.



The comic of June 18 draws a bit of inspiration from Show Biz Bear (1959) where Yogi gets bashed around doing stunts on a film shoot. You can see how the incidental characters have the Walt Clinton “low ear.” And there’s a reference to another favourite H-B character.



The plot of Bear For Punishment (1960) is heavily borrowed for the June 25 comic. A magician makes Yogi invisible temporarily, Yogi steals picnic baskets but then unexpectedly and suddenly appears when the ranger arrives (and doesn’t know it).



It’s a shame the top row of panels is missing from all these comics, but the bottom 2/3rds are always written so you can still follow the plot. You can click on all of them to enlarge them.

Augie Doggie — Whatever Goes Pup

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – George Nicholas; Layout – Ed Benedict; Backgrounds – Dick Thomas; Story – Mike Maltese; Story Director – Alex Lovy; Titles – Lawrence Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Augie, Mailman, First Bluebird – Daws Butler; Doggie Daddy, Second Bluebird, Duck – Doug Young.
Music: Phil Green; Harry Bluestone/Emil Cadkin; Jack Shaindlin.
Production: Quick Draw McGraw M-013.
First Aired: week of December 21, 1959 (rerun, week of June 20, 1960).
Plot: Doggie Daddy floats after drinking Augie’s formula and can’t get down again.

Anyone hoping to see a lot of Ed Benedict’s great stylisation in this cartoon will be disappointed. His background layouts have been given a fairly tame interpretation by Dick Thomas, who had a fairly traditional approach to his construction. One of the only real hints Benedict was here is in the design of a mailman, who has a large, triangular nose and a head that juts out to the back. Still, he’s a little less distinctive than something like Benedict’s scooter salesman in Scooter Looter the previous season.

And there, unfortunately, isn’t a lot of George Nicholas’ distinctive animation style here, either. He’s not flopping around a tongue in a big mouth like he did with Yogi Bear and Fred Flintstone. But he does come up with his usual beady-eye, stunned look for Doggie Daddy a few times.

Augie Doggie had two different personalities. At times, he acted like a real kid, with TV heroes and wanting to adopt a pet. Other times, he was a scientific genius, making formulas (this cartoon and Pipsqueak Pop), inventing things (Ro-Butler) or talking to space aliens (Mars Little Precious). I prefer the former but the latter probably left more room for Mike Maltese to come up with gags that couldn’t be duplicated on a live-action sitcom.

This cartoon starts like a bunch of them. Daddy’s in his living room chair (which had a different design almost every cartoon) reading the paper when he smells something. The camera pans over a motley group of coil-connected beakers and tubes and stops on a wide-smiling Augie with part of one eye over top of the other. It reminds me of Dick Lundy’s drawings in Million Dollar Robbery (though it could be Benedict’s influence again; he laid out that cartoon, too).


Scientist Augie declares “I got somethin’, Dad. Or maybe I haven’t,” and induces Daddy to drink the green concoction. Daddy carries on reading the paper, not realising he’s floated to the ceiling until he looks up, then down. Then comes the reaction, in nine drawings. Daddy hides behind the newspaper in the middle of it before he ends it with part of his head sticking into what must be a rubber ceiling. Nicholas varies the drawings of the take. Some are on ones, so what you see below isn’t the exact timing.



The rest of the cartoon is split into two parts—Daddy’s attempts to get back to the ground, despite being full of Lighter-Than-Air formula, and then Daddy giving up and just enjoying flying around. Nicholas uses the old Carlo Vinci trick of stretching and thinning out Daddy’s body when he zips out of the screen in his attempts to get back on “terra cotta,” as he puts it the first time.

Hanna-Barbera cartoons could be a little sloppy in matching medium and close-up shots in consecutive frames. Here’s one of the more blatant examples you’ll find after Augie finishes nailing Daddy inside a piano.



This scene also features a great example of how the studio saved money. The piano is never animated. It’s simply on a cell that slides up. Daddy getting out of the piano and then the instrument crashing to the floor is never shown on camera, not even a drawing of the piano wreckage. It’s conveyed by shots of Augie wincing in reaction to sound effects off camera; it’s sure easier to animate than a piano breaking apart. There’s a really cute read on the dialogue here. Augie and Daddy are completely matter-of-fact when they say “bye” to each other ask the piano floats toward the ceiling. They make it sound like an everyday event.

Augie uses a vacuum cleaner and sucks dad down (they both laugh at Augie’s bad pun “It’s in the bag.”) Cartoon physics are in play because the vacuum, with Daddy in it, aims itself for the chimney for some reason and levitates into the air. Daddy casually floats out of the top of the vacuum bag and zips down toward the nearest rooftop TV antenna (“restin’ between channel 14 and 15”). Just before this, Augie races a wall socket to unplug the vacuum. He runs past the same shadow on the wall eight times. How long is the Daddy home that an electrical outlet isn’t closer?



Daddy’s been kind of kidding around at this point but he seems to go absolutely looney. “Whoops! I see a space station for wounded space ships,” says Daddy during his next ascent. He means a mailbox. He somehow fits into it (“Now I can drop anchor,” he remarks), but the mailman comes, opens the door to the box, and a disgusted Daddy floats up. The mailman looks at us and says “I’ve heard of air mail, but this is ridiculous.”

Daddy decides to do enjoy floating around while Augie thinks of something (a shame he’s not doing an dog paddle instead of an Australian crawl). A couple of bluebirds with big, ovular eyes that Benedict likes decide to hitch a ride. The jokey Daddy tells them to get off (“I haven’t got my pilot’s license yet”) and puns “I guess you could say dat I’m for the birds.” The dialogue’s not exactly Maltese’s strongest material.

Daddy and a white duck collide in mid-air. Nicholas used a nose-crinkle effect when he could. He did it with Augie reacting to the off-camera piano destruction and he does it during the collision. Daddy apologises to the duck, but the mallard wants no part of the plot of this cartoon. “When dogs start flyin’, I start walking,” says the disgusted duck, who stomps away in anger.

Maltese doesn’t really have an outstanding topper ‘stuck-in-the-air’ gag. The cartoon’s time is just about up so he just ends it. Daddy grabs onto a flag pole atop a building (“never thought I’d be flyin’ at half mast”) and Augie races in, make it up to the top of the building and back down in no time flat and emerges with Daddy floating at the other end of a rope. The perspective is interesting. The lamppost evidently is close to the foreground, so you can get an idea how high Daddy is flying. That means the buildings in the background must really be far in the distance.


So we’re back to Augie in his darkened room mixing a formula to try to get Daddy down. But the old dog isn’t worried in the slightest. The final shot has the floating father in silhouette, wearing a kite tail, the full moon behind him (the previous shot shows the rope going skyward from a nail in a window sill). Now it’s time for Maltese to end things with one of Daddy’s “after all” observations: “How many fathers can fly like a kite?”

Music is from the C and B, EMI Photoplay and Langlois Filmusic libraries, the first two re-released in Capitol Hi-Q.

0:00 - Augie Doggie Main Title theme (Curtin, Barbera, Hanna).
0:23 - CB-89A ROMANTIC JAUNT (Bluestone-Cadkin) – Daddy reads paper, floats to ceiling.
1:51 - CB-86A HIDE AND SEEK (Bluestone-Cadkin) – Daddy notices he’s on the ceiling, jumps toward floor.
2:20 - jaunty bassoon and skipping strings (Shaindlin) – “Augie, who put out the lights?”, piano scene, Daddy sucked into vacuum.
3:36 - fast show biz music (Shaindlin) – “I’ll turn the machine off”, Daddy on TV antenna.
4:23 - GR-155 PARKS AND GARDENS (Green) – Augie with flat irons, mailbox scene, birds hitch ride, duck scene.
6:22 - GR-58 GOING SHOPPING (Green) – Daddy spots flag pole, Augie takes him home, Augie in lab.
6:55 - rising scale show biz music (Shaindlin) – Augie at window, Daddy in front of moon.
7:07 - Augie Doggie End Title music (Curtin, Barbera, Hanna).

Daws Butler, Man of Voices

“Man of/with a thousand voices” is a cliché that’s been applied to all kinds of folks over the years. Mel Blanc comes to mind first, but it’s also been a tag that publicists and newspaper writers have pasted on Allen Swift, Billy Bletcher, Rufe Davis and Harry Foster Welch (who is barely known today as the war-time voice of Popeye).

Oh, and Daws Butler, too.

Even people who don’t like early Hanna-Barbera cartoons (as shocking as that sounds) have favourable words for Charles Dawson Butler. As well they should. Daws never gave a bad performance despite, on occasion, not being given the best material to deal with (especially as time wore on into the ‘70s). And who doesn’t love the word-twists Daws tossed into his delivery? Credit Daws for adding to the vernacular the universally-known adjective/noun “pic-a-nic.”

It’s always a treat to find Daws getting a bit of recognition in the popular press way-back-when, though some writers had a hard time figuring out he didn’t have an “e” in his first name. Stories about cartoon voice actors, prior to The Flintstones, almost begin and end with Mel Blanc (having your name show up in cartoon credits on TV daily has its advantages). But with the success of The Huckleberry Hound Show, Daws got an occasional mention, too. Here’s an unbylined piece from the San Antonio Light, dated February 8, 1959.

the man with a thousand voices
THE next voice you hear might very well be that of Daws Butler, the man with a thousand voices.
Since 1935, Butler has been imitating voices. As a vocal impersonator he has fooled the sharpest ears in the country. Since the advent of television, he has been the voices of over 200 commercial cartoon characters.
Today he runs riot on two popular cartoon shows, “Ruff and Reddy” and “Huckleberry Hound.”
On the NBC network program, “Ruff and Reddy,” Butler is not only the cartoon character voice of “Reddy” hut also that of Harry Safari, Killer Diller and Pinkie the Elephant..
On “Huckleberry Hound,” Daws is the voice of Huck, Yogi Bear, Mr. Jinks and Dixie.
Who is this man? How did he develop this genius for voices?
Daws says it all began when as a youngster he discovered that he was uncomfortably shy and retiring:
“I decided to combat this shyness by a self-inflicted therapy. While in high school at Oak Park, a Chicago suburb, I forced myself to appear before groups at amateur contests. My repertoire at the time consisted of a Ford starting on a cold day—President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Rudy Vallee. The therapy worked and I found it easier to b« extroverted.”
While running from one amateur contest to another, he teamed up with two other youngsters doing the same kind of an act. They decided to become professionals and obtained their first engagement at the Black Hawk restaurant in Chicago.
“I was now in show business. My real ambition, however, was to be a cartoonist and commercial artist. Hut the, bookings continued and before I knew it, I found myself a professional entertainer,” Daws continues.
ALTHOUGH he forced himself to become an extrovert, he admits that he is happiest when doing a voice which gives him complete anonymity.
“I guess I compromised with my natural shyness by becoming adept in a field of show business which would offer me complete anonymity and still give the satisfaction of solid accomplishment.”
During the heyday of radio, Daws began studying voices. At one time he played an entire drama by himself, being all the voices in the story.
During World War II, he spent four years in Naval Intelligence. When he was honorably discharged from the service, Daws headed for California where he picked up his career.
In 1948, Daws joined Stan Freberg and the two starred in the west coast’s first TV puppet show for children, “Time for Beany.” The show ran for five years and won for Butler and Freberg several coveted “Emmys.”
“We manipulated the puppets, did all the voices, and ad libbed like crazy, driving the camera director to distraction, trying to find the ‘new lines’ that never appeared on his script.”
HE next collaborated with Freberg on a phonograph record which sold over 1,000,000 copies. It was “St. George and the Dragnet.”
It was after the success of this popular recording that Daws moved into the field of animation writing and voicing many of the cartoon commercial messages.
He enjoys doing the cartoon characters for “Ruff and Reddy” and “Huckleberry Hound” best of all.
“Although I never realized my ambition to become a cartoonist, 90 per cent of my work is with them, so my original ambition was half-realized at that.”

The story isn’t quite correct with respect to Daws’ animation career. He may have been first hired at the Columbia studio for the cartoon Short Snorts on Sports (1948). He was given work by the great Tex Avery, who had been using people like Frank Graham, Harry Lang and Wally Maher to provide voices. Avery needed someone to do a Ronald Colman voice for Out-Foxed (released 1949, the voice track could have been cut up to two years earlier) and, somehow, Daws’ abilities as a mimic came to his attention. Daws supplied the same voice in the marvellous Little Rural Riding Hood and, soon, Lang and Maher disappeared and Daws got a fair chunk of work in MGM cartoons until the studio closed in 1957. People reading here likely know Daws’ Huckleberry Hound voice is modified from the one he gave the laconic wolf in Avery’s Billy Boy (released 1954). His first cartoon screen credit came at the Walter Lantz studio (originally working again with Avery) before he was given top spot on Hanna-Barbera voice roster.

It’s really tough picking a favourite Daws Butler voice from the ‘50s. They’re all fun. Best of all, you can hear that Yogi, Huck, Quick Draw are all distinctive characters, not just some guy changing his pitch and intonation. Daws didn’t have just one little kid voice—he had several. Augie Doggie and Elroy Jetson don’t sound the same. Daws may not have had a thousand voices, but considering how many smiles and laughs he gave us with the ones he had, who’s counting?

Yogi Bear — The Runaway Bear

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Animation – Ken Muse; Dialogue – Charlie Shows; Story Sketches – Dan Gordon; Titles – Lawrence Goble, Production Supervision – Howard Hanson (no credits).
Voice cast: Narrator, Tall Circus Worker, Clown, Dog – Don Messick; Yogi, Col. Packingham P. Putney, Short Circus Worker – Daws Butler.
Music: Bill Loose/John Seely; Jack Shaindlin; Geordie Hormel.
First aired: week of January 5, 1959 (rerun, week of July 6, 1959)
Plot: Yogi tries to avoid being turned into a trophy by a wealthy hunter.

You can’t get farther away from the typical Yogi Bear cartoon than this one. There’s no Ranger Smith, no Boo Boo, no pic-a-nic baskets and no Jellystone Park. Instead, Yogi is the World’s Greatest Skating Bear. Yogi wasn’t chained to the same format until he got his own show in 1961, though parts of it appeared in many cartoons before that. In fact, elements in this short were not new in the Hanna-Barbera world and would continue to surface through the 1960s. The “escape from the circus” idea was used in the Yogi cartoon Hide and Go Peek later that season; it was ripped off from the starting point in the Pinky story arc on The Ruff and Reddy Show the previous year, which was ripped off from the Tom and Jerry short Jerry and Jumbo (1951). The lineage can also be traced to the T & J cartoon Down Beat Bear (1956) where a bear with Ed Norton’s vest and porkpie hat escapes from a carnival.


A lot of people growing up today must reel in shock at the idea of a wild animal being killed just for the fun of it, then having its head stuffed and mounted on a wall. “Animal rights” and “endangered species” were not commonly heard terms amongst the general population before the mid-1950s. And so it was cartoons written by men from an earlier generation featured animal characters pretending to be, or avoiding becoming, trophies. This is one; another example at Hanna-Barbera was Major Operation (1961) with Snagglepuss and Major Minor. It, like this cartoon, featured an English hunter, something already familiar to Yogi viewers from the two Yowp cartoons in the 1958-59 season. Don Messick uses the same stuffy English voice as Yowp’s owner in this cartoon and the character looks similar to him; he has the same moustache and size but is missing the monocle. A few years later, the idea of a rich Englishman hunting an escapee was the premise of the Wally Gator cartoon Droopy Dragon (1962). So Hanna and Barbera managed to wring a fair bit of mileage out of this idea fuel tank.

Hanna and Barbera also managed to save money by having no animation in the first 38 seconds of the cartoons. All we see is pans over background drawings that act as sight gags over Don Messick’s narration. Is it my imagination, or did Ken Muse cartoons feature a lot of non-animation? The gags are the same kind that Warren Foster used in Showbiz Bear the following seasons, showing wealth through exaggeration. They’re pretty cute, actually. “Double-decker tennis courts. A pool for each foot. Dozens of big, shiny cars. With a little car in each big car.”




After a pan of Colonel Putt-Putt’s trophy room we get ‘50s minimalism at its best. The floor of his mansion is indicated by squares on a green background. And, just to compare character designs, here is a drawing of the Englishman from the Wally Gator cartoon four years later.



After we learn from this scene the Colonel wants a bear head to complete his collection, we switch to more non-animation. For 10 seconds, we get stationary shots of circus tents then a pole with a poster before Yogi peeks his head out. The bear is on the lam. It was decided to draw the circus workers and their not-Yowp tracking dog in silhouette. A couple of nicely-drawn clowns spot Yogi as well. (Fans know Yowp has a forehead, a tail that points in a different direction and only says “Yowp!”)




Yogi escapes by skating away while the background dissolves from the circus grounds to a countryside. It’s the only time I think they tried that kind of effect in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. Yogi decides to hide out in the mansion. He meets up with the Colonel, who is pondering how to get a bear head. Let’s go through the scenes.

● The Colonel sneaks off to get his rifle when he realises he’s not imagining a bear is in his home, then blasts the chatty, joking. “Hey, watch it, will ya?” says Yogi. “You almost blew my head off.” Which was the idea. Except the Colonel realises that would have ruined the head. So he tries another tactic.

● Putt-Putt sits Yogi one end of a table, then goes to the other end and pulls out a bow and arrow. But the bear ducks under the table because he dropped his napkin so the arrow lands instead in the back of the chair where Yogi was sitting, picking up some fruit on the table along the way. Yogi pops his head back up. “How about that. My favourite goodie. Shishkabob!” Yogi begins heating the fruit with a lit candle that somehow suddenly is on the table.

● The Colonel tricks Yogi into laying down for a nap. A guillotine is rigged above the bear’s neck. “Chin up,” says the Colonel, which is Yogi’s exact position. Then Charlie Shows comes up with a line that’s either a subtle pop culture reference or purely coincidental. Putt-Putt remarks “It’s later than you think.” The phrase was the tag line of the radio horror show Lights Out, sponsored at one time by the maker of Schick Blades. Anyway, this blade misses Yogi because he sits up, somehow the wooden stocks his head was in comes off the guillotine.

● The old covered-cannon-disguised-as-a-camera trick. However, the Colonel tilts the cannon up, the ball goes on the air and lands on him. “Shee. Too bad. The little guy saved my life. Oh, well. C’est la guerre. That’s the way the cannon ball bounces” is Yogi’s uproariously funny response from writer Charlie Shows. Paging Warren Foster! You’re wanted in dialogue!

● The old midway shooting gallery gag. The Colonel shoots Yogi over and over. Instead of pain or blood or death, a ‘ping’ sound is heard and Yogi mechanically changes direction every time he’s hit. To top the gag, Yogi skates off stage, comes back with a rifle and does the same thing to the Colonel.

Putt-Putt raises a white flag of truce and the two work out a deal. Yogi now resides in the mansion with his head sticking through a hole in a wall, and displayed on a plaque (when he’s not eating lunch). “Well, anyhoo, this beats working in the circus,” the bear tells us and laughs before resuming his dead-eye trophy-like gaze as the iris closes.



The music cues here are from the DVD version of the cartoon. There has been a version on the internet recorded from Canadian television which has a different music track. Jack Shaindlin’s ‘Toboggan Run’ has been deleted, other cues have been moved up and ‘L-78 Comedy Underscore’ by Spencer Moore has been added until the regular music track is rejoined for the final cue. Perhaps there’s a rights issue with Shaindlin’s music in Canada.

0:00 - Yogi Sub Main Title theme (Curtin-Hanna-Barbera)
0:14 - ZR-49 LIGHT EERIE (Hormel) - Shots of Putt-Putt’s mansion, Yogi decides to scram.
1:51 - LAF-5-20 TOBOGGAN RUN (Shaindlin) - Yogi skates toward clowns, skates away, stops at mansion.
2:28 - no music - Yogi at mansion gate.
2:34 - TC-201 PIXIE COMEDY (Loose-Seely) - Yogi at window, blasted by Putt-Putt, Yogi at table.
3:52 - TC-202 ECCENTRIC COMEDY (Loose-Seely) - Putt-Putt pulls out bow and arrow, bed scene, cannon ball drops.
5:17 - TC-303 ZANY COMEDY (Loose-Seely) - Yogi looks in hole, “shooting gallery” scene.
6:26 - TC-436 SHINING DAY (Loose-Seely) - Putt-Putt in chair, Yogi in plaque.
6:58 - Yogi Sub Title End Theme (Curtin).