Quick Draw McGraw — Chopping Spree

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Lew Marshall; Layout – Dick Bickenbach; Backgrounds – Art Lozzi; Story – Mike Maltese; Story Director – Alex Lovy; Titles – Lawrence Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voices: Quick Draw, Baba Looey, Sam Squeamish, Lumberjack on rail car – Daws Butler; Narrator, Naughty Pine (Foreman), Ronald Rugged, Voice on Phone – Hal Smith; Peachy Blossom – Jean Vander Pyl.
Music: Phil Green, Harry Bluestone/Emil Cadkin, Jack Shaindlin.
Episode: M-026, Production J-65.
First Aired: week of March 21, 1960 (rerun week of Sept. 19, 1960)
Plot: Quick Draw McGraw goes undercover to investigate mysterious accidents at a lumber camp.

This may be a cartoon starring Quick Draw McGraw, but the real star is Mike Maltese. He pulls out just about every dialogue trick he’s ever tried and sprinkles them throughout this six-and-a-half-minute short. We get groaner puns. We get characters talking to the narrator. We get characters aware of their situation and commenting on it. And we get a nice little twist ending.



Yeah, I realise what I’ve described is aural; that “illustrated radio” that C. Martin Jones found so distasteful. So what? It’s a funny cartoon. At least, I’m a sucker for silly dialogue that works in its own little world of logic. And the opening pan is attractive and sets up the plot. It’s a good marriage of Bick and Art Lozzi’s talents. The flip-branched trees are a Bick trademark, and Art’s added his favourite star-like leaves. He’s also varied the colours nicely on Bick’s tree designs, with various shades of green, a couple of greys and even a buff in there.

But, before we get to our plot, we’ve got some groaners:

Narrator: There was no room for the squeamish here.
Tough Lumberjack: I’m lookin’ for work.
Foreman: What’s your name?
Tough Lumberjack: Sam Squeamish.
Foreman: Sorry. Like the man said, there’s no room here for the squeamish.
Narrator: Only the rugged were welcome at The Roaring Splinter.
Foreman: What’s your name?
Wimpy Lumberjack: Ronald Rugged, what else?
Foreman: You’re hired.

Now it’s time to get to the action. Maltese sets up his running dialogue joke.

Narrator: You are about to witness another of the mysterious accidents which befell the camp of recent date.

And the rest of the cartoon, just about everyone tosses in the contrived phrase “the mysterious accidents which befell the camp” during some portion of their dialogue, including Peachy Blossom, who the narrator tells us is a “Typical, Helpless, Lonely Lumber Queen.” She’s evidently helpless enough that the narrator has to help her along by explaining there’s a card on her desk from someone who could help her (which isn’t there in the medium shot). It’s a shame it’s not a Paladin-like card with a horse’s head. That would have been an appropriate gag for Quick Draw.

Quick Draw (reading letter): Dear Quick Draw, I need your help. Bad-ly. Signed, Peachy Blossom, T.H.L.L.Q.
Baba: Say, Quickstraw, what means “T.H.L.L.Q?”
Quick Draw: That should be oblivious, Baba Boy. It means “Typical, Helpless, Lonely Lumber Queen.”

Off they go to the Splinter Lumber Camp. Peachy, without any kind of scare take because that would have involved maybe three extra drawings, looks at Quick Draw.

Peachy: Oh, you poor man. You must be the latest victim of the mysterious accidents that have befallen us.
Baba: No, lady. This is Quick Draw McGraw. Always he looks like that.
Peachy: Oh, you poor man.

Quick Draw quickly reveals who is responsible. It’s the butler, because they’re always guilty. But Peachy hasn’t got a butler. She has a foreman. So Quick Draw deduces it’s the foreman.

Peachy: Mr. Quick Draw?
Quick Draw: Yes?
Peachy: Are you sure you weren’t in an accident?

This is where we get the “Don’t you for-get it” catchphrase before Quick Draw and Baba disguise themselves and meet up with the foreman. Maltese digs out the routine he used in Treasure of El Kabong as our heroes spout real groaners trying to convince the interrogating foreman they’re really lumberjacks.

Foreman: So how do you chop a tree?
Quick Draw: I chops it down.
Foreman: What do you holler when a tree falls?
Quick Draw: I hollers “Ouch!” if’n it falls on m’foot.
Foreman: Where does sawdust come from?
Quick Draw: From a dusty saw.
Foreman: Where do we get wood pulp?
Quick Draw: From a young tree when it’s just a pulp, yuk, yuk.



The ruse works but the foreman, being a “yellow, thievin’ polecat,” doesn’t want a “smart guy” hanging around, so he pulls out a pistol. Quick Draw and Baba run to the nearest log-laden rail car and hide to avoid the bullets. The foreman lights a bundle of dynamite on the car and kicks it down a hill. Both Quick Draw and Baba jump to safety before it explodes, Quick Draw “snaggin’ a branch, Western-style.” Maltese comes up with a sequence that would have been at home in a late-‘50s Daffy cartoon from the Jones unit. We hear sawing. Cut to a shot of the foreman sawing off the part of the branch Quick Draw is on. Cut to a shot of Baba sawing off the part of the branch the foreman is on. We hear chopping. Cut to a shot of the foreman next to the falling tree Baba is on. Cut to a shot of Quick Draw next to the foreman, sawing off a part of cliff he’s standing on. Quick Draw and the cliff plummet. Alex Lovy or Bill Hanna couldn’t have timed the sequence much better, though I suspect if Hanna were at MGM, there’d be a great realisation take by Ray Patterson when the sawing sound is heard, then a cut to the two-character shot. Something that never would have happened at MGM—Quick Draw wouldn’t be standing on a different tree in the next shot.




Peachy expresses sympathy for the battered Quick Draw (who almost gets an axe chopping him in an area that isn’t anatomically correct) and asks the lamenting question whether the mysterious accidents will ever cease? “I’m sure they’ll cease if you’ll marry up with the villainous foreman,” Naughty Pine informs her. So Maltese pulls a surprise ending like he did in Masking For Trouble, where the girl decides to run off with the bad guy. That kind of ending certainly wasn’t original with Maltese; Franklin Pangborn’s 1935 melodrama parody Ye Old Saw Mill ends the same way. The foreman decides he doesn’t need his double-bladed axe any more and casually throws it away. It cuts into a hollow log where Quick Draw happens to be hiding.



Baba: Hey, Quicksdraw, where are you going?
Quick Draw: To the nearest tree surgeon, where else? Ooh. That smarts.

Some trivia notes:
● The cartoon’s set in “the Old Northwest” but Quick Draw drives a modern jeep.
● The foreman’s name is only mentioned once, when Quick Draw is being sawed off the tree.
● Quick Draw doesn’t say “I’ll do the thinnin’ around here,” though we hear the word “thinnin’” a couple of times.
● Daws uses a modified version of his Jerry Lewis voice for the lumberjack on the blown-up rail car.

The best use of the stock music is that unidentified sad violin piece underneath the scene of the mournful Peachy in her office. It’s hammy enough to fit Maltese’s dialogue. The harmonica “Oh, Susanna” is a good opening set-up. I don’t know the source of either cue. And I still don’t have the full name of the Jack Shaindlin ‘Fireman’ cue.

0:00 - Quick Draw McGraw sub main-title theme (Curtin).
0:16 - Oh Susannah (?) – shot of lumber camp, foreman talks to Squeamish and Rugged.
0:52 - CB-87A COME AND GET ME (Bluestone-Cadkin) – Mysterious accident.
1:09 - sad string music (unknown) – Peachy on phone.
1:40 - GR-348 EARLY MORNING (Green) – Peachy looks at card.
1:50 – CRAZY GOOF (Shaindlin) – Quick Draw reads letter from Peachy.
2:22 - GR-78 CUSTARD PIE CAPERS SHORT BRIDGE No 1 (Green) – Quick Draw and Baba in jeep, knock on door.
2:35 - GR-99 THE DIDDLECOMB HUNT (Green) – Quick Draw talks to Peachy.
3:25 - GR-96 BY JIMINY! IT’S JUMBO (Green) – Quick Draw questioned by foreman, foreman shoots.
4:41 - SIX DAY BICYCLE RACE (Shaindlin) – Quick Draw and Baba run, Quick Draw jumps from train.
5:33 - GR-81 FRED KARNO’S ARMY SHORT BRIDGE No 1 (Green) – Quick Draw on branch, hears saw.
5:39 - ‘FIREMAN’ (Shaindlin) – Sawing scene, foreman offers to marry Peachy.
6:25 - GR-457 DOCTOR QUACK SHORT BRIDGE No 1 (Green) – Accepts proposal, axe lands in log.
6:35 - SIX DAY BICYCLE RACE (Shaindlin) – Quick Draw runs away.
6:59 - Quick Draw McGraw Sub End Title theme (Curtin).

The Hunt For Red Coffey

It has been said—and if it hasn’t, allow me to say it—that any information you want to know is out there. All you have to do is find it. In the case of information about cartoon voice actors, that sometimes involves a lot of fruitless searching.

And that brings us to Red Coffey.

Animation history hasn’t been kind to Red. Well, history hasn’t been kind to Red. A two-and-a-half year search for information about him has turned up very little, including what his name really was, when he was born and if he is still with us. But we can trace his career at Hanna-Barbera fairly easily.

Our story starts in the pre H-B studio days on January 7, 1950, the date MGM released the Tom and Jerry cartoon Little Quacker. It featured a noisy little yellow duck whose voice was clearly inspired by Clarence Nash’s Donald over at Disney. MGM didn’t have a huge stable of voice actors; there isn’t much of a need for one when half your cartoons feature characters that don’t talk. So Hanna and Barbera brought in someone new who could provide the appropriate duck sound, and that someone was Red Coffey. Barbera must have loved the duck character because it was brought back again and again until the studio closed seven years later (it also sounds like Coffey doing the “meow, meow” in Tex Avery’s Ventriloquist Cat, but I’ve been told it’s actually Harry Lang).

How Hanna and Barbera found Coffey, or whether he was already known around Hollywood as someone who did duck impressions, is one of those big mysteries I have been unable to solve. But Coffey could do much more than a duck. He was a nightclub comic, and a big enough one in 1950 to land a gig at the original Club Bingo in Las Vegas (the famous Sahara was built on the site in 1952). Through the ‘50s, Coffey was in an act with singer Jerry Wallace. Heres’s a picture of them at the Casbah nightclub (location unknown); Coffey is on the left and Wallace on the right. The two also had nice little solo careers. Wallace found himself with some hits on the country chart in the latter part of the decade and starred in Corn’s-A-Poppin’ (1956), a feature film filled with self-conscious acting and obvious, trite dialogue on a grand scale. Pardon my diversion from Mr. Coffey for a moment to link to the trailer for the movie. It has to be seen to be believed.



Meanwhile, back the ranch—and we do mean “ranch”—Coffey landed a gig on Dude Martin’s TV show on KTTV in Los Angeles, making his debut on July 22, 1953. Martin was the leader of a neat group that ventured into country swing. He later went by the name Steve Martin when he was the station’s programme director and even that wasn’t his real moniker. Coffey’s sojourn on the show was a short one. On September 16, Dude “abandoned the corny and poorly staged slapstick,” as the Long Beach Independent called it, and started loading up on less country-fied acts, like Al Martino.

No matter. Red carried on with his stage partnership with Wallace through the decade. And he made a bit a cash on the side by playing that duck in the MGM cartoons. Then, when Bill and Joe started in business for themselves and began to put together The Huckleberry Hound Show in 1958, the self-pitying duck returned—and so did Red Coffey. He turned up in the Yogi Bear cartoons Slumber Party Smarty and Duck in Luck (with a fabulous appearance by Yowp), Pixie and Dixie’s A Wise Quack and Snooper and Blabber’s De-Duck-Tives (as a Trafazian duck, no less). In the Yogi cartoons, he was known as Biddy Buddy or Iddy Biddy Buddy and not only got a marketing push by the studio, he was immortalised in song on a couple of Golden Records for kids (with Gil Mack rendering not very approximate versions of the H-B characters).

When Yogi Bear got so big, it made financial sense to spin him off into his own series, Joe and Bill looked through their company of supporting characters to find a couple to promote into their own shorts. That’s when the pathetic duck was tweaked a bit and turned into Yakky Doodle. But here’s where animation history proved to be unkind to Red Coffey. He wasn’t hired to voice the character. Instead, Joe put the call out to Jimmy Weldon, who began hosting a kids show in Los Angeles starting September 15, 1952. It featured a duck puppet named Webster Webfoot who, in a familiar-sounding story, had a voice clearly inspired by Clarence Nash’s Donald over at Disney. Webster was popular in the ‘50s and beloved today by those who saw him then. He made appearances on The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show and even cut a record. Play it below. You can stop it when the inevitable happens and it gets too annoying.



Why did Weldon suddenly come in to play the duck that had been Red Coffey’s role for ten years? The answer could be that Coffey wasn’t available. He spent part of 1960 touring in the Olsen and Johnson show Hellzapoppin’, which is about as far as you can get from either a western act or cartoon ducks (the show featured a drunk/lamp post routine by a guy billed as Ben Dova). However, Coffey did provide his duck voice at H-B a final time in the Loopy De Loop cartoon This is My Ducky Day. Red appeared in the credits. But cartoon history continued to be unkind as his name was misspelled. The misspelling was picked up years later by people compiling information about cartoons and has been disseminated all over the internet (if he was ever credited at the end of the old Huck half-hours, the credits have been lost to history).

The Oxnard Press-Courier of June 16, 1961 reveals a gig at a high school grad (along with other acts) at the Elks Club and bills him as “the voice of Huckleberry Hound.” At this point, the Coffey trail turns cold. I can find no specific references to him after this so it is anyone’s guess whatever happened to him. At one point, some lame comedian on the internet decided to put up one of those joke entries on an Anyone-Can-Post-Anything site and that non-information started making the rounds as if it were undisputable fact. If anyone can share any biographical facts about him, please do. Perhaps animation history can yet be kind to the career of Red Coffey.

Augie Doggie — Peck O' Trouble

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – George Nicholas; Layout – Walt Clinton; Backgrounds – Art Lozzi; Story – Mike Maltese; Story Direction – Alex Lovy; Titles – Lawrence Goble; Production Supervisor – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Augie, Fly, Woodpecker – Daws Butler; Doggie Daddy – Doug Young.
Music: Hecky Krasnow, Phil Green, Jack Shaindlin, Harry Bluestone/Emil Cadkin, Spencer Moore.
First Aired: week of March 7, 1960 (repeat, week of September 5, 1960).
Production: Quick Draw McGraw Show M-024, Production No. J-76.
Plot: Doggie Daddy deals with income tax and a pesky woodpecker.

One of the things that made Hanna-Barbera a success in the early days was the studio was able to take a bunch of familiar cartoon elements, stir them around, and come up with something new. There’s a lot of stuff in this cartoon you’ve seen before. Just to name a few—a heckling woodpecker (Woody), running far away up a hill to make a noise (Avery’s Rock-a-Bye Bear or Deputy Droopy), an ending with a living creature chewing on a pencil to sharpen it (Woody’s Termites From Mars).

Doggie Daddy dealt with hecklers before in Crow Cronies and Good Mouse Keeping. This time, though, we get George Nicholas’ expressions. You’ve seen them in other cartoons. The small-pupilled stunned look.



One drawing of a nice scare take.



Part of a goofy sneeze take. Augie actually develops nostrils.



Augie races away but leaves an outline of himself and then outline follows him in smear lines. Nicholas uses a lot of this effect in the cartoon. He does the same thing with the woodpecker.



It appears Mike Maltese didn’t quite have enough material to round out the story so he added some silly business at the start before he got into the plot. The woodpecker doesn’t show up right away. First, Doggie Daddy gets a headache doing his taxes. Then, a fly with noisy feet lands on his tax forms and starts walking around. Daddy uses a fly-swatter to scare him off. The fly has nothing to do with the story and doesn’t appear again. It’s like Maltese enjoyed the concept of a fly with noisy feet, so he put him in the story to pad for a bit of time.



And I suspect Maltese quickly churned out the story in this one. If he had more time to develop dialogue, the woodpecker could have been as facetious as the crow or as non-sequitur-ish as the mouse in the cartoons mentioned above. A lot of dialogue strikes me as fairly obvious instead of funny, though I like how when the woodpecker is surveying all the wooden furniture in the Daddy home, gives matter-of-fact descriptions, then says “Chair à la Louis” like it’s some French dish (real French would be “au Louis” but that sounds more Irish than French). The best lines are when Daddy is working on his income tax because they’re a parody of something that sounds all too familiar:

Daddy: Let’s see. The expenditures here on Form 12B are only deductible if Form 12B happens to be Form 11C.

While all this calculating is going on, the woodpecker flaps down onto the window sill, sees the furniture and realises he’s “hit the wooden jackpot.” For the sake of the plot, Maltese now sets aside the fact woodpeckers don’t actually eat wood. The bird enthusiastically demolishes a pile of property, injuring Doggie Daddy on the way. The list:

● A chair (à la Louis).
● A stand holding up a plant vase.
● A piano (“No, I won’t do it. I’ll fight it. I’ll be strong. I .. will .. not .. do .. it.” Pause. “Lucky me. I lost!”).
● A baseball bat tossed by Daddy (turned into a boomerang which returns to bash Daddy in the snout).



● Part of the floor (Daddy falls through).
● A sledgehammer handle (the hammer part falls on Daddy’s head).
● Part of the outside wall.
● The garage (except for the door, which falls on top of Daddy when he lifts it up).



● A ladder Daddy is climbing (“This time, you’re a gone goose of a dead duck of a woodpecker,” cries Daddy. Daddy falls to the ground).

You’ll notice how Doggie Daddy’s injury changes from one eye to the other.



Daddy waves the white flag to surrender. Yes, once again, we have another cartoon in which Augie can keep his new friend for 99 years (“Make it 98 years,” corrects the woodpecker. “I don’t want to, you know, wear out my welcome”). But Doggie Daddy wins in the end because he can use the woodpecker in his home. And he’s deductible.

Daddy: After all, how many people can say they have a real, live woodpecker pencil sharpener in da house? Ha ha ha ha.

There’s a great little oboe and sweet potato cue when the fly is buzzing around and scrunching on Daddy’s desk. Reader Steve Carras guessed correctly that it’s by Hecky Krasnow, who was a vice-president of a subsidiary of Sam Fox Publishing as of 1957, and whose music was published in the Fox library. The last cue is similar to Jack Shaindlin’s “Sportscope” but is still unidentified by name.

0:00 - Augie Doggie main title theme (Curtin).
0:24 - GR-65 BUSH BABY (Green) – Daddy does taxes.
1:02 - SWINGING GHOSTS (Krasnow) – Fly scene.
1:17 - GR-454 THE ARTFUL DODGER SHORT BRIDGE No 1 (Green) – Daddy “noisy feet” line, Augie has to sneeze.
1:29 - LFU-117-1 MAD RUSH No. 1 (Shaindlin) – Augie rushes outside to sneeze.
1:35 - L-1158 ANIMATION COMEDY (Moore) – Augie tippy-toes past Daddy, sneezes, Daddy in ceiling.
1:44 - CB-89 ROMANTIC JAUNT (Bluestone-Cadkin) – Daddy does taxes, woodpecker looks inside home, eats chair, woodpecker talks to Augie.
2:37 - SIX DAY BICYCLE RACE (Shaindlin) – Woodpecker eats stand, Augie runs away with vase.
2:46 - CB-89 ROMANTIC JAUNT (Bluestone-Cadkin) – Daddy talks to Augie in bedroom.
3:05 - THE HAPPY COBBLER (Krasnow) – Augie talks to woodpecker, woodpecker eats piano, Daddy tosses baseball bat.
3:53 - fast circus chase music (Shaindlin) – Bat flies through air, turned into boomerang, clobbers Daddy, Daddy falls through hole in floor, bashed with sledgehammer, woodpecker skids into garage.
4:57 - SIX DAY BICYCLE RACE (Shaindlin) – “Look, pop, I’m scared, I’m scared!”, door falls on Daddy, ladder scene.
6:06 - GR-65 BUSH BABY (Green) – Augie rushes to Daddy, Daddy surrenders, woodpecker sharpens pencil.
6:51 - LAF-6-16 SPORTSCOPE-ish (Shaindlin) – Daddy talks to audience.
7:08 - Augie Doggie end title theme (Curtin).

How Hanna-Barbera Cartoons Are Made

50 years ago today, the CBC aired a profile of the Hanna-Barbera studio. Here’s the TV listing from the Montreal Gazette about it.

Cartoonists Star Hour-Long “Close-Up”
In Hollywood, Anoinette Bower examines the work of two men who turn out eight film cartoons a week; in Canada, Douglas Leiterman seeks out the secrets behind a vast network of eavesdropping by wire tapping; in England, Elaine Grand delves into the problems surrounding Paul Robeson.
These are some of the subjects that will be discussed when Close-Up moves into its hour-long summer format starting Tuesday, July 4 at 10 p.m. EDT on the CBC-TV network.
On the opening program of the summer edition, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera are hosts to Antoinette Bower amid the hectic but “big happy family” atmosphere of their vast studios in Hollywood. They discuss the teamwork involved in creating such famous characters as Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Quick Draw McGraw and The Flintstones.
On the same program, Close-Up’s Bob Quintrell interviews Charlie Schultz [sic], creator of the comic strip, Peanuts, at his rural California estate.
A report on wiretapping, and interviews with people who make their living by this illicit trade, is being directed by Douglas Leiterman, for showing on Close-Up, July 11. Elaine Grand’s interview with Paul Robeson will be shown at the end of August.
Other subjects for Close-Up studies include two young entertainers, Anne Bancroft, star of the Broadway play The Miracle Worker, and Peter O’Toole, who has been selected to play the title role in the movie Lawrence of Arabia; Morocco; India; euthanasia; and June Callwood’s interview with Ethel Waters in California.
A series of profiles on prominent Canadians will be conducted by Percy Saltzman and shown on Close-Up throughout the summer.

You can watch part of the segment below. It’s a shame the CBC never posted the whole thing (or the segment with Schulz). The bald man taking a big drag off a smoke at the beginning is Alex Lovy, working on a storyboard. I don’t know who the Yogi animator or the left-handed Flintstones background guy are.

Yogi Bear — Bear For Punishment

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Gerard Baldwin; Layout – Tony Rivera, Backgrounds - Joe Montell; Story – Warren Foster; Titles – Lawrence Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Yogi, Man in 3rd Cabin, Presto, Sam, Dad – Daws Butler; Narrator, Boo Boo, Woman in 1st Cabin, Woman in 2nd Cabin, Sam’s Wife, Man Opening Trunk, Little Girl, Ranger Smith – Don Messick.
Music: Spencer Moore; Geordie Hormel; Jack Shaindlin; Bill Loose/John Seely.
First Aired: week of November 30, 1959 (rerun, week of June 20, 1960)
Episode: Huckleberry Hound Show K-033, Production E-85.
Plot: Yogi makes a magician turn him invisible so he can steal picnic baskets.

Gerard Baldwin is the only animator hired by Hanna-Barbera in the 1950s who is still with us. He may be best known for his time at the Jay Ward studio—he left to direct for Ward in 1959 after what seems to have been a disappointing stint at H-B—but he drew two Yogi Bear cartoons in the second season, and at least one in almost all of the other series in the 1959-60 TV season.

His Yogi is certainly distinctive. The bear develops a huge, rubbery muzzle and a stretched neck during dialogue in three-quarters view. There are spots where Yogi seems a little dumpier than usual. And the humans in this cartoon talk with their mouth and jaw lines moving to the side of the face.



Tony Rivera laid out this cartoon. There seem to be more head shots than usual during dialogue scenes. His magician’s rabbit has a nice, simple design (and appropriate confused look) and the littering tourist we see at the beginning of the cartoon has thick glasses similar to the ones Rivera gave the director in Show Biz Bear. Joe Montell’s backgrounds are similar to what he built for Papa Yogi, with outlines of firs and dots to represent blooms at the top of bushes.



Some of Warren Foster’s cartoons take a while to get into the basic plot or change directions a bit along the way, and this is one of them. Almost the first half is taken up with Yogi’s attempts to con food from tourists in cabins and the rest of the cartoon involves stumbling upon a magician and the end result—invisibility, outright thievery, being too smart for one’s own good, and finally becoming a... well, you read the title of the cartoon for yourself.

Five of the thirteen Yogi cartoons on the second season of The Huckleberry Hound Show open with narration and animation-saving camera pans, and this is one of them. It quick sets the scene that it’s spring, so bear hibernation time is over and it’s time for some food. As in Rah Rah Bear, Foster fits in his opinion of tourists—they’re inconsiderate slobs. One in a car tosses a can that rolls into Yogi’s cave and wakes up the bear.

Yogi: Tourist season is officially open. They just threw out the first tin can! On your feet. We’re gonna eat.

Yogi and Boo Boo hit up a couple of cabins, pulling the “working my way through college,” “hungry bear” and “health inspector” bits to no success, reminiscent of the Woody Woodpecker cartoon Fodder and Son (1957). Even though Boo Boo voices his concern about violating park rules, he’s the one who suggests the last con to Yogi. Foster’s script is undermined by the choice of music. Daws Butler’s pity delivery just doesn’t mesh with the happy Jack Shaindlin tune in the background. The Vic Lamont arrangement of Winter Tales used in other H-B cartoons would have fit here nicely.

We’re almost three minutes into the cartoon and now Yogi spots Presto the magician’s trailer. Preston gives a demonstration of his abilities by making a rabbit appear and disappear with the words “Nom de plume,” though Presto’s accent isn’t quite French. The best part of this little sequence is Boo Boo is more clued in than Yogi. “It’s just a trick,” he keeps saying as Yogi insists the appearance and disappearance is magic (“Hey, hey! The rabbit went away” and “That funny trick is pretty slick”). Yogi gets a brilliant idea (“I was afraid of that,” the annoyed Boo Boo remarks). He gets Presto to make them “invisible bears among the visible pic-a-nic baskets. What a fate to cogitate” (Foster seems to have gone overboard on the rhymes). Presto warns them if they don’t return he’ll be forced to make them visible.

Now we get eating gags. The hungry Yogi is only shown by little sunbeam-like lines that indicate mouth noises (the same sort of thing was used for sound coming out a car radios on H-B cartoons) as he chomps down the tourists’ food before the tourists can get to it. “The ranger isn’t going to like this, Yogi,” warns Boo Boo in his immortal words. The first tourists are surprised with the disappearing food. The second one is afraid and drives away. The third ones are the funniest. Foster maintains the ‘bored father’ idea that Charlie Shows and Joe Barbera used in the first season. Dad is resting against a tree. His daughter is reading. “Daddy...our picnic basket just got up and floated away singin’,” says the girl. The sarcastic dad just lays there. “Oh, sure. These kids nowadays.”




The calls start pouring in to the ranger station. “How do you know it’s a bear if you didn’t see him?” Ranger Smith asks one caller. That’s actually a good question. Nevertheless, the callers get interrupted when the ranger looks out the window and sees a basket float by. Baldwin has him do a squint/turn-head/open-eyes take in four drawings on twos. The best line of the cartoon from Foster as the suddenly-woozy ranger rocks his head back and forth.

Smith: I’m sick. Too much fresh air. Babbling brooks. Pines. That’ll do it every time.

Foster once explained how Yogi has to get a comeuppance in every film where he’s doing something wrong and it happens here. He has a cave full of picnic baskets but gets greedy and wants one more. Unfortunately, after his last theft, the bears are made visible again. Yogi refuses to listen to the warnings of Boo Boo that the ranger can see him. And clobber him (off camera; we see Boo Boo wince) as Yogi makes faces at him.



“How lucky can you get? One swing and he hits an invisible bear,” the surprised Yogi remarks as he and Boo Boo are behind bars. The ranger feeds them nuts and berries. Baldwin reuses a squashed face expression to end the cartoon.

A lot of the familiar Bill Loose and John Seely music isn’t in this cartoon. We do get the weird tick-tock/Pop Goes the Weasel cue from Spencer Moore.

0:00 - Yogi Bear Sub Main Title Theme (Curtin-Hanna-Barbera)
0:13 - ZR-50 LIGHT UNDERSCORE (Hormel) – Trailers enter Jellystone, can tossed in cave.
0:36 - LAF-27-6 UNTITLED TUNE (Shaindlin) – Yogi wakes up, begs at two cabins, Yogi walks into third cabin.
2:15 - TC-437 SHOPPING DAY (Loose-Seely) – Health inspector bit doesn’t work, knocks on Presto’s trailer door, “A friendly bear.”
3:04 - L-75 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – Presto makes rabbit disappear, makes Boo Boo disappear.
3:46 - L-1121 ANIMATION NAUTICAL (Moore) – Yogi gets Presto to make Boo Boo reappear, Yogi gets idea.
3:55 - L-80 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – “I was afraid of that”, Preston makes bears invisible, Sam says “Oh, boy!”
4:42 - ZR-48 FAST MOVEMENT (Hormel) – Watermelon eaten, Yogi grabs thermos and picnic basket, steals girl’s picnic basket, Ranger answers phones.
5:45 - harp sound – Picnic basket floats by Ranger’s window.
5:49 - ZR-49 LIGHT EERIE (Hormel) – Ranger in cabin.
5:58 - L-1139 ANIMATION COMEDY (Moore) – Cave scene, bears reappear, “But Yogi!”
6:28 - L-992 ANIMATION CHILDREN (Moore) – Yogi tells Boo Boo to be quiet, makes faces at ranger, clobber sound.
6:41 - LAF-74-2 LICKETY SPLIT (Shaindlin) – Yogi and Boo in jail.
6:58 - Yogi Bear Sub End Title Theme (Curtin-Hanna-Barbera).

Yogi Bear, Sunday, July 1961

Let’s check out what Yogi Bear was doing in the comics 50 years ago this month. Once again, the artwork is (I suspect) by Harvey Eisenberg. It’s a shame these black-and-white scans from photocopied newspapers don’t do it justice.

Ranger Smith never said anything bad about Boo Boo, so it seems a little out of character that he’d pick on Boo Boo in this cartoon from July 2 (July 1 in Canada; newspapers published on Saturdays, not Sundays).



The wealthy guy in the July 9 cartoon has the same build as Barney Rubble (nose excepted). I don’t understand why he’s got all that food when he obviously isn’t going to eat it. Yogi’s “cur” rhyme seems a little forced.



Gene Hazelton or whoever wrote the July 16 comic was obviously familiar with 14 Carrot Rabbit (1951), where Bugs Bunny gets a funny feeling whenever gold’s nearby, Yosemite Sam cons his way into a partnership with the rabbit, then grabs all the gold for himself. I’ll take the Bugs cartoon, thanks. You can’t duplicate that great animation of Bugs “feeling” gold in a couple of panels.



Augie Doggie drops in on July 23. Harvey loved having at least one panel with a character in silhouette and here he’s got some in black and another in white. I like that he varies the angle on Augie’s car.

Augie was not part of The Yogi Bear Show so this was his first appearance with Yogi. He made an appearance on the all-star ‘Yogi’s Birthday Party’ (with Doggie Daddy) but that didn’t air until October 2, 1961. I really like this comic because it has the feel of one of those cartoons-between-the-cartoons that ran on the Huck, Yogi and Quick Draw shows.



Some nice layouts highlight the comic from July 30. I like the varying perspective from panel to panel. Plot elements are familiar; the writer has borrowed pieces of the premises of Scooter Looter (1959), where Yogi accidentally starts a scooter on a wild ride and Loco Locomotive (1961), where Yogi takes the Jellystone kiddie train on a ride (this comic pre-dates the latter). Add in an element of Bewitched Bear (1960), where Yogi destroys the Ranger’s cabin and is forced to rebuild it.



As usual, the top row of panels is missing from all these comics. You can click on any of them to enlarge them.