Where is Bedrock Anyways?

For years, people watching The Simpsons have kiddingly debated in which U.S. state Springfield may be found (most fans suggest, considering the quality of the show for a long time, it should reside in a cemetery). Viewers of The Flintstones can rejoice that there is an answer to the location of Bedrock. It’s in Thailand.

Want proof? Reader Evan Borisinkoff has sent a note about a resort in Thailand where, according to this CNN web story, “guests can stay inside buildings shaped like Fred, Wilma, Barney, Betty and Dino.”





But, wait a rock-pickin’ minute! Bedrock’s not in Thailand. It’s in Iraq.

In hunting around the internet for more Flintstones news, I came upon the rather startling revelation that Saddam Hussein was a fan of the Modern Stone Age Family. And he even built a Flintstones Village for his grandkids. So among his evil deeds is not getting licensing permission from Hanna-Barbera.



You can find out a bit more in the caption to the photo above at this North Dakota news web site.

But, wait again! Bedrock may be in Australia. At least, Fred’s car appeared in a local charity bed race, according to this news story. But wait some more! It may be in Glasgow. At least some Flintstones were spotted there, also raising money for charity, according to this news story.

One thing’s for certain—the Flintstones continues to have a worldwide appeal more than 50 years after they were created. No doubt, their owner hopes that translates into big money with the coming remake by the Family Guy guy (which we’ve actually heard little about lately.

My thanks to Evan for the tip.

A Real Yogi Christmas

You’ve heard me complain about unentertaining H-B Christmas specials with characters wearing skunk hats and on and on. But the Yuletide season is supposed to be about caring and giving. So allow me to give you a real Hanna-Barbera Christmas adventure.

Okay, this is kind of like re-gifting. I’d rather say that than “pilfering.” This comes from the nice blog “Golden Gems” which was posting scans of Little Golden Books. A year ago, we reposted pages from one of the Yogi Christmas books uploaded there. This is from another, “Yogi Bear Helps Santa”, copyright 1962. It was drawn by Lee Branscome, who provided background art for the original Jetsons and Jonny Quest shows. Read along or just enjoy the drawings.


















If you’re interested in old Little Golden Books, check out Barbie’s site HERE. It’s a shame family matters have forced her to stop blogging but it’s nice of her to leave up her old posts.

The folks at Golden Books brought you Golden Records, and here’s where we go from the sublime to the you-know-what.

This time, I’m re-gifting from myself. I posted this a year ago. Golden came out with a Yogi Bear Christmas record in 1961, with both sides written by Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera and Sylvia Parnes. Faithful readers know Daws Butler and Don Messick had an exclusive record contract with Colpix, so someone else had to be found to voice Yogi and Boo Boo, someone in New York where the Golden Records were pressed. The city had plenty of voice actors doing commercials, Allen Swift was probably the busiest. Golden had its own little stock company of actors and the man assigned to try to replicate the sound Daws’ and Don’s characters was Frank Milano. Unfortunately, doing so was not among Frank’s many gifts. Listen to them at your own peril.

HAVE A HAP-HAP-HAPPY CHRISTMAS



GIVE A GOODIE FOR CHRISTMAS



The last couple of Christmas Days, we’ve posted cartoon music from the Capitol Hi-Q library. I wish I could do the same this year. But I’ve not been able to find any more music from the cartoons. The late Earl Kress and I held out hope that more of Jack Shaindlin’s music from the Langlois Filmusic library would surface somewhere but, unfortunately, that just hasn’t happened. Collectors of stock music tend to go for English and European labels, not American, so copies of Langlois discs are extremely rare. We’ll have to substitute another type of H-B Christmas bonus instead.

Ripping Good Holiday With Huck, Yogi and Jinks

Huckleberry Hound and his tele-mates are as loved in the U.K. and they are in North America. And here’s a bit of concrete proof.

It’s ceaselessly amazing that people around the world not only read this blog, but some link to it. One of those readers is in Scotland and his link is at KID ROBSON’S SITE. He’s posted a neat Christmas colour comic from 1960 that was part of TV Express Weekly. It features all the regular characters from the Huck show of the day.

Ranger Smith looks dreadful in a couple of panels, but the design of the old car is neat and you’ve got to love a dog from North Carolina talking about the “boot” of a car.






Kid has an interesting site for those of you into comics, and a very extensive blog roll of related sites. It’s worth taking a peek.

Alan Reed and Daws Butler Speak Today

How many people were involved with old cartoons would you love to hear from, but their time has passed and they’re no longer alive to give interviews? You’d probably stop counting after awhile because coming up with a number would be a fruitless task.

Part of the problem is a lot of people didn’t care about cartoons. Interviewers dismissed them as unworthy of their time. Well, some didn’t. Mike Barrier recorded many conversations with some of the lesser-known people in classic animation, people like Mike Maltese and Dick Bickenbach who played huge roles in the early Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Eventually, I hope, Mr. Barrier will get around to transcribing them and posting them on his site. But there’s no financial gain for him to do it, so we’ll have to wait until he gets the time and inclination for it to happen.

Someone else who did a couple of interviews, once upon a time, was an aspiring voice actor named Joe Bevilacqua. As a young man, Joe learned to use his voice from a master, Daws Butler. And he’s been using it ever since.

When we last left Joe on this blog, he was hosting a programme called ‘Cartoon Carnival’ on Shokus Internet Radio. It was a fairly eclectic, and somewhat freeform, mix of soundtracks of old cartoons, Joe’s voice work, interview snippets and other bits of audio Joe accumulated over the years.

Shokus has morphed from a streaming radio station into a two-hour live interview show on the web (with a next-to-no-cost archive of old chats).

Joe, meanwhile, succumbed to the workload of assembling and editing a weekly show, but he’s still busy on the internet and has a couple of projects that may be of interest. One to fans of The Flintstones. Alan Reed, the voice of Fred, is no longer with us, but Joe’s done his damndest to bring him back in a five-hour, six minute audio book called “Yabba Dabba Doo!: The Alan Reed Story.” From Joe’s site is gleaned this summary:

Narrated by Alan Reed Jr., Alan Reed Sr., Joe Bevilacqua, Joe Barbera, Tony Reed, Bill Marx.
The autobiography of the voice of Fred Flintstone is brought to
life by veteran radio-theater producer Joe Bevilacqua and Alan Reed Jr. This is
an enhanced unabridged audiobook of the print book features rare interviews with Alan Reed himself, an interview with Joe Barbera, commentary by Joe Bevilacqua, and clips from Reed's radio, TV, and film career, including The Fred Allen Show, The Shadow, The Life of Riley, Life with Luigi, Duffy’s Tavern, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Viva Zapata, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and The Flintstones.

Fans of old radio shows should be delighted to hear that contained within the mound of audio (if audio came in mounds) is Bill Marx narrating letters Fred Allen wrote to Reed. People may not realise Alan’s Falstaff Openshaw character was an early resident of Allen’s famous Alley; Allen used the Falstaff character to comment on political and social affairs through rhyming verse. Allen gave ownership of Falstaff to Reed when he left the show. The Openshaw voice was the one Reed used for ‘Frederick’ Flintstone in “The Split Personality” (1960).

“What’s the URL?” you’re asking. Patience, dear reader.

Joe has also combed through those mounds of audio (if I may mix metaphors) to come up with Volume One of “The Best of Cartoon Carnival.” This features Joe’s personal interviews, some of whom are no longer around to talk today: Joe Barbera, Leonard Maltin, Bob Clampett, Stan Freberg, Daws Butler, Mel Blanc, Bill Marx, June Foray, Bill Scott, Hoyt Curtin, and Craig Marin. The almost three-hour compilation show also features narration from Doug Young (Doggie Daddy) and Janet Waldo (Judy Jetson), both happily still with us today.

Give ‘em the URL? Quiet, Joe. This is my blog.

Anyway, just a sampling of the other things Joe has put together.

► “Daws Butler Teaches You Dialects. Lessons from the Voice of Yogi Bear!”
Can you possibly learn from anyone better?

► “Rare Daws Butler: Comedy from the Voice of Yogi Bear!”
Where to start? Mr. Jinks reciting ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ in his own, like, you know, cooool hipster fashion? How about Daws teaching you how to get Bert Lahr upset (ie. voicing Snagglepuss)? There’s a lot packed into under an hour of audio.

As you can see, this is stuff by the wonderful Mr. Butler that you won’t find in the Neiman-Marcus catalogue, no matter how hard you look. It’s only on Joe’s site, lovingly crafted by Joe himself. And, without wishing to make this sound like an advertisement, I’ll bet it costs less than anything in the Neiman-Marcus catalogue. And is a lot more fun.

Oh, yes, that URL. Joe’s web site is HERE. And he has a blog as well.

Alan Reed’s gone and Daws Butler is gone. But, thanks to old cartoons and radio shows, and one Joe Bev, they really are still here.

Yogi Bear — Hide and Go Peek

Produced and Directed by Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna.
Animation – Ken Muse; Layouts – Dick Bickenbach; Backgrounds – Fernando Montealegre; Dialogue and Story Sketches – Charlie Shows and Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson (no credits).
Voice Cast: Yogi – Daws Butler, Charlie, Ranger; Narrator, Joe/Melvin, Elephant – Don Messick.
Music: Bill Loose/John Seely, Spencer Moore, Geordie Hormel, Jack Shaindlin.
Production: Huckleberry Hound Show K-026, Episode E-64. (Final Yogi Bear cartoon produced for the 1958-59 season).
First Aired: week of March 23, 1959.
Plot: Yogi tries to save an escaped circus elephant from men trying to bring him back.

Bill and Joe weren’t afraid to borrow from themselves if it meant getting a cartoon series on the air, but there’s some pretty heavy lifting going on here.

This cartoon has its genesis in Jerry and Jumbo (1951), where a baby elephant falls off a circus train and rolls into the home of Jerry Mouse, who hides him from Tom by disguising him as a giant mouse. Next we arrive at the second storyline of Ruff and Reddy (1958) where the lead characters hide an escaped baby circus elephant from its violent guards. That basic idea was borrowed yet again when Yogi Bear escapes from a circus as guards hunt for him in The Runaway Bear earlier in the season.

The story structure here is pretty good. It’s treated as a tale by a narrator who intros the story, lets it play itself out, then returns at the end. There’s a running dialogue gag and some violence gags. Oh, there’s an appearance by an old cartoon law: Elephants always use their nose as a vacuum (it happened in Tom and Jerry, Ruff and Reddy, and again in 1960 when Quick Draw McGraw tried to escape a doting circus elephant).



And it also has some really nice backgrounds. Here’s “beautiful Jellystone Park” in a reassembled shot. The evergreens are sketchy, and the sponged, semi-transparent clouds with an outline around them are a nice effect. You can find the same type of cloud drawings in ‘In the Picnic of Time,’ an early Augie Doggie production with backgrounds by Monte from layouts by Bob Givens.

I asked John Kricfalusi for a quick summary about the work of the three background artists at Hanna-Barbera at this time: Bob Gentle, Art Lozzi and Fernando Montealegre. Here’s how you can tell them apart:

Bob Gentle. His sponge work is softer than Monte and Lozzi’s. Like the paper is wetter when he applies it. Also he uses a lot of colored pencil lines

Monte has generally the starkest boldest graphic look of the 3. Brighter colors

Lozzi generally has more details and likes to make a lot of patterns with flowers and leaves and stuff on top of the sponged bigger elements.

The narrator outlines the wonders of the park, including a couple of animated geysers which don’t enter into the plot (but they break up the monotony of the shot in three drawings on twos), and the camera finally comes to rest on “a fantastic formation called Elephant Rock. With this strange formation goes an even stranger story—the story of an elephant that vanished in Jellystone Park, never to be seen again.”




That’s when the flashback begins. And we’re instantly greeted with cost-saving on the screen. A circus convoy is rolling through the park. Yet the trucks are just being moved across the same background being repeated. The wheels of the trucks don’t turn; Ken Muse simply draw white bars to represent light reflecting off the hubcaps and moves the location of the bars every two frames.

As you can see in the drawing, the elephant (wearing a top hat for reasons that aren’t explained) isn’t happy and escapes. It’s not animated. There’s a shot of the two circus workers in the cab of the truck talking, a thunder sound (with the camera shaking), then a cut back to a shot of the truck with the bars broken. Not only were the workers facing backward before the shot of the truck with them facing forward in silhouette, there’s a line of dialogue and no lips are moving. It’s just a static shot. Then the shot cuts back to the two workers in the cab, facing backward. We learn ‘Joe’ is the dark-haired one.

They decide to “form an elephant posse or somethin’.” The posse consists of the pair of them and that’s it. They decide to check Jellystone Park and happen across a ranger at a station that looks more like an information booth. “Pardon me, Mac,” says the red-haired circus guard, “You see a elephant go by here?” “Uh, what colour? Stripe? Chequered? Polka dot?” asks the ranger. That’s the running gag of the cartoon.

The guards pass a thin tree. The bulky elephant peeks out from behind it then makes a dash for it. Ken Muse uses outlines and brush strokes to indicate speed.



Then the elephant disguises himself as a tree. The guards buy it. Charlie Shows’ wit: “Yeah. You can’t see the elephant for the trees.” “I gotta start wearin’ bifocals.” The elephant has eyes much like Ed Benedict would design them, not quite oval and of different sizes. But despite the Benedict-like lump on the back of the head, the guards have a Bickenbach basicness to them.

Cartoon time gets eaten up with some running cycles with Spencer Moore music underneath that doesn’t augment the action at all. And we get a name change. Suddenly, the voice of the red-haired guard (Daws Butler) is calling the other one “Melvin.” But I thought his name was “Joe.” Ah, well.

The elephant runs into Yogi’s cave and hides under the bed. The commotion wakes up Yogi who jumps out of the bed, only the drop is longer than he expected. A bunch of dialogue follows (Daws has Yogi say “Necessess-arary”). There’s with a trunk-vacuum gag when Yogi walks outside his cave to turn in the elephant for a reward, but then he decides to protect the animal when he hears the guards (we learn the red-headed one is “Charlie”) promising to give the elephant “a couple of good k-nocks.”





Yogi and the guards (“Melvin” is back to being “Joe”) chat at the cave entrance and the bear pulls off the “Stripe-chequered-polka dot” line. The guards are about to leave when they suddenly notice elephant footprints leading into the cave. They suddenly notice because they weren’t there in the part of the scene with Yogi and have magically appeared. Yogi and the elephant vamoose out of the cave’s secret exit. A secret exit from a cave?? Has Yogi been watching Batman? Or did Joe Barbera need a Deus ex machina to get him out of a plot corner? I pick the latter. Whatever the case, it gives Yogi a chance to use his catchphrase: “You gotta admit. I’m smarter than the average bear.”

The bear and elephant make a run for it and jump behind the bushes when they see the ranger coming. Muse simply uses some brush strokes to indicate the quick exit. By the way, the bushes, ground and sky colour are the same in this scene as in Duck in Luck and so are some of the tree designs in the previous background drawing. The ranger meets up with the hunting circus guards and we get the “Stripe-chequered-polka dot” line again. “This bit just don’t quit,” remarks Joe/Melvin/Joe. Oh, wait. It’s actually Charlie with the wrong voice coming out of him.

Yogi shoves the elephant up a tree. The guards show up and we get the “Stripe-chequered-polka dot” line again. Charlie gives Yogi the count of three to tell them where the elephant is. He doesn’t have to. The elephant apparently can’t hold on to a tree branch and lands on top of the pair (Yogi zips away just in time). The shot cuts to a repeat of the ranger’s walk cycle and the sound of gunfire. The pair insists to the ranger they’ve been hunting an elephant, at which point Yogi shows where the bullets really ended up (these guys must be incredibly bad shots to mistake a bear for an elephant, and a bear that doesn’t yelp in pain after being shot, at that).



The circus types are kicked out of the park by the sceptical ranger and that ends the flashback. The narrator returns. The camera pans over to the rock formation.

Narrator: Well, that’s the story. The elephant just disappeared and was never seen again. If the bear did know where the elephant was, he never told a soul. A strange story.

Suddenly part of the rock formation, shaped like an elephant’s head, turns around. Why, it’s the elephant, who informs us the story is true and laughs away like characters became apt to do at the end of many a Hanna-Barbera cartoon.

This was the last Yogi cartoon written by Charlie Shows to be aired. The following season, Warren Foster took over the writing and storyboarding of the Yogi cartoons.

All the music should be pretty familiar to anyone who likes the first season of Yogi cartoons.

0:00 - YOGI BEAR (Hanna, Barbera, Curtin, Shows) – Main titles.
0:13 - TC 204A WISTFUL COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Shot of Jellystone, elephant escapes.
0:58 - TC 301 ZANY WALTZ (Loose-Seely) – Guards at Jellystone gates, meet ranger.
1:38 - L 78 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – Elephant peeks from behind tree, disguised elephant, hides under Yogi’s bed.
2:30 - TC 432 LIGHT MOVEMENT (HOLLY DAY) (Loose-Seely) – Yogi stretches, talks to elephant.
3:12 - L 1154 ANIMATION COMEDY (Moore) – Yogi walks out of cave, sucked back in.
3:27 - TC 432 HOLLY DAY (Loose-Seely) – “Now, just a doggone minute!”, guards talk to Yogi.
4:27 - TC 202 ECCENTRIC COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – “If I could be of any help,” run out secret exit.
5:07 - ZR 48 FAST MOVEMENT (Hormel) – “Smarter than the average bear,” zip behind bushes.
5:18 – LAF-25-3 bassoon and zig zag strings (Shaindlin) – Ranger walk cycle, guards talk to ranger.
5:33 - LAF-10-7 GROTESQUE No 2 (Shaindlin) – Yogi shoves elephant up tree, elephant lands on guards, shoots at Yogi.
6:30 - LAF-4-1 FISHY STORY (Shaindlin) – Yogi points to butt.
6:41 – LAF-25-3 bassoon and zig zag strings (Shaindlin) – Closing narration.
6:59 - YOGI BEAR (Hanna, Barbera, Curtin, Shows) – End titles.

Bill and Joe and Tom and Jerry and Ruff and Reddy

This post isn’t intended to be a history of the start-up of the Hanna-Barbera studio or Ruff and Reddy, let alone a definitive one. Such would require more time to flesh out than I’m prepared to spend, and more space one would tolerate for a simple blog post. And Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera both wrote books giving their recollections of how it happened anyway.

Hanna bragged about being an unequivocal Hugh Harman-Rudy Ising loyalist, sticking with them when they left Leon Schlesinger in 1933 for half-starvation and then MGM—until Fred Quimby made him an offer four years later and he walked out on them. Barbera was enticed by Quimby through a couple of intermediaries to forsake Paul Terry’s studio in New York and come to MGM. The two teamed up as directors (as Barbera remembered it, “I said to Bill: ‘Why don't we try a cartoon of our own?’”) and came up with the first Tom and Jerry cartoon Puss Gets the Boot, released in February 1940. Neither Hanna nor Barbera are credited but, remarkably, their identities were revealed in an Associated Press story less than three months after the cartoon was released. The only version I’ve found has no byline.

Introduce New Cartoon Technique
Hollywood. May 4—(AP)—A very entertaining cartoon making the making the rounds deserves some belated attention. It’s [sic] title is “Puss Gets the Boot.”
We here get so accustomed to seeing the “credits” at the beginning of pictures, looking for names of neighbors and fellows we have met, that when there are no names we are curious and a little disappointed.
The credits for “Puss” are conspicuous by their absence. At the beginning, it says a man named Ising produced the picture for M.G.M., but more than one person wondered who conceived the characters and the plot and directed the story. I was one. And, in addition, told it with such simplicity that it will not confuse children—nor bore adults.
The answer is a pair of young fellows Joe Barbera, who used to work in a bank in New York, and Bill Hanna, who started his film career as a janitor in a cartoon studio the day after he got out of high school.
From now on, because Puss is so good, Joe and Bill are a team of producers and they will have their names in large letters on every moving picture they make.

Office politics weren’t in short supply at the MGM cartoon studio in the late ‘30s and they waft from this story. Ising and Hugh Harman were re-hired by MGM only as a last resort after being fired and it seems clear Fred Quimby decided, or was told, to line up some potential replacements as soon as he could. This newspaper story would certainly be a slap in the face to Ising and a tacit but public message that a new, rising team had arrived—and was responsible for “his” work.

Seven Oscars and 14 Academy Award nominations later, things couldn’t have looked better for Hanna and Barbera. Or the MGM cartoon studio. From Boxoffice magazine of June 4, 1955:

MGM to Double Output of Cartoon Department
HOLLYWOOD—Concurrent with its projected upsurge in feature film production, MGM is doubling the output and personnel of its cartoon department and henceforth will turn out 18 pen-and-ink subjects annually, all in CinemaScope and Technicolor.
Hal Elias, associated for 18 years with the production and distribution of MGM short subjects, has been upped to manager of the cartoon division, headed by Fred Quimby, who is leaving on an extended vacation.
At the same time Joseph Barbera and William Hanna, writer-director team on the “Tom and Jerry” series, were promoted to full producer status and will supervise all of the 18 planned cartoons. Nine will be in the “Tom and Jerry” group, six will star “Droopy” and the balance will be adapted from published works.

According to Barbera’s autobiography, Quimby made his vacation permanent after announcing his retirement to the studio staff in early 1956.

But MGM was in turmoil. Trade papers reveal a merry-go-round of top-level executive changes and shareholder unrest. And then came a phone call to Hal Elias. At least, that’s how Bill and Joe remember it. Boxoffice explains what happened in its issue of December 22, 1956:

MGM Halts Production Of Cartoons Temporarily
While much of the industry’s limelight during recent weeks has been directed toward Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, its executive personnel and its future program, Leo’s cartoon department is getting set for a complete shutdown—not because the mighty Metro is going to stop the production of animated subjects, but due to the fact that the studio reportedly has a two-year backlog of shorties, and the front office brass considers that a halt should be called while some of this finished celluloid is absorbed by the market.

Barbera once mentioned another reason; old MGM cartoons could be re-released (and had been since November 1947) and make the studio 90% of the profits of new cartoons, with only the cost of printing and distribution to worry about. MGM had been booking a compilation of shorts (live action and animated) called the Tom and Jerry Cartoon Festival only several months earlier, complete with promotional manual for theatre owners.

So Hanna and Barbera got together and formed their own company. And they either went to, or got an offer from, the man who directed Anchor’s Aweigh (1945), for which Hanna and Barbera supplied animation of Jerry dancing with Gene Kelly. From Boxoffice of July 13, 1957:

George Sidney Organizes Cartoon Production Firm
Columbia executive producer George Sidney has announced plans to branch out into the production of cartoons with the formation of H.B. Enterprises, Inc., under which banner he will make feature cartoon films for theatrical consumption as well as shorter television and industry products.
Associated with Sidney in the organization are former MGM cartoon toppers William Hanna and Joe Barbera, who created, wrote and directed all the “Tom and Jerry” cartoons.
The new project has no connection with George Sidney Productions, releasing through Columbia and which already has made “Jeanne Eagels” and “Pal Joey.”

Sidney’s percentage of the action was not disclosed.

So we have six and a half months between the time of the announced shutdown of the MGM cartoon studio and the formation of H-B Enterprises. When did Ruff and Reddy get created? Joe Barbera recalled in his interview with the Archive of American Television:

We went over, finally, to Screen Gems. In the meantime, I had sat home one time and I did a story, I boarded it, and I created a dog and a cat, called ‘em Ruff and Reddy. And my daughter Jayne who’s 12 years old, she put the color on them.

Barbera created it? It just may be the idea germinated months before the MGM announcement and Joe Barbera didn’t have a thing to do with it.

Keith Scott’s wonderful book The Moose That Roared reveals that Bill Hanna entered into a partnership with MGM’s other cartoon director—Mike Lah, who was married to Hanna’s wife’s twin sister—in a company called Shield Productions. As a side note, a third partner was MGM background artist Don Driscoll, a buddy of Ed Benedict’s who had been working on CinemaScope remakes of old Tex Avery cartoons. Scott’s book says Shield was working on resurrecting the first real made-for-TV cartoon, Crusader Rabbit. But there was more than that. Shields had several shows in production. Guess what one of them was? The U.S Government Catalog of Copyright Entries shows the following:

SHIELD PRODUCTIONS, INC.
Ruff and Reddy, 2 v. © Shield Productions, Inc.; 25May56; A238905-238906.

But these weren’t actual cartoons. What was copyrighted was two volumes in book form. So were these synopses of cartoons? Unless someone actually goes through the records, we won’t know. What is clear is the idea of Ruff and Reddy—and all we have is the name and nothing else—was in Bill Hanna’s head before he found out the MGM studio was closing and that it was tied in with a cartoon house separate and apart from Joe Barbera.

Shield ran into trouble over the rights to Crusader Rabbit when the company was three months into production. That apparently ended Shield Productions. But it didn’t end Ruff and Reddy, which Hanna used to kick off his new company with Barbara. Dick Bickenbach told historian Mike Barrier that he roughed out the animation for the titles of the show the last two days he was at MGM, though no date or even month is revealed.

So, we’re back at July 1957. Days after Sidney came on board, he brokered a deal with Screen Gems, Columbia Pictures’ TV arm. The meeting resulted in an option for five, five-minute cartoons at $2,700 apiece for the first two, $2,800 each for the second two and $3,000 for the last one. And somewhere on the way, Columbia’s Harry Cohn got a chunk of the company (20% as Joe Barbera remembered it).

With capital in hand, H-B Enterprises moved into the old Chaplin studio on Highland Avenue. Then, according to Barbera’s book, Cohn mistook a pencil test for a real cartoon and ordered Mitchell to stop production for good. But Barbera goes on to say Roger Muir, the producer of The Howdy Doody Show at NBC in New York,

Heard about ‘Ruff and Reddy’ [Barbera doesn’t disclose how] and wanted us to use the cartoons much as we had originally planned—as bookends [on a new puppet show] between which hoary old theatricals would run. Muir’s offer kept us alive, and Screen Gems went ahead with the deal. Now we had to swing into production full tilt.

But the Saturday Evening Post of December 2, 1961 has a far more lacklustre version in an article on the studio:

Screen Gems, Columbia Pictures TV subsidiary, gambled $10,000 to see some sample cartoons about a dim-witted dog named Ruff and a frisky cat named Reddy. Almost immediately Screen Gems sold the samples to NBC as a series and Hanna-Barbara Productions was in business.

It’s uncanny how all contemporary stories about the studio speak of instant success, while Barbera’s recollections later in life feature a multitude of tales about a studio and characters being rescued at the last minute from more melodramatic endings than Penelope Pitstop.

Whatever the case, the NBC deal was done by early-ish November, when newspapers and trade publications started mentioning the show. From Oscar Godbout’s Hollywood news in the New York Times of November 11:

It looks as though N. B. C.’s “Gumby” show on Saturday morning may be supplanted by a pair of space-traveling animals. The network has purchased a new cartoon series, “Ruff and Reddy,”—a cat and a dog—from Screen Gems. The four-minute films will form part of a half-hour children’s program. The animated films depicting the adventures of the characters on the “Aluminum Planet of Muni-mula,” will be seen beginning next month. Each comprised of “Ruff and Reddy” installments and two first-run cartoons from the Columbia Pictures studio film library.

A Billboard story out of New York on November 18 mentioned a start date of Saturday, December 21 but the first Ruff and Reddy aired the Saturday before (December 14th), 10:30 a.m. in the East, 9:30 a.m. in the central states and 9 a.m. on the West Coast, though, if TV listings are to be believed, KRCA in Los Angeles ran something else and didn’t air the show until the 21st. The Billboard story called the studio “B&H Productions” and one newspaper referred to “Fred Hanna and Joe Barber.”

There were 12 adventures in all, each in 13 parts running about 3½ minutes. I’m loath to copy what fill-in-your-own-blank internet sites say about when each aired, but it appears the cartoons aired in first-run over the course of three seasons. They were copyrighted as follows:

September 15, 1957 (H-B Enterprises): Series ‘A’, Planet Pirates; Series ‘B’, Pinky the Pint-Sized Pachyderm; Series ‘C’, Westward Ho Ho Ho; Series ‘D’, Treasure of Doubloon Lagoon; Series ‘F’, Egg Yeggs; Series ‘G’, Scary Tale of a Canyon Trail.
September 15, 1958 (H-B Enterprises): Series ‘H’, Fantastic Phantom; Series ‘I’, Missile Fizzle; Series ‘L’, Dizzy Deputies; Series ‘M’, Spooky Meeting at Spooky Rock.
September 15, 1959 (Hanna-Barbera Productions): Series ‘N’, Sky High Guys; Series ‘O’, Misguided Missile.

There were no series ‘E’, ‘J’ and ‘K’. ‘E’ was used for Pixie and Dixie production numbers, ‘J’ for cartoons in the Quick Draw show and ‘K’ for the Huckleberry Hound half-hours.

Huck debuted in 1958 and Quick Draw in 1959, so it appears Ruff and Reddy was still in production when those two series were being animated. Quite a load, considering Loopy De Loop first appeared in theatres in fall of 1959.

The only credits I’ve ever seen on the cartoons are Hanna’s and Barbera’s.

Both Bill and Joe told how they hired many, or most, of the people who worked with them at MGM. That’s not quite the case. Credited artists at Metro in the last year were Lew Marshall, Ken Muse, Jim Escalante, Carlo Vinci, Irv Spence, Bill Schipek, Ken Southworth, Herman Cohen, Dick Bickenbach, Bob Gentle, Fernando Montealegre, Roberta Greutert, Don Driscoll (who remade backgrounds from old Avery cartoons for CinemaScope) and Ed Benedict, along with director Mike Lah. Escalante, Spence, Southworth, Cohen and Driscoll seem to have moved on. It’s unclear whether Schipek was with H-B Enterprises at the start. Lah fit in some animation and layouts for the new studio while working at Quartet. Of course, none of the uncredited assistant animators (Lefty Callahan, Joe Finck and a chap named Jerry Eisenberg among them) were needed. But uncredited background artist Art Lozzi was found a place. Brightman carried on supplying material for Walter Lantz cartoons. There was no expensive orchestra; Scott Bradley’s services were replaced by a sound cutter working with production library music. And Barbera recalled sound and camera work was originally sub-contracted. A random viewing of a handful of the cartoons in the first season shows some familiar artists at work—Vinci, Muse, Lah and Benedict among them. Charlie Shows and Dan Gordon worked on the first two Ruff and Reddy seasons, but whether they were responsible for the two adventures in the 1959 season (26 cartoons in all), or Warren Foster and Mike Maltese were (they were writing the other H-B cartoons that season) isn’t known. And it’s well-known that Daws Butler and Don Messick, who had freelanced at MGM, did all the voices on the new series.

There’s one puzzling thing in all this. Hanna’s book relates “NBC signed up to a five-year contract to produce and develop additional (italics mine) cartoon series for television,” presumably as a result of Ruff and Reddy. But what happened? The studio did nothing of the kind. Within that five year period, it created three half-hour shows for Kellogg’s (Huck, Quick Draw, Yogi), another set of cartoons for syndication (Lippy the Lion, Touché Turtle, Wally Gator) and three prime-time half-hours for ABC (Flintstones, Top Cat, Jetsons). What about the deal with NBC? Joe Barbera’s later books and interviews are completely silent on it. Steven H. Scheuer, in a syndicated column from May 11, 1958, mentions “NBC has a ten-year option on Ruff ‘N Reddy and evidently plans to continue running the show on Saturday morning” but nothing at all about that five-year contract. I’ve not researched contemporary trade publications to see if it was mentioned. It’s hard to believe Hanna was mistaken. It’s easier to believe something fell apart, the deal was torn up and Barbera couldn’t figure out how to spin this into a good-publicity cliff-hanger so he simply ignored talking about it. In any case, it’s something for historical diggers to solve.

Ruff and Reddy is not a great show. Shows goes overboard with his cheesy rhyming couplets and titles in his coy attempt to be amusing. It’s a far cry from the smart-ass dialogue Warners cartoons that smart kids could watch the same morning. Reddy is an ignorant blow-hard far too impressed with himself and who thinks fists solve anything. Audiences are supposed to cheer for that? Ruff seems to spend most cartoons either running from something or saying “Reddy’s in trouble!”; a co-star should have a bit more to him than unwavering earnestness. And why is the cat named ‘Ruff’? Wouldn’t it make more sense for that to be the dog’s name?

Elements of Ruff and Reddy were borrowed by Hanna and Barbera for later cartoons, mainly some secondary character designs and Reddy’s North Carolina hound-dog voice (Daws Butler made Huck sound a little more laconic so the two don’t quite sound the same). But Ruff and Reddy’s true accomplishment was it sparked the Hanna-Barbera empire. And, for that, it deserves a bit more than being a footnote in television history.