The Unknown Adventure of El Kabong

Six Quick Draw McGraw cartoons were made in the series’ final season, 1961-62. Three of them featured El Kabong. But there was another one planned that year.

In hunting around the nooks and crannies (especially crannies) of the internet, I’ve come across an almost complete storyboard for an El Kabong adventure with the production number J-133. There’s no title on it, and no hint if this was a story by Mike Maltese (I suspect it is) or who drew the board. What I do know after checking various copyright records is there is no J-133 in my list of Hanna-Barbera productions. J-132 is “Hand to Mouse” (an Augie Doggie cartoon) and J-134 is “Person to Prison” (with Snooper and Blabber). But J-133 is missing. So, either the cartoon was never made or never aired.

The board is missing one set of nine panels, but you can follow along with the plot nonetheless. The story includes a return of the (Typical Western) Rancher’s Daughter, and a reference to Pat Pending, which made me think of the character in “Wacky Races,” written on occasion by Maltese. Baba Looey proves to be a master of disguise in this one and gets a scene all to himself.

You can click to enlarge any of the sheets.

I’m sure as you read the dialogue, you’ll hear Daws and Jean Vander Pyl (and maybe Doug Young as the prospector). The music, by the way, would have been by Hoyt Curtin; the stock music was jettisoned by the final Quick Draw season.

If anyone has any more information about the storyboard, I’d love to hear about it. Thanks to Sherm Cohen for the head’s up on this.

Augie Doggie — Big Top Pop

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Gerard Baldwin; Layout – Bob Givens; Backgrounds – Joe Montell; Story – Mike Maltese; Story Sketches, Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voices: Augie Doggie – Daws Butler; Doggie Daddy – Doug Young.
Music: Jack Shaindlin, Phil Green, Hecky Krasnow, Harry Bluestone/Emil Cadkin, unknown.
First Aired: week of Oct. 26, 1959 (rerun, April 25, 1960)
Episode: Quick Draw McGraw Show M-005, Production J-29.
Plot: Doggie Daddy tries to please Augie by being a circus performer.

Doggie Daddy was no Wile E. Coyote but you can’t notice a bit of a resemblance in a few of his cartoons, like this one. Daddy engages in a series of blackout sight gags of tasks that end in complete failure, with the longest one at the end. Of course, there’s no Wile E. nefariousness at play. Daddy’s just going through stunts trying to please his son, much like he did in “Tee Vee or Not Tee Vee.”

Writer Mike Maltese once told historian Mike Barrier he had a whole supply of Coyote gags ready to use and I have to wonder if he dipped into his files and quickly put a bunch of them together, then moved on to the next cartoon. Maltese is known for his odd wordplay but there isn’t a lot of it here, just the sight gags, as if he didn’t have time to craft a lot of funny lines. Unfortunately, limited animation doesn’t always help sight gags, but dialogue can make up for it. So what we’re left with is an average cartoon as the audience watches Dear Old Dad suffer yet again.

This cartoon also features a pairing-up of two guys who soon ended up at the Jay Ward studio—animator Gerard Baldwin and background artist Joe Montell. Baldwin’s telltale trait at animating dialogue is here; he moves the mouth way up and in on the snout.



And you can pick out Montell by the dots that he uses to represent buds on plants.



Baldwin only worked on a few cartoons at Hanna-Barbera while Montell seems to have lasted through the 1959-60 season.

The cartoon opens with satchel-carrying Augie bidding farewell forever to “tops of the pops” “who’s been more than a mother to me.” He’s running away to join the circus. Fortunately, Daddy’s been reading a book on “child sick-i-cology” telling him to “go along with the gag until he finds a new interest.” So that’s what happens. Daddy says he’s running away, too, but makes the mistake of saying they have to work up an act because Augie walking on his ears isn’t enough. The whole set-up scene takes up a minute and 45 seconds so it’s like Maltese is padding a bit.

Let’s go through the gags. Whether Dear Old Dad got his circus supplies from Acme, I don’t know, but some seem to be the same kinds of things Wile E. Coyote bought.

● Daddy tests out a wire-walking act. He drops the balance pole to lighten the weight and ends up bashing into a tree branch overhead, over and over.

● Daddy lifts off on a teeter-board and somersaults times. He’s supposed to land in a chair but goes through the chimney of the house instead. The camera shakes on a background drawing of the chimney and there’s crashing sound effect, followed by a puff of smoke. Not even a cut to a wasted Daddy with a quip.



● Daddy attaches a wheel to his nose to go upside down on a zip line with Augie standing on his feet. When they reach the ground, the momentum buries Daddy. Maltese evidently had “Whoa, Be-Gone!” (1958) in his mind. That’s the cartoon he wrote at Warners where Wile E. Coyote uses a wheeled helmet to zoom upside-down on a wire.

● A clown act is deemed safer. Augie hides in a fake firecracker. When Daddy lights it, Augie pops up and squirts him in the face with a water pistol. “Instead of a large kaboom, we got a little squoit. Heh, heh, heh” says Daddy, sounding like he’s rehearsing lines. Augie pulls the trigger. Kaboom. Daddy to audience: “I tink we all knew dat was gonna happen.”

There’s an animation choice here that puzzles me. There’s an explosion and a drawing of Doggie Daddy after the initial blast (see below left). Here’s not even singed. But then after a couple of alternative black and white frames, Daddy’s all marked up. Why isn’t he blackened a bit right after the explosion?



● The two are on trapezes (don’t ask what they’re hanging from) that collide. Daddy drops to the ground. Again, the crash is a camera shake, a sound effect and Augie closing his eyes and putting his feet together.

● The big finale. A 100-foot dive into a trampoline, “then poor Dad, uh, dear Dad” is supposed to bounce into a cannon and be shot into a safety net (footage is taken up with a pan over the lawn to the net). The blackened Daddy never makes it out of the exploding cannon.



Ah, but Augie’s through with the circus and has another interest—“just like dem sick-o-lo-logical books said,” as Daddy tells us—raising crocodiles in the bathtub. Daddy tells us before the iris out, “After tryin’ ta raise a boy, I tink I would welcome crocodiles.”

Jack Shaindlin wrote a bunch of newsreel music perfect for stories about circuses and sports events, and some of it makes its way here. There’s a medium march with a second half that sounds a lot like his “Sportscope” but it’s not the same music. The trapeze music was heard in the Huckleberry Hound cartoon “A Bully Dog” the same season. The sound-cutter tends to use longer pieces for the gags and Phil Green shorties if there’s reaction dialogue.

0:00 - Augie Doggie Main Title theme (Hanna-Barbara-Curtin)
0:25 - EM-107D LIGHT MOVEMENT (Green) – Augie says he’s leaving forever.
0:56 - GR-74 POPCORN (Green) – Daddy puts nose in child psychology book, decides to humour Augie about the circus.
2:10 - LAF-6-16 SPORTSCOPE-ish (Shaindlin) – Pole gag.
2:48 - rising scale music (Shaindlin) – Teeter board gag.
3:28 - GR-457 DR QUACK SHORT BRIDGE No 1 (Green) – Daddy talks to Augie.
3:43 - fanfarish music (?) – “Once again” scene of Augie and Daddy.
3:50 - fast circus chase music (Shaindlin) – Daddy on zip-line, skids into ground.
4:00 - GR-346 FIRST BUDS (Green) – Augie talks to Dad.
4:09 - THE HAPPY COBBLER (Krasnow) – Clown act.
5:07 - trapeze music (?) – Trapeze scene, Daddy and Augie crash into each other.
5:24 - CB-83A MR TIPPY TOES (Bluestone-Cadkin) – Daddy falls below.
5:30 - LAF-6-16 SPORTSCOPE-ish (Shaindlin) – Trampoline scene.
6:31 - GR-74 POPCORN (Green) – Daddy calls from inside cannon, “I’ve got another interest now.”
6:50 - GR-77 CUSTARD PIE CAPERS (Green) – “It woiked!” Daddy talks to camera.
7:09 - Augie Doggie End Title theme (Curtin).

A Cel-ebration

There was a time that cartoon studios threw out old cels, much to the later chagrin of former employees who saw it happen. There was a time they were given away; Tex Avery used to hand neighbourhood kids cels of his Kool-Aid TV spots. And there was a time a whole industry popped up to sell them, in some cases even attempting to reproduce scenes in ancient cartoons.

But there are still some originals out there for you to buy and a couple of spots on the internet advertise their wares. You can do a web search and find them. I did some time ago and have some shots of what may be fairly familiar scenes from Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

Here are a couple from the opening of the half-hour Quick Draw McGraw show from 1959. I’ve never really looked closely enough to see who did the animation.




Here are Pixie and Dixie. This is from the final season cartoon “Mouse Trapped.”



This one’s from the closing of ‘The Magilla Gorilla Show.’ There’s a version of this on line and you can really notice the difference in the colour from what was actually painted on the cel. Magilla (not in this cel) has a Don Patterson eye squint but I don’t know who the animator is.



Jane, stop this crazy thing! Well, these cels from ‘The Jetsons’ closing haven’t reached that part of the scene. Hey, here’s a question. Did the Jetsons’ cat have a name? Maybe Baby Space-Puss?




Okay, this isn’t a cel. This drawing is advertised as an Ed Benedict version of the early Snagglepuss. The stripes and hat seem odd for Snag, because his proto-type in the Quick Draw McGraw and Augie Doggie cartoons of 1959 and 1960 don’t have them.



I wondered whether this was actually Toing Tiger. Never heard of Toing? Then click onto these great drawings of Toing, along with Mayka-Boo-Boo the Elephant, at Mark Christensen’s site. 2025 note: This site no longer exists. H-B veteran Scott Jeralds says the characters were used in the ill-fated “The World: Color It Happy.” If you’re a Hanna-Barbera fan, you’ve probably seen the snippet of the unsold pilot (minus Toing Tiger) on-line, with Art Gilmore as the voice of Joe Barbera and Billy Idelson (of the old radio show “Vic and Sade”) as Bill Hanna. If you haven’t, take a look.



Here is a Toing model sheet by Iwao Takamoto and Jerry Eisenberg. I imagine this came from Mark's site.

Yogi Bear, Weekend Comics, June 1962

You’d think that the people at Hanna-Barbera would know their own characters’ names, especially when they have their own cartoon series. But someone slipped up when writing the weekend Yogi Bear comics 50 years ago this month. Somehow, Doggie Daddy became “Augie Daddy.” Ah, well. We’ll get there in a moment.



Ranger Smith takes a break in the June 3rd comic. But Yogi has a food con going on with some incidental characters. You think Snoop Dogg was influenced by Yogi rhyming “fizzle” and “chisel”?



The same artist (Harvey Eisenberg?) is back on June 10th, judging by the trees. Partying high school students return to the comic, these one from Glendale, California. I wonder if Leonard and Julie are named after real people. I don’t know if the near-sighted ranger (can you hear Don Messick doing him?) appeared again; it’s his first time in the weekend comic. A couple of silhouette drawings add some variety.



The Father’s Day comic with Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy isn’t too readable, but you can see the characters match the way they looked on the TV show. You can’t see it too well, but there’s a little bird sticking out of the hole in the ‘r’ in “Bear.” There’s snow on the peaks of Jellystone on June 17th. The park’s got to be pretty high up.



The June 24th comic has a small resemblance to the short “Bears and Bees” (1961), where Ranger Smith gives Yogi crap for becoming soft and eating “man’s food.” Yogi unhappily heads to the woods to forage but brightens when he sees a bee and some honey. He doesn’t eat the honey, he trades it in for man-type goodies from tourists. This comic takes the “man’s food” and bees in another direction for a solo gag.

As usual, you can click on them to make them larger. I’ve snipped these together from two papers so you can see the top row this month. The scan quality isn’t very good due to bad settings when these were originally photocopied. With luck, Mark Kausler will have them in his collection and you can see what they looked like in the paper in colour on his blog. Click on any to enlarge.

Yogi Bear — Oinks and Boinks

Produced and Directed by Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna.
Credits: Animation – Don Patterson; Layout – Walt Clinton; Backgrounds – Bob Gentle; Story – Warren Foster; Story Director – Alex Lovy; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voices: Yogi, Wolf, Malcolm Pig – Daws Butler; Edgar Pig, Stanley Pig – Don Messick.
Music: Bill Loose/John Seely; Spencer Moore, Geordie Hormel; Jack Shaindlin.
First Aired: week of September 26, 1960.
Episode: Huckleberry Hound Show K-40.
Plot: Yogi and Boo Boo get conned by the Three Little Pigs into taking over their straw and stick houses.

Chuck Jones once remarked that when Warren Foster and Mike Maltese left Warner Bros. for Hanna-Barbera, the Warners shorts they wrote started showing up at H-B. Jones likely had “Oinks and Boinks” in mind.

The cartoon has its direct descendant in “The Windblown Hare,” written by Foster and released by Warners in 1949. Bugs Bunny is conned by the Three Pigs into moving into their straw, then their stick houses, knowing “the book” says the Wolf will blow them down. The Wolf refers to “the book” throughout the picture as he is obligated to follow its pre-determined outcome. Then there’s a twist at the end as Bugs gets even with the pigs. It’s one of director Bob McKimson’s best Bugs cartoons.

“Oinks and Boinks” has a watered-down version of the same story. But there are necessary differences and not just because of the limited animation. The starring characters don’t have the same temperament, so their reactions are different. Bugs is an aggressive character. Yogi Bear is not. Bugs inflicts violence to get laughs. Yogi does not. Unlike the Warners cartoon, the pigs here are not sleazy con-men looking for a quick buck from a patsy; they give their homes to Yogi. It plays into Joe Barbera’s comment over the years that the bad guys in Hanna-Barbera cartoons really weren’t all that bad.

This cartoon is similar to the previous season’s “Hoodwinked Bear,” right down to the Phil Silvers-inspired Wolf going along with “the book”. Both are enjoyable cartoons. “Hoodwinked Bear” has neat Art Lozzi backgrounds and better animation than this one, but I like the story structure better here.

The only thing that bothers me is some of the stock music. It’s probably because I’ve seen so many Fractured Fairy Tales on Rocky and Bullwinkle with Daws doing his Silvers takeoff. The Jay Ward cartoons have no music and that makes the voices stand out (and the dialogue barrels along in them because the cartoons are half the length of an HB cartoon). The music here is low-key, doesn’t quite match the mood and distracts a bit from Foster’s lines.

Don Patterson is the animator here and gets boxed in a bit by Alex Lovy’s low-key approach to directing. There’s an opportunity for some really good takes in here, but Lovy’s timing lets them rush by without letting them sink in; because they’re not really wild takes, they need more time to establish. Here are a couple of drawings by Patterson. A nice anticipation drawing but the wide-eyed take gets lost because it’s only on four frames and the mouth moves in the third one.



There’s a bit of animation that gets re-used. Patterson gives the Disney Practical Pig stand-in (he has an engineer’s hat) a wink in a couple of scenes. And you can tell Patterson’s at work here because he has the characters biting their lip on the letter “f.” Ed Love animates dialogue similarly and both use more than three head positions when a character is talking, but Patterson’s work is a little smoother. Both use teeth but Love has some distinctive tooth positions.



There’s other reused animation, too. The Wolf inspects the straw house, then the stick house, looking for pigs, walking past Yogi and then talking to him in close-up. I didn’t count the frames but there are whole chunks where Yogi’s reactions appear to be repeated in both; only the background is different. Here are some examples.




The Wolf blowing down the houses is reused as well. Considering the actions in the story are identical, identical animation would seem okay for television.

Yogi gets in his rhyming couplets (along with his catchphrase about “av-er-age bears”). When he’s offered the straw house for free, he responds “It may look a fright, but the price is right.” When he’s offered the stick house for free, it’s “Hey, hey, this is our lucky day.” When they arrive at their cave: “Just a hole in the wall, but it’s home after all.” And after getting their cave back, Yogi ends it with “And a happy ending in bed we’re spending.” Foster was more poetic with rhymes than Charlie Shows in the first season. Shows would rhyme pairs of words, like “Take it on the lam, Sam” (regardless of whether a character was named Sam). Foster, however, borrows a line from Shows when Yogi remarks of the pigs “There go two of the good ones.”

The best part of the cartoon is the malcontent Wolf, who gets more and more annoyed as the cartoon wears on and deviates from “the book.”

Boo Boo: Why do you want the pigs, Mr. Wolf?
Wolf: “Why do I want the pigs, Mr. Wolf” the kid says. Oooh, boy. How sheltered a life can you live? Okay, okay. Nothing to do but go on. I will do my part.

And at the end, when he chases the pigs out of Yogi’s cave, after letting out distinctly Bilko-like “Hey, hee, hi, hut, ho” orders:

Wolf: What do you think you’re doing? Get back there and build that house so I can huff and puff and try to blow it down. I want to frustrate myself, like it says in the book.

As mentioned, Yogi and Boo Boo move into the two houses, which the Wolf blows down with the bears in them. Finally, the pair spot their cave—and discover the pigs living in it.

Stanley: Yeah, we’re going to live here.
Malcolm: My practical brother got the idea.
Edgar: I’m so practical I couldn’t see the sense of building a brick house, what with, uh, building permits and all that red tape.
Stanley: After all, we gave you two houses.
Malcolm: So we knew you wouldn’t mind giving us this one.

Edgar’s design may be borrowed a bit from Disney’s Practical Pig, but the voice is borrowed from Pixie.

Cut to the Wolf reading the book. He’s so bugged, he doesn’t know what comes next. He reads about the brick house. Off he goes, walking away like Charles M. Wolf in the Foster-written “Hare-less Wolf” (1958) at Warners, muttering to himself to twig his memory about what he’s looking for (“Bathhouse, no, no, no. Birdhouse, no...”). He comes across the unbuilt brick house. The wavy-line closed mouth on the Wolf is something Patterson would use on Fred Flintstone.



The Wolf knocks on the stone of the cave (the muffled sound effect isn’t correct but works) then we get another wasted take when Yogi bears out of the cave. Not only does Lovy only hold the take to four frames, Yogi is talking while it’s happening, completely moving the attention away from the Wolf and his take.

“Pigs? We’re up to here with pigs. You want pigs? Be my guest,” says Yogi. Again, the bear’s not being revengeful like Bugs Bunny in “The Windblown Hare.” There’s no nastiness. He’s courteously answering a question, though he full-well knows he and Boo Boo will get their cave back. And that’s what happens at the end.

Ranger Smith is not in this cartoon, the only one in the third season where he doesn’t appear. He wouldn’t have fit anyway. There was only one other cartoon after this where he was absent as Foster and his successors stuck with an established formula.

Evidently, Hanna and Barbera liked the idea of a Phil Silvers-sounding wolf as that’s what they got in Hokey Wolf when they needed to replace Yogi Bear on the Huck Hound show.

I mentioned the music earlier. The last cue seems a little inspired by “London Bridge is Falling Down” so it works in a fairy tale format. I’m guessing, because of the muted trumpets and sound quality, it’s a Jack Shaindlin cue. And the medium-up tempo “Shining Day” by Bill Loose always works in establishing a scene.

0:00 - Yogi Bear Sub Main title theme (Curtin, Hanna, Barbera)
0:25 - ZR-50 UNDERWATER SCENIC (Hormel) – Yogi and Boo Boo walking.
0:51 - TC-436 SHINING DAY (Loose-Seely) – Pigs talk, give house to Yogi
1:36 - L-80 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – Wolf outside, searches house, blows down house.
3:19 - GROTESQUE No 2 (Shaindlin) – Pigs talk, give house to Yogi.
3:57 - L-75 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – Wolf outside, searches house.
4:59 - LAF-5-20 TOBOGGAN RUN (Shaindlin) – Wolf blows down house.
5:11 - LAF-27-6 UNTITLED TUNE (Shaindlin) – Yogi and Boo Boo walk to cave, pigs inside.
5:49 - C-14 DOMESTIC LITE (Loose) – Wolf reads book, talks to Yogi, goes into cave.
6:49 - happy muted trumpets (Shaindlin) – Pigs run out of cave, Yogi and Boo Boo in bed.
7:10 - Yogi Bear Sub End Title theme (Curtin).