Ginny Tyler

She’s best known for her voice work on Disney cartoons and records, but she had a brief career at Hanna-Barbera as well.

Word has come from the Radio Enthusiasts of Puget Sound blog that Ginny Tyler has passed away.

Ginny and Nancy Wible played airhead car hops in the first season of “The Flintstones” when Fred was suckered into buying a drive-in restaurant. She got credit in the 1966 Hanna-Barbera show “Space Ghost,” playing Jan. Some of her TV credits include “The Jack Benny Program” (as a parrot), “The Joey Bishop Show” (as a baby) and “The Lucy Show” (as a sheep). She won a role as a girl squirrel in Disney’s “The Sword in the Stone” when she deciphered this characterisation instruction from director Woolie Reitherman: “She doesn't speak words but chatters away in squirrel talk, like squirrels do, you know.”

Merrie Virginia Erlandson was born August 8, 1925 in Berkeley, California. Her parents were Erland A. and Harriet Ruth (Rittenburg) Erlandson, both from Bellingham, Washington. Her brother Donald was born about a year later in Seattle. Her mother got a divorce and married Theodore H. Eggers. Ginny graduated from West Seattle High School in 1943, attended Western Washington College of Education in Bellingham, then the University of Washington Drama School. She married Lowell Studley Fenton in Seattle on July 3, 1946 after he got out of the U.S. Navy. An article on their wedding in the West Seattle Herald mentions she was already “well known in radio and dramatic circles.” She told an old-time radio newsletter her first job on radio was a cold read in 1936. Her mother likely helped her get on the air. A 1999 Seattle Times column reveals Hatty Eggers, known professionally in the 1930s and ‘40s as Harriett Adair, played piano and whistled on stage and radio and with the Paul Whiteman Band. By 1947, Ginny was co-hosting (with Al Priddy) “Make Believe Island” on KOL radio and moved into TV in 1951 with a kids’ show on KOMO. Through the years, she staged children’s plays and taught acting to youngsters.

Ginny provided voices on recordings by the wonderful Spike Jones. She also appeared in “The Maltese Bippy.” Well, we all have our duds.

Here’s a column about her from the National Enterprise Association, dated December 7, 1964.

WALKING ZOO
Versatile Voice Keeps Ginny Busy
BY ERSKINE JOHNSON
HOLLYWOOD - The crow of a rooster down on the farm gave Ginny Tyler a career in show business.
What's her line?
Ginny suspects she could even stump those expert panelists.
Who ever heard of an attractive young lady with a talent for vocal imitations of dogs, cats, birds and most of the animals from the aardvark to the zebra?
Well, now you have, because that’s Miss Tyler’s line.
Even a Worm
She collects three figure salary checks for vocal imitations. When not barking, chirping or howling on cue for television shows, she also imitates crying babies, little boys and several dozen cartoon characters. She even provides the squeaky little voice of a worm — the early worm on a Los Angeles rise and shine TV show.
What’s more, she does her job so well she once even received a fan letter from Walt Disney.
The letter arrived after she invented a new language — “Squirrel talk” — for one of his movies. For Ginny it was easy.
She has been imitating birds and animals all her life. “Naturally talented,” she laughs, in saying that she was only 10 when she imitated that rooster’s crow on her grandfather’s farm near her home town of Seattle, Wash.
Works With Lucy
Normally she performs her odd vocalizing off camera and directly to a sound track, which cutters then match to film. But now and then she is hired for a show such as Lucille Ball’s, which is filmed with an audience. For “Lucy Gets The Bird,” to be seen on CBS-TV Monday night, Ginny is the voice of the talking bird which motivates the plot. Not wanting her to be seen, the show’s producer hid Ginny, along with a microphone, under the bleachers where the spectators sit. It was the only place where she could remain unseen yet still have a view of the stage to await her cues.
“It was comfortable," she quips, “but almost a disaster—several pairs of ankles kept getting in my way.”
Joins Walt Disney
As a University of Washington student, Ginny told kiddie stories featuring her trick voice on a Seattle TV station. Then Disney heard about her and brought her to Hollywood as hostess on the Disneyland portion of his Mickey Mouse Club. “For a year,” she says, “I was LIVE from Disneyland.”
For pretty Ginny, always heard, seldom seen, the year was a happy one.
She uses her trick voice occasionally for laughs away from the cameras. When a fellow wolf-whistled at her one day on a Hollywood street corner, Ginny Tyler gave him the surprise of his life.
She BARKED back.
“A wolfhound bark, naturally,” she laughs.

And this is from the Pasadena Star-News, November 5, 1964.

CHILDREN LOVE IT
Star of ‘Aladdin’ Always in Fine Voice
By RAY DUNCAN
The ability to chirp like a cricket, while dressed like a mouse, is one of several talents which have made Ginny Tyler famous among children.
But children hereabouts are accepting her performance at Pasadena Playhouse in “Aladdin and His Genii,” in which she is neither mouse nor cricket. She is the 2,000-year-old genii who merges in a cloud of smoke from the wonderful lamp when it is rubbed by Aladdin.
For more than a year she wore mouse-ears as a hostess and story-teller on Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club on television. She also wore the word “Ginney” [sic] written across her sweater. One of her specialties, as a story-teller, was imitating assorted voices and sounds of birds, animals and insects, especially crickets.
Crickets and Weather
She says that her studies of the sounds made by real crickets convinced her that the chirp proportionally faster as the weather grows hotter. From this data she developed a theory which may someday go down in scientific history — perhaps as Ginny’s Law.
If says “If you count the number of chirps a cricket makes in a minute, divide that number by two, and then add 20, you will have the temperature.”
She insists that it really works. Not all of her work has been that weighty. She had done many voices and irreverent noises for Spike Jones and his orchestra, the noted madmen of music. She has also done hundreds of saner sounds for Disney movies, for other cartoon makers and recording groups, and for a long procession of television commercials. Not merely her voice, but all of her, recently appeared in a major role in the movie “The Sword and the Stone.”
One-Woman Cast
She got her start in show business, and simultaneously worked her way through college in Seattle, by enacting all the voices on a radio story-show for children. Sometimes she was a one-woman cast of 20 or 30 characters, whom she also directed from her own script.
She is almost equally involved in “Aladdin,” which is being offered as a richly-costumed, fully-staged production with more that 30 players on the Playhouse stage. She is co-author of the script, and she has one of the two starring roles with Derrik Lewis. She sings, dances, and acts, but she gets to use only one of the approximately 900 voices and accents she is known to command.

Ginny lived in North Hollywood, then Toluca Lake before returning back home to the Pacific Northwest, the same area where Doug “Doggie Daddy” Young retired and the one-time home of the lovely Janet Waldo. You can read a bit about her in the Issaquah newspaper from a couple of years ago HERE and THIS column in the West Seattle Herald.

I See By the Papers

Hanna-Barbera licensed its characters all over the place, it seems, and got all kinds of free advertising, thanks to stores taking out space in newspapers. Let’s peer in some old papers from the ‘60s and see what we can find.

What do you think the young Quick Draw McGraw fan would like Santa to bring him/her for Christmas in 1960? Well, the answer’s pretty easy if mom or dad opened up their daily paper. Newman’s in Emporia, Kansas pushed a whole slew of board games for Christmas 1960. The ones by Milton Bradley were probably familiar to kids because of TV advertising, like The Game of Life and Concentration. And then there was this one.



The newspaper copy reads: “Milton Bradley’s QUICK DRAW McGRAW right out of his TV show. Private Eve game features all his friends. Snooper, Doggie Daddy, Blabber, Ba-Ba Looey and Augie Doggie. 4 tokens, 48 cards, spinner and playing board. 2 to 4 players, ages 5 to 12. $2.00.”

I wonder if Bick designed the cover.

Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and Pixie and Dixie became spokes-cartoons for Solo Stores in Winnipeg. Did Hanna-Barbera approve? Well, the characters are on model in one ad from February 1960.



The copy reads: “The whole family will rise and shine when you set a delicious and so nutritious breakfast before them! It’s the only way to start a day. Ask Yogi Bear—he’ll tell you that the best "Goodies" come from Solo.” And, naturally the store sold Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.



Huck shows up in a full-page institutional ad for U.S. Steel in September 1960. It’s titled “Watching America Grow with Lowell Thomas” and is formatted like a newsreel. There’s a picture of Thomas and snapshots of various spots representative of economy growth in America, including a musical instrument factory, a medical school, a motel, and the company that made Huck dolls.



There’s no connection of a mention of steel with any of these businesses; there’s just a U.S. Steel logo in the corner. The caption reads: “Yogi Bear and the boys should he proud of the mark that Huck made for himself in the financial world. Here at Knickerbocker Plastic Co., Inc., the Huckleberry Hound plastic banks are one reason why their toy sales are up 12% this year—and Huck is also one reason why production in the entire plastics industry is up 10% over 1959.”

Yogi Bear makes an unlikely appearance in the Muscatine Journal’s “Recipe of the Week column on February 15, 1961. We learn how Mrs. Abbey Logel makes her Graham Cracker Dessert and that her four year old son “John likes to spend his time playing with his Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear toys.” A wise child.



It looks like the Yogi dolls came in bigger-than-the-average size. The Fox Hospital paediatric ward in Oneonta, New York had a large Yogi and a smaller Boo Boo (with a huge tie) donated. The photo, and this scan-from-photocopy isn’t great, is from the local paper, November 16, 1960. There’s no story, just the photo caption.

Yogi Bear, Weekend Comics, July 1962

Yogi Bear’s rhyming dialogue can get a little tiresome, especially when it seems obligatory rather than clever, and it looks like the writers in Gene Hazelton’s comics staff at Hanna-Barbera agreed. One of them made fun of the idea in one of the weekend strips.

The month of July 1962 featured Boo Boo, Ranger Smith and some incidental characters. Everyone else in the H-B world was on a summer holiday somewhere else than Jellystone. We’ll get to see a bunch of them next month (sorry, no Mr. Jinks or meeces, though).



In the July 1 comic, the writer parodies Yogi’s rhyme in the opening panel of the top row which many papers never published. We learn Ranger Smith’s name is Frank. Everyone seems to think his name is “John.” Is that one of those post-facto things, like Chuck Jones naming the orange running-shoed monster “Gossamer” years after the first cartoon with it was released? I don’t recall Ranger Smith referring to himself other than “Ranger Smith” in the original series. And Smith’s wife is a nameless blonde in this one.

A shame Mr. Ranger doesn’t have one of those rods with a pair of scissors to untangle the fishing line like in Tex Avery’s “Field and Scream.”

I like the angular layout of the silhouetted jeep in the second panel.



The July 8 comic has Yogi getting his revenge on a guy who ridicules his incompetence. See? He really is smarter than the average bear.



A great drawing of a leaping Yogi in the second panel of the July 15. The cartoonist was also as adept at drawing a jetliner as he was with the characters. And at a rear angle, too. He uses a different angle when drawing Yogi and Boo Boo swimming in the final panel. Nice hula dancer and a great expression of Yogi; much like the way George Nicholas drew him for the TV cartoons.



Would Yogi really say “Great Scott”? (And who was “Scott” anyway?) Well, he did in the July 22 comic. More cute kids.



On TV, Jellystone Park had a white-haired superintendent, at least in a few of the cartoons. In the comics, it has a head ranger who apparently has only one open-mouth position. He appears in the July 29 comic. What’s with these rangers anyway? They tell Yogi to eat bear-type food, and when he does, he’s in trouble. No wonder he rebels.

Boo Boo isn’t needed in this cartoon, so he’s absent. Apparently he has his own cave or is sleeping in a separate bed from Yogi this time.

Yogi dealt with bees in several cartoons, notably “Bears and Bees,” where he sells twig-filled bottles of honey, and “Queen Bee for a Day,” where Boo Boo gets stuck in a queen bee costume. No bees in filing cabinets in either, though.

The quality of the comics isn’t great this month. Photocopying dark colours doesn’t provide pleasing results. Well, at least that technology is somewhere in the past, thanks to scanners. As you might guess, the top rows of each comic came from one paper (the only one I could find with them) and the bottom two rows from another. You can click on them to make them bigger.

Snooper and Blabber — Monkey Wrenched

Produced and Directed by Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna.
Credits: Animation – Gerard Baldwin, Layout – Bob Givens, Backgrounds – Joe Montell, Story – Mike Maltese, Story Sketches – Dan Gordon, Titles – Art Goble, Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Snooper, Blabber, Monkey – Daws Butler; Manager, Wife, Wellington – Don Messick.
Music: Phil Green, Jack Shaindlin.
Episode: Quick Draw McGraw Show M-17, Production J-44.
First aired: week of January 18, 1960 (rerun, week of July 18, 1960).
Plot: Snooper is hired to find a pet Globobian monkey in a supermarket.

There was once a cartoon called ‘Ride ‘Em Bosko,’ which ends with the cartoonists in live action not being able to think of an ending to the short and walking off camera. Writer Mike Maltese seems to have had a mental block and a similar admission in this cartoon. Snooper skates into a pie held by a monkey he’s chasing. “Say, Snoop,” says Blab. “I didn’t know it was time for lunch.” Snooper responds, with hands held out, “I’ll think of a smart answer later.” Maltese wrote all 78 cartoons in the 26 shows of the first season of ‘The Quick Draw McGraw Show,’ so he can be forgiven when he occasionally gets stuck for an idea.

There are some cute dialogue bits in this cartoon, along with the usual Snooper and Blabber formula and catchphrases and an ending out of nowhere. Maybe the best part of the whole cartoon is the odd character design of the picked-on little husband by Bob Givens. And you’ve got to like how his bossy wife has the famed Hanna-Barbera 5 O’Clock Shadow.



Gerard Baldwin is the animator working with Givens in this one. He had a tendency at H-B to animate characters with their mouths way up in the face in three-quarter view. And the characters have thick necks that stretch down into their clothing.



Snoop shows his origins with the first line of the cartoon. For those of you not up on your old radio shows, Maltese, Daws Butler and whoever else at Hanna-Barbera patterned Snooper after Archie the bartender on ‘Duffy’s Tavern,’ played by Ed Gardner. Archie picked up the phone to open each week’s show with the words “Duffy’s Tavern, where the elite meet to eat...” Daws borrows Archie’s voice and his catchphrase at the opening of the cartoon (after the obligatory shot of an eyeball drawing on an office window) when Snoop picks up the phone and answers with “Snooper Detective Agency, where the indiscreet meet defeat.”

Maltese really stretches it a bit in the opening with dialogue that deserves to be ridiculed on screen after it’s said, but is treated like real funniness instead. Snoop is offered $5,000 to catch an escaped monkey. “Hey, for that kind of money, I’ll be glad to be a monkey’s uncle.” Then he tells Blab “There’s monkey business afoot.” At least Maltese skipped a reference to barrels.

Blab gets all excited and prattles on and on when he hears the case is “a 906.” He did the same thing in another cartoon. I presume this is Maltese trying to make it appear Blab really is a “blabber-mouse” but the blabbing aspect was never really a character trait.

Snoop: Quiet. Now, tell me assistant, what’s a 906?
Blab: How do I know, Snoop? I’m only your assistant.

I sure wish there were decent versions of the Snooper and Blabber cartoons available somewhere; you’ll notice the colour is pixilated on these screen grabs. I like some of the stylised settings Givens comes up with, like the supermarket and the street with parked cars in the cartoon’s next scene. The stripe on one car is very Fairlane-ish.



Snoop mingles “with the bandages and the cold cuts” while Blab talks to the store manager with Don Messick’s floorwalker voice that has a hint of Frank Nelson’s famous “Yes?” man on the Jack Benny show (without the squealing). Blab asks him where he keeps his loose monkeys. “Under ‘M’, of course,” he replies facetiously. And that’s where the monkey is. Blab sticks him in a paper bag and takes him to the manager to tell him the monkey was indeed under ‘M.’ The manager is sceptical until the monkey pops his head out of the bad. “I wonder if ‘Head Shrinker’ is under ‘S.’ I need one.”

Blab rushes to Snoop and starts blabbing “I found the pet Globobian monkey you told me to keep quiet about.” “I’m glad you’re doing such a loud job of it,” Snoop replies. While all this is happening, the monkey’s escaping. Catchphrase time: “Folly that paper sack!” and “Halt in the name of the Private Eye Lacrosse Team!”



The rest of the cartoon is pretty much a chase with the monkey outsmarting Snooper. First, the critter puts gum on the floor to stop dead the shopping cart Snooper’s travelling in. Next, he and Snooper strap on bars of soap for the aforementioned skating/pie scene (“I’ll take the polish off his monkeyshines”). Next, Blab corners him at the top of a cash register. The monkey opens the till to bop Blab. Then, it’s “monkey sees-monkey does.” Snoop knocks himself on the head with a hammer, hoping the monkey will copy it. He does, but not hard enough to knock himself out. Snoop demonstrates with the natural end result.

Finally, the scene cuts to the shrew wife and meek husband Wellington. She wags her finger at him and tells him not to move while she looks at the kumquats. When she disappears, the monkey switches his fez for the little man’s hat, grabs his shopping cart and takes off. The shrew is so stupid, she thinks the monkey’s her husband and runs after him down the street, threatening him for daring to move.

Well, if the monkey’s going to pretend to be a man, Snoop decides the man is now a Globobian monkey and calls its owner to claim the reward. Says the man to the audience, “Gosh. I sure feel sorry for that monkey.” Cartoon ends. It’s impossible to tell if Snooper really thinks the man is the monkey but it’s irrelevant.



Snooper and Blabber cartoons always seem to end with Phil Green’s ‘Custard Pie Capers.’ This cartoon doesn’t. But we get Green’s ‘Dr Quack’ back-to-back on the sound-track, the sound-cutter cuing into the middle of the tune the first time it’s heard. And two of Jack Shaindlin’s three ‘Mad Rush’ cues get used twice.

0:00 - Snooper and Blabber Main Title Theme (Hanna-Barbera-Curtin)
0:25 - CRAZY GOOF (Shaindlin) – Shot of office building, office scene.
1:14 - GR-93 DRESSED TO KILL (Green) – Snoop and Blab walk to store, talk to manager, interrogate monkey.
2:42 - LFU-117-3 MAD RUSH No 3 (Shaindlin) – Blab pushes monkey in cart.
2:52 - GR-74 POPCORN (Green) – Blab talks to manager, Snoop peers into cart.
3:47 - LFU-117-1 MAD RUSH No 1 (Shaindlin) – Monkey runs, chews gum.
4:20 - ASININE (Shaindlin) – Monkey tosses gum on floor, skates with soap, Snoop puts soap on feet.
4:57 - LFU-117-3 MAD RUSH No 3 (Shaindlin) (Shaindlin) – Snoop skates after monkey, Snoop face in pie.
5:31 - GR-456 DR QUACK (Green) – “Meanwhislt, folly that monkey!” Snoop with hammer, Snoop sticks out tongue, bashes himself on head.
6:25 - GR-456 DR QUACK (Green) – Wife hectors husband, monkey exchanges hats, wife yells at monkey.
6:44 - LFU-117-1 MAD RUSH No 1 (Shaindlin) – Woman chases after monkey.
6:52 - fast circus chase music (Shaindlin) – Snooper leads husband away.
7:10 - Snooper and Blabber End Title theme (Curtin).

Andy Griffith and Huckleberry Hound

It seems like a logical conclusion. Hanna-Barbera borrowed voices of stars for its characters—Ed Wynn, Art Carney, Bert Lahr, Jimmy Durante, Ed Gardner, Desi Arnaz, Phil Silvers, for example—so why wouldn’t the studio have Daws Butler borrow Andy Griffith’s voice and stick it in a lazy blue hound? Even John Fink in his column in the Chicago Tribune of October 25, 1958 noted the resemblance, and Griffith hadn’t achieved his huge fame on television at that point. And you may recall the immortal words of son-of-a-cartoon-character-thief Roger Myers, Jr. on “The Simpsons”:

Animation is built on plagiarism! If it weren’t for someone plagiarizing ‘The Honeymooners,’ we wouldn’t have ‘The Flintstones!’ If someone hadn’t ripped off ‘Sergeant Bilko,’ there’d be no ‘Top Cat!’ Huckleberry Hound, Chief Wiggum, Yogi Bear? Andy Griffith, Edward G. Robinson, Art Carney.

Griffith’s death at the age of 86 has provided a good opportunity to lay to rest that theory once and for all.

Tim Lawson and Alisa Persons, in their book The Magic Behind the Voices (2004), interviewed Daws himself on the subject:

Though Hanna-Barbera claims that Huckleberry Hound was based on Andy Griffith, the voice was actually based on William Harwood, a North Carolina man who was a veterinarian and next-door neighbor of Butler’s future wife, Myrtis.
"Myrtis was from Albemarle, North Carolina. When I was in the navy, I’d hitchhike home on the weekend and this fella would be sitting on the front porch next door. He'd see me come panting just to see Myrtis, and he'd say (in a drawl), ‘Hi, Daws! Come on up and sit down. We’ll talk a bit.’ I’d say, ‘Well, maybe a half an hour or an hour.’ Anyway, he kind of stuck in my head. I was in the navy then, but I put him in a little separate box. I didn’t even realize I was doing it. Then when Huckleberry Hound came along, there he was!”

Now, Daws Butler wouldn’t lie to you, would he?

Just in case there are any doubts...

Daws borrowed Huck’s voice all, right. He borrowed it from himself. Daws used a lower-key version of his North Carolina drawl while employed at the MGM studio for the director that wasn’t named Hanna or Barbera—Tex Avery. He put it in a wolf character for the first time in “Three Little Pups,” released December 26, 1953. Avery was already gone from the studio; Mike Barrier reveals in his book “Hollywood Cartoons” that Avery’s unit was disbanded on March 1, 1953. Daws, obviously, would have recorded the soundtrack before that; the film is even copyright 1952. What was Griffith doing then? Not much that anyone would have known about. He shot to national fame only after the release of his first comedy record, and that wasn’t until after December 9, 1953 when Capitol bought the rights to it for $5,000.

So, yes, Hanna-Barbera reworked celebrity voices in the early days. And, yes, Huckleberry Hound’s voice has the same accent and is in the same range as Andy Griffith’s. But, no, one isn’t based on the other. Daws Butler came up with it on his own, with the help of a real-life “Pet Vet.”

Huckleberry Hound — Pet Vet

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Carlo Vinci; Layout – Dick Bickenbach; Backgrounds – Dick Thomas; Story – Warren Foster; Story Director – Alex Lovy; Titles – Lawrence Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Huckleberry Hound – Daws Butler; Narrator, Kitten, Lion – Hal Smith.
Music: Geordie Hormel, Bill Loose/John Seely, Jack Shaindlin, unknown.
First Aired: week of Jan. 18, 1960 (rerun, week of July 11, 1960)
Production No. K-036
Plot: Veterinarian Huck treats a lion with a sore tooth.

This cartoon has the Huckleberry Hound everyone thinks of, the good-natured guy who gets pounded around a bit (and comments to the audience about it) but kind of wins in the end.

Huck has his problems with animals, doesn’t he? Setting aside more dog-like dogs stealing his steaks or stopping him from delivering the mail, he got attacked while trying to rescue a kitten and tame a lion in season one, and in this cartoon he’s assailed by a bulldog and another lion.

There isn’t really a lot to say about the cartoon, other than to quickly go through the story.



“This picture is dedicated,” Warren Foster’s script begins once again, “to the animals’ friend, the veterinarian.” The camera trucks in to Dick Thomas’ background drawing of an animal hospital and then there’s a pan over sick animals. Hal Smith lends his voice to the narrator and the kittens mewing.



Cue Huck walking down the hallway past the same emergency fire hose in the wall three times. “Animals can’t talk,” philosophises Huck, “but, um, their own way of expressin’ their feelings.” A bulldog shows his by biting Huck. We get a two-drawing shake take from Carlo Vinci, which I’ve slowed down.



The phone rings. There’s a roar on the phone. “Sounds like a im-pacted wisdom tooth,” diagnoses Huck. He strolls along the grounds of the city zoo (singing ‘Clementine’) to the lion cage. The gags:

● Huck goes in the cage and tells the lion here’s there to help. The word “help” quickly becomes a cry for one as Huck rushes from out of walled cage and pushes the door closed on the lion’s grasping paw.



● The old gag of hammering on each tooth to see which one’s causing the trouble. We get pain drawings of the lion. “Come on, now, you have to help me. Was that insensitive?” says the clueless Huck. The lion responds by throwing Huck through the door (no animation of the throwing; we see him sail through the closed door) and into a tree. “Well, we’re makin’ progress,” Huck tells the audience.

● Huck tries to hog-tie the lion to work on the tooth. The lion hog-ties Huck instead. Again, we don’t see the action; there’s just a camera shake on a background drawing of the lion cage wall and door. “First lion I ever did see that could tie a decent knot,” Huck observes.

● Soda-phan something-or-other is in a huge needle to put the lion to sleep. Yeah, you guessed it. The needle’s in Huck’s butt. There’s a ten-second hold on the same background drawing as above, with a few camera shakes. Carlo has it easy in this one.

● Huck gives the lion a hotfoot. The idea is to swoop down on a road into the cage when the lion yells and pull out the bad tooth with a pair of pliers. It sure sounds like Hal Smith yelling “Yeeeowww” for Huck here. Pan to the lion’s closed mouth with Huck inside. He pushes open the jaws. “My timin’ was off just a smidgeon,” he reckons to the viewers.

● Huck’s in the lion’s mouth pulling on the tooth. “Close your mouth a little,” he keeps suggesting to the lion. Again, you know what’s going to happen. “Open, I suggest,” yells Huck. He jumps out and makes a stretch-diving exit while the animal swipes at him with his claws. Fosters pulls a Tex Avery-type gag. “You gotta be right fast. Those lion claws are really sharp.” Huck’s feet walk away, separating him into four parts.



● Time for a game. Huck ties a string to his tooth and gets the lion to do the same. “Now, when I count three, we’ll pull the string.” The lion pulls Huck’s string and removes a tooth.

● A string from the lion’s mouth is attached to Huck’s jeep (aka “four-wheeled forsep”). Huck drives away. “When that string tightens, that old tooth is going to go, go, go,” says Huck. The camera pulls back to reveal the proud lion, string still attached to the tooth, riding in the back of the jeep. Fade to black.

You may notice when Huck first meets up with the King of Beasts, the bum tooth is on the lion’s right side, but changes to the left side when we see him in the lion’s mouth and for the rest of the cartoon.

There’s not much more to say about the cartoon. Not too silly. Not a lot of satire. Just a string of gags on a premise that probably dates back to silent film comedy shorts.

The music’s fairly typical. Two snatches of ‘Clementine’ on a small electric organ, like the kind you’d hear on radio game shows 60 years ago, make an appearance. Whether Hoyt Curtin recorded it solo, or if it’s from a production library, I don’t know.

0:00 - Huckleberry Hound Sub Main title theme (Curtin).
0:14 - ZR-45 METROPOLITAN (Hormel) – Shot of clinic, pan of dogs and cats.
0:32 - TC-432 HOLLY DAY (Loose-Seely) – Dog bites Huck, on phone with lion.
1:08 - Clementine (Curtin?) – Huck strolls in zoo.
1:17 - GROTESQUE No 2 (Shaindlin) – Lion roars, Huck goes into lion cage, runs out, closes door.
2:10 - TC-204A WISTFUL COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Huck at door, hammers on teeth, in tree.
3:10 - CB-86A HIDE AND SEEK (Cadkin/Bluestone) – Rope scene.
3:36 - TC-301 ZANY WALTZ (Loose-Seely) – Shot scene.
4:11 - TC-202 ECCENTRIC COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Huck gives hotfoot.
4:16 - LAF-2-12 ON THE RUN (Shaindlin) – Huck runs, on tree, lands in mouth.
4:34 - TC-303 ZANY COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Huck in lion’s mouth, Huck with pliers, divides into four.
5:16 - LAF-27-6 UNTITLED TUNE (Shaindlin) – Lion pulls Huck’s tooth scene.
6:11 - LAF-7-12 FUN ON ICE (Shaindlin) – Huck talks to lion.
6:23 - Clementine (Curtin?) – Huck strolls to jeep, lion nods.
6:42 - LAF-74-2 LICKETY SPLIT (Shaindlin) – Huck starts engine, lion in jeep.
6:58 - Huckleberry Hound Sub End Title theme (Curtin).