Jailhouse Yock

July 17, 2022, 7:16 am

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Remember the gag in Tex Avery’s The Peachy Cobbler (1950) where the elves hammered nails into each other’s butts? The same thing happens in one of the mini-cartoons that ended The Quick Draw McGraw Show.

The story has the characters on the show building a brick jailhouse for Quick Draw. Here’s the hammering set up, with Blabber painting on top of a ladder.



Here’s Doggie Daddy’s expression.



And Snooper’s expression. The saucer eyes are held for several frames.



Blabber falls off the ladder. It’s tough to tell with this frame recorded onto VHS but Blab leaves behind a face.



The end gag is cute and pretty much expected in a Quick Draw cartoon. The jail is built. The characters are all trapped inside. “How we get out? There is no door,” says Baba Looey. “Oh, I forgot about that,” admits Quick Draw—but they’ll be out in time for the next Quick Draw McGraw show.



Does anyone think these are Don Williams’ eyes?



Someone should be in that jailhouse because it’s crime the Quick Draw McGraw Show isn’t on home video. The 16mm footage that was dubbed onto these old VHS tapes must be around if the original negatives aren’t, and could easily be included as bonuses on a disc set if the original half-hours can’t be located.

I’m not holding out hope we’ll ever see a home release including these neat little treasures, but it’s good to know collectors have preserved some of them and are letting them be seen on-line. Thanks to Steve Hanson for this one.

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It's George Jetson's What?

July 31, 2022, 5:36 am

≫ Next: Farewell, Jane Jetson 1.0

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No, I am not wishing George Jetson a happy birthday today.

The reason is simple. There’s not a scintilla of proof that his birthday is today.

Some cartoon fans abhor a vacuum. They also love back stories, something in the early days of the Hanna-Barbera studio no one cared about. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera’s interest was making people laugh, not writing biographies or “bibles” (okay, they were interested in profits, but that’s beside the point).

So someone, somewhere, came up with the idea of spreading word on the internet that George Jetson was born on July 31, 2022. How they picked the date is beyond me, as Mr. Jetson never (as far as I can recall) celebrated a birthday at any time during the 1962-1963 season.

It is true that publicity articles before the series appeared on television set the show in 2062. But that was jettisoned (or is it “Jetsonsed”?) as it was never mentioned in a single cartoon. Why date a show that could possibly run for decades?

One good thing is coming out of all the internet chatter. It gives the Jetsons more exposure, hopefully to young people who have never seen the original series.

Not all the episodes are great, with hoary old plots about the boss coming to dinner and inept women drivers, but the show is worth watching for the futuristic designs. Astro is always funny, and there’s some good satire in Elroy’s TV Show, where activists have sucked all the entertainment (and life) out of television, and Uniblab, where a robot/computer turns out to be a corporate suck-up. And A Date With Jet Screamer features what is basically an early animated music video, courtesy of animator Bobe Cannon during his brief stay at Hanna-Barbera.

However, never it let it be said that Yowp is a wet blanket. Feel free to make this George Jetson Day and celebrate by watching some of the almost-60-year-old cartoons. Or you can listen to a few cues from the series below. I imagine these came from the collection of the late Earl Kress. Hoyt Curtin loved those end-stabs. No, I do not know why the alpha/numeric labels for the cues begin with “V.”


V300


V301


V302


V302A


V302B


V303


V304


V309


V310


V312


V313


V314


V315


V316


V317


V320


V322


V324


V326

Farewell, Jane Jetson 1.0

August 1, 2022, 2:45 am

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July 31st may not have been the birthday of George Jetson, but it was the day after the death of the first woman to play George’s wife.

Comic actress Pat Carroll died on the weekend of pneumonia at age 95.

There are some readers who may have missed the posts some years ago about this, but Penny Singleton was not the first person cast as Jane Jetson. Hank Grant’s syndicated TV column (in the Binghamton Press), dated May 13, 1962, revealed:

Starring “voices” for the new “The Jetsons” animated cartoon series, now signed for Sunday nights on ABC-TV, will be Morey Amsterdam and Pat Carroll. Since they will be required to work only one day a week, Morey will continue as a regular on the Dick Van Dyke Show and Pat hopes to do the same on the Danny Thomas Show.

That didn’t last long. Grant wrote in the Hollywood Reporter two days later:

Casting of voices for Hanna-Barbera’s new “The Jetsons” series is now wide open, even for the top Jane & George Jetson roles. Begging off their firmed deals because of sponsor conflicts were Morey Amsterdam (Dick Van Dyke Show) and Pat Carroll (Danny Thomas Show).

Well, apparently it wasn’t all that tidy. Or placid. Here’s a wire service story from almost a year later.

Cartoon Firm Sued by Two
LOS ANGELES, April 12—(UPI)—Actress Pat Carroll and comedian Morey Amsterdam filed $27,600 suit Friday claiming breach of their contract to do voice characterizations for a television cartoon series.
Miss Carroll and Amsterdam contended in their superior court suit that they entered into a contract last April 28 with Hanna-Barbera Productions to do voice characterizations for the “Jetsons” and were to receive $500 a segment—with a guarantee of 24 segments for 1962-63.
Both said the defendant, Hanna-Barbera, failed to use them for the voice work.

It took months for the case to end up in court. This is from January 25, 1965.

TV firm sued
LOS ANGELES (AP)—Comedian Morey Amsterdam and actress Pat Carroll are seeking $12,000 each from Hanna-Barbera Productions, charging the firm signed them to provide the voices for an animated television show called “The Jetsons”—but used their services only once, not 24 times as called for in their contracts.
The case went to trial Tuesday, Amsterdam and Miss Carroll said their contracts called for them to get $500 each for each of the shows, planned for the 1962-63 season.

The Associated Press reported on January 29th the two of them lost their suits.

When we originally posted about this in 2010, it spurred author and fellow CITR alum Kliph Nesteroff to ask Carroll about it. You can read what she had to say over on his blog.

It took about a month to re-cast the main roles. The TV writer for the Alton Evening Telegraph of June 15, 1962 reported Penny Singleton was now Jane and George O’Hanlon had been hired as George. You’ll notice, by the way, the character was named “George” before O’Hanlon was cast.

The firing wasn’t really a setback for Carroll; she carried on with a long career in live action and animation. But we can’t help but think how different The Jetsons would have been with Carroll and Amsterdam as the lead characters.

More Huckleberry Hound and Augie Doggie Music

August 6, 2022, 6:45 am

≫ Next: Flintstones Daily Comics, Dec. 1961, Pt. 1

≪ Previous: Farewell, Jane Jetson 1.0

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There are many stories about the world being a lousy place. I could tell some. You could tell some. But this is a story about the world being a less lousy place because there are still kind and generous people out there.

This blog was started because of an affection for the stock music heard in the backgrounds of The Huckleberry Hound Show and The Quick Draw McGraw Show. To make a long story short, after a search that took several decades, I discovered the origin of the cues, acquired copies where I could and started documenting which ones were heard on specific cartoons, moving my efforts to this blog in 2009.

The easier way, of course, would be to have copies of the cue sheets that Screen Gems had to submit to ASCAP and BMI so royalties could be paid to the composers.

One of the greatest cartoon music scholars out there, if not the greatest, is Daniel Goldmark. He has written several books and, wonderfully, penned a thesis where the appendix contained a list of the music (except that composed in-house) heard in every single Warner Bros. cartoon (except the “Seely Six”) from 1930 to 1969, compiled from cue sheets. This is such an incredible resource. He was also the music coordinator on the Spümcø cartoons “Boo-Boo Runs Wild” and “A Day in the Life of Ranger Smith.” Music by Capitol Hi-Q! (the Smith cartoon opens with ZR-49 LIGHT UNDERSCORE by Geordie Hormel).

After years and years, I finally had the courage to ask Dr. Goldmark—we have corresponded about one his projects—if maybe he had any Hanna-Barbera cue sheets from the Capitol Hi-Q days.

He did. And, to my astonishment and extreme delight, he e-mailed me 135 pages of cue sheets for the first three seasons of the Huck show, before Hoyt Curtin took over. Not for all the cartoons, but a good percentage of the first two seasons.

At last, I could learn the identity of some of the music I have not been able to find.

Here are a few discoveries.

The sheets are for each half hour show. That means they list music for themes and bumpers in addition to the cartoons. The opening themes always run 24 seconds, meaning each cartoon had credits. The sheets also note the order in which the individual cartoons aired. They confirm what many people have said—there was a rotation each week, with Huck being the first cartoon one week, Yogi the next, and Pixie and Dixie the next.

The sheets for the first two years say “revised.” I don’t know why. I do notice some cues on the sheets are different than what you hear in the cartoons from the Huck DVD or any Huck cartoons that aired on American cable TV. I don’t have a copy any more, but a version of “The Runaway Bear” (E-29) was on-line that had a substitution for a Jack Shaindlin cue. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cue sheet for that cartoon.

Guyla Avery, according to the sheets, was part of the studio’s music department. Guyla was actually Bill Hanna’s secretary, and Iwao Takamoto told a story about how Bill would shout at her from inside his office until it was agreed to protect eardrums by installing an intercom. Hanna never quite figured out to operate it, so he continued to yell out at Guyla. She later married artist/designer Alex Toth.

Until June 3, 1960, the studio’s address on the sheets is 1416 N. LaBrea, which was the old Kling/Chaplin studios. The sheets for the third season, starting in September, reveal the company was now operating out of the window-less cinder-block building at 3501 Cahuenga (not to be confused with later new building down the street on Cahuenga we all associate with Hanna-Barbera).

Somewhat maddening is the fact the sheets only list names of music if they don’t contain an alpha-numeric. That means the sheets don’t actually tell us most of the names. For example, a sheet will read “6-ZR-50” and not tell us the name is “Light Underscore.” With that in mind, let me try to clear up the identities of some the music as revealed by the cue sheets.

● Not one, but two short pieces by Raoul Kraushaar were heard on the Huck show. They have an MR prefix: 7-MR-183 and 8-MR-377. The Kraushaar cues were pulled from the Hi-Q library via the Omar library, co-founded by Kraushaar in 1956 (he is the “R” in “Omar”). They both sound like they were recorded in the back of a room, with a clarinet, strings and muted trumpets. In some cases, they were edited together to sound like one cue.
● The sad trombone music heard as the sneaky dog limps with a crutch in “Nuts over Mutts” is Jack Shaindlin’s LAF-72-3.
● “Oh Susanna” heard as Cousin Batty chats with Pixie and Dixie is Shaindlin’s LAF-88-7.
● George “Geordie” Hormel is responsible for ZR-21E SUSPENSE when the alien’s spaceship lands in Jellystone Park in “Space Bear.”
● In the same cartoon, the cue that the late Earl Kress said contained the name “Fireman” is LAF-1-2. He never could remember the complete name.
● The light symphonic music, memorably heard as the skunk is flying on a paper airplane in the Augie Doggie cartoon “Skunk You Very Much” is LAF-113-3. The cue sheet lists as the composer “Langworth” instead of Jack Shaindlin, and it doesn’t remind me of any of Shaindlin’s work.
● LAF-6-16 is a mystery. The cue sheets assign the code to two completely different pieces of music; Dr. Goldmark warns that cue sheets are not always accurate. One is the medium circus march that opens “Goldfish Fever.” But it’s also the code assigned to the brief piece in “Rah Rah Bear” where the players enter the field. That cue starts off the same but ends differently than Shaindlin’s “Boxing Greats No. 2.” On top of that, the medium circus march is reported as LAF-1-8 at the end of “Boxing Buddy.” The same cue is at the start of “Mark of the Mouse” but I don’t have a cue sheet for that. I don’t know what to think; I only have the sheets for the three cartoons mentioned above. For now, I will assign both codes to the march and leave the boxing cue without an LAF number.
● Mr. Jinks is sitting in a basket in “Party Peeper Jinks” while LAF-93-2 plays underneath. It starts with a flute and has quacking muted trumpets.
● A cue in the same cartoon between choruses of a birthday song to Jinks is LAF-93-15. It features woodwinds and strings.
● A fast circus-type chase cue called LA-74-4 is heard in a pile of cartoons, in some cases only the second half is used when the melody goes F-G-A-Bb-C and comes back down. Part of it is in the final scene of “Nottingham and Eggs.”
● Shaindlin provides the seagoing medley which opens “Pistol Packin’ Pirate.” It is LAF-65-7.
● The dramatic cue during the showdown between Sheriff Huckleberry (in the cartoon of the same name) and Dinky Dalton is L-31 SOMBER MOVEMENT by Spencer Moore.
● “Brave Little Brave,” with its specialty cues, doesn’t follow the Capitol Hi-Q numbering system. The music for about the first 4½ minutes is a Geordie Hormel piece labelled 11-ZR-K7C. The rest of the music is Q-743 by Spencer Moore. The closest cue I can find is L-744 MELODIC WESTERN UNDERSCORE. Same tempo, same orchestration, same double tom-tom beat, but the melody doesn’t quite match. My guess is the “Q” cues were in the original Capitol “Q” library, which was replaced by Hi-Q in 1956.
● “Show Biz Bear” features silent film serial style music played on an upright piano. These are Shaindlin cues entitled “Silent Movie Piano”; Shaindlin recorded a commercial album of these.
● Clarence Wheeler’s “Woodwind Capers” turns out to be a solo flute, four seconds long. It’s heard in “Hoodwinked Bear.” At least, that is all that was used.
● The version of “La Cucaracha” in several cartoons is an Omar library cue labelled OK-787 by Bill Loose and Jack Cookerly, who later played keyboards for Hoyt Curtin.

Whew! I think that’s it.

All this wonderful information is going to take some time to update the cues on the blog, as I’ll have to change some Quick Draw shows and other Huck cartoons for which I don’t have cue sheets.

People who like lists and lists of cartoons can stand by for just a moment.

You can see most of the music referred to was composed by Jack Shaindlin. We’ve posted about Shaindlin before, but a brief summary of his stock music career is he formed a company in the late ‘40s called Filmusic. The November-December 1952 edition of Film Music revealed:

The Hollywood office of Filmusic Co. of New York is making 1500 recorded selections available for TV and non-theatrical producers. The company, the largest independent music-on-film library in the country, is headed by Jack Shaindlin and features his sound tracks. Mr. Shaindlin has been musical director for the March of Time, Louis de Rochemont and the major studios in the east since 1937. His Filmusic sound track is used exclusively by NBC-TV.

The problem with trying to identify names of his cues (you won’t find my favourite Shaindlin cue, “Toboggan Run” in a copyright catalogue or in the BMI database) is simple. Shaindlin told Business and Home Screen magazine once that “the music was never published and hasn’t been ‘kicked around.’” Filmusic became Langlois Filmusic in 1954 and Cinemusic in 1960. Shaindlin seems to have copyrighted only select cues for the sake of royalties, and certainly not the 1500 mentioned above, including a good many of the ones heard in the Huck and Quick Draw shows.

Here are the Shaindlin cues that have been partially ID’d and a couple that have not been. These were sent to me years ago by Earl. I have held off posting them until I knew what they were, except for one cue he asked me not to post.

Included is a vaudeville hi-step cue that got a workout on the Quick Draw McGraw series; all Earl could remember was it contained “fireman” in the title. Another I particularly like reminds me of little busy animals skipping through the woods. It’s heard at the end of “Baffled Bear,” as Yogi runs a gas station. I’ve also attached “Six Day Bicycle Race,” heard several times in the Snooper and Blabber caper “Puss N’ Booty.” If I don’t have the real names, you’ll see quotation marks around fake ones. Don’t accept these as valid.

Two bonus cues are below, thanks to reader Evan Schad. With his help, I acquired a Synchro library 78 rpm disc containing the two Hecky Krasnow cues heard on several Augie Doggie cartoons.


LAF-1-2 "high stepping fireman"


LAF-6-16 "circus parade"


LAF-25-3 "dance of the forest squirrels"


LAF-74-2 LICKETY SPLIT


LAF-74-4 "race to the finish"


LAF - SIX DAY BICYCLE RACE


LAF - "the greatest show on earth"


LAF - "happy little elves"


HAPPY COBBLER


SWINGING GHOSTS

Again, I am extremely appreciative to Daniel Goldmark for his generosity and selflessness in providing this valuable documentation.

Since people love lists, here are the cartoons for which we have a list of the cues with production numbers and episode numbers in brackets. Alas, only one of the three Yowp cartoons is present.

E-1 Pie-Pirates (003)
E-2 High Fly Guy (008)
E-3 Tally Ho-Ho-Ho (007)
E-4 Pistol Packin’ Pirate (005)
E-5 Judo Jack (002)
E-6 Little Bird Mouse (007)
E-7 Yogi Bear’s Big Break (001)
E-8 Big Bad Bully (004)
E-9 Slumber Party Smarty (002)
E-10 Kit-Kat-Kit (003)
E-11 Big Brave Bear (006)
E-12 Scaredy Cat Dog (006)
E-13 Baffled Bear (009)
E-14 Cousin Tex (001/012)
E-15 Foxy Hound Dog (005)
E-16 Jinks’ Mice Device (004-021)
E-17 The Ghost with the Most (009)
E-18 The Buzzin’ Bear (013)
E-19 Jiggers It’s Jinks (008)
E-20 The Brave Little Brave (010)
E-21 The Stout Trout (012)
E-22 The Ace of Space (010)
E-27 Jinks the Butler (013)
E-31 Sheriff Huckleberry (005)
E-32 Sir Huckleberry Hound (004)
E-33 Lion-Hearted Huck (002-013)
E-34 Rustler-Hustler Huck (006)
E-35 Huckleberry Hound Meets Wee Willie (001/010)
E-37 Tricky Trapper (003)
E-38 Cock-a-Doodle Huck (008)
E-39 Two Corny Crows (009)
E-40 Freeway Patrol (007)
E-41 Dragon Slayer Huck (012)
E-47 Birdhouse Blues (021)
E-49 Prize-Fight Fright (021)
E-52 Brainy Bear (022)
E-53 Nice Mice (022)
E-54 Postman Huck (022)
E-55 Robin Hood Yogi (023)
E-56 King-Size Surprise (023)
E-60 Robin Hood Yogi (023)
E-61 Scooter Looter (025)
E-62 Mouse-Nappers (025)
E-63 Little Red Riding Huck (025)
E-64 Hide and Go Peek (026)
E-65 Boxing Buddy (026)
E-66 The Tough Little Termite (026)
E-70 Papa Yogi (030)
E-71 Ten Pin Alley (027)
E-74 Show Biz Bear (027)
E-76 King Size Poodle (030)
E-77 Nottingham and Eggs (032)
E-78 Rah Rah Bear (032)
E-79 Hi-Fido (027)
E-80 Stranger Ranger (031)
E-81 Somebody’s Lion (030)
E-82 Batty Bat (033)
E-84 Mighty Mite (031)
E-85 Bear For Punishment (033)
E-87 A Bully Dog (031)
E-89 Bird Brained Cat (032)
E-90 Huck the Giant Killer (033)
E-97 Hoodwinked Bear (037)
E-98 Piccadilly Dilly (037)
E-99 Goldfish Fever (037)
E-100 Snow White Bear (038)
E-101 Wiki Waki Huck (038)
E-102 Pushy Cat (038)
E-103 Space Bear (039)
E-104 Puss in Boats (039)
E-105 Huck’s Hack (039)
E-107 Booby Trapped Bear (041)
E-109 High Jinks (043)
E-110 Legion Bound Hound (041)
E-111 Price For Mice (041)
E-112 Gleesome Threesome (042)
E-113 Science Friction (042)
E-114 Plutocrat Cat (042)
E-115 A Bear Pair (043)
E-117 Spy Guy (044)
E-118 Nuts over Mutts (044)
E-120 Knight School (043)
E-122 Party Peeper Jinks (044)

Sheets are missing for Huckleberry Hound Shows K-011, 014 through 020, 024 in the first season, and K-028 through 030, 034 through 036 in the second, and K-040, K-045 to 52 in the third. .

Flintstones Daily Comics, Dec. 1961, Pt. 1

August 21, 2022, 3:15 am

≫ Next: An Interview With Hoyt Curtin

≪ Previous: More Huckleberry Hound and Augie Doggie Music

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There’s a site which has posted the Monday-through-Saturday newspaper comic strips of The Flintstones. I wasn’t going to post my copies because of that, but since they’re taking up space in my computer, I’ll put them up for December 1961 and leave it at that.

There are puns, there’s sexism (Wilma’s is a shrewish wife who won’t shut up or make up her mind), and there’s no Baby Puss. Those of you who get worked up about “Bibles” can get grumbly that Wilma’s mother doesn’t look anything like she does on the TV show. We note she hadn’t appeared on television yet.

I’m a little baffled about the comic referred to Fred’s foot as a wheel. I thought they were brakes, and the stone rollers at either end of his car were wheels.

You can enlarge any comic by clicking on it.


Friday, Dec. 1, 1961.


Dec. 2, 1961


Monday, Dec. 4, 1961


Dec. 5, 1961


Dec. 6, 1961


Dec. 7, 1961


Dec. 8, 1961


Dec. 9, 1961


Monday, Dec. 11, 1961


Dec. 12, 1961


Dec. 13, 1961


Dec. 14, 1961


Dec. 15, 1961

An Interview With Hoyt Curtin

August 27, 2022, 7:08 am

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Times were changing in the late 1950s when it came to background music on television.

Some producers had been relying on leased stock recordings from production music companies; live orchestrations were simply too expensive and the head of the American Federation of Music, James Caesar Petrillo, was too meddlesome. But by 1959, Petrillo was out, and producers evidently decided the cost was right to have someone come in and score themes, bridges, openings, endings and so on. The days of Ozzie and Harriet having music someone heard on Dennis the Menace were about to end.

Hanna-Barbera was one of those producers. Other than opening theme songs, the studio, from Day One in 1957, relied on sound cutters picking music from the Capitol Hi-Q library and Langlois Filmusic (distributed by Capitol) to fill the backgrounds of cartoons.

That day came to an end. In 1959, Columbia Pictures ended its theatrical release agreement with UPA and, in its place, put Loopy De Loop cartoons on the big screen produced by Hanna-Barbera. Why not? It owned part of the cartoon studio.

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera decided Loopy should have something other than library music enhancing its theatrical shorts. The studio had hired Hoyt Curtin to write themes and arrange variations of them for bumpers. Why not hire him to create a library of cues for exclusive use of (and owned by) Hanna-Barbera?

That’s what it did.

Then H-B got into the half-hour prime-time television business, so Curtin was brought in to write music for The Flintstones then for everything else the studio was producing, music that is familiar to almost everyone of a certain age (the lyrics for some themes may not be, thanks to the production involving the Randy Horne Singers).

At the time, this was all “kid stuff.” No one gave it any serious consideration, especially because it had to do with television. But the kids grew up, they still liked Curtin’s music and some had the smarts to seek out Mr. Curtin for interviews.

This one was reprinted in the September 1992 edition of Film Score Monthly. Curtin’s H-B history is a bit off in places, and he was asked about cartoons outside the scope of this blog, but it’s interesting nonetheless, especially his references to Carl Stalling and Daws Butler. And he’s quite correct about The Jetsons second theme. When it became The Orbitty Show, you can hear the synth where Curtin had used horns in the original.

We’ve skipped the filmography mentioned below. Basically it gives him credit for every single H-B cartoon. According to it, Ted Nichols never existed; Mr. Nichols has his fans, too. And it mentions all the original Hanna-Barbera shows which, outside of theme songs, owe more to Jack Shaindlin, Spencer Moore and Phil Green when it comes to scores.

(The photos comes from a 1972 article in another magazine we have not reprinted on the blog).

HOYT CURTIN
FROM BEDROCK TO HOLLYWOOD

Hoyt Curtin has scored some of the most pervasive material in American culture, being the countless number of cartoons put out by Hanna-Barbera over the last thirty years. He began in the Hollywood of yesteryear, before lone musicians like Fred Mollin could capably score an entire television show or movie with only electronics. All studios had orchestras on call, and it was up to the composers to work with an "in-the-trenches " mentality of a different sort to score the assembly-line material for live players. It created a hectic do-it-yourself scoring schedule which many composers, like Henry Mancini and Jerry Goldsmith, claim to be instrumental in their training.

The following interview was conducted by James Vail for his radio program Cinemusic, which airs in Hammond, Louisiana on KLSU 90.9 FM on Tuesday nights at 9PM, re-run on Sunday at 4PM. The interview is reprinted here with Mr. Vail's permission, as is the mammoth Hoyt Curtin filmography which follows.

Vail: Could you describe your musical background and the events that led to your breaking into the film/television medium?

Curtin: I studied piano all my life, of course, and went to USC’s school of music and studied composition I was very fortunate to study with some very wonderful people because I was supposed to go to Juiliard after the war, on the G.I. Bill, and the man who enters you asked me why I was going to Juiliard [sic] when USC had people like Ernst Toch and the biggies at the time. Why go to Juiliard? They were just very crowded and they didn’t have anyone of that stature. So I called up my friend who let me enroll late at USC and drove back there at about a hundred miles an hour and went to lake my masters degree. It was great! We had some marvelous teachers. I studied with Miklós Rózsa and I just kept writing all I could, trying to get a job and that's not easy.

Vail: I see your first score was for The Mesa of Lost Women in 1952.

Curtin: (laughs) It’s the world's worst film, I think. It was really bad when I wrote it but now it’s worse. As I remember, it was about ladies on an alien planet who turned into tarantulas. I believe that was it. I didn’t have any budget so I had to do it with two pianos. A friend of mine, Ray Rash—one of the real great jazz guys—played the other piano. We really had fun doing that. I started out in what was called the industrial film business, because TV had just started to come in and companies like GE, Ford, and all the rest, they didn't spend their money in television, they spent it in industrial films. I finally got a job, by accident I went up and pounded on the door, literally, and the guy that owned the studio. Ray Wolf, had just fired his musical guy in a great huff. They were friends; that’s the worst kind. They had a big blow-up just the day before and here I am standing with this can of film in my hands that we made at USC. USC has a very good film department. They not only make the films but they have the kids score them. They’re still doing that. In fact I speak at USC, on occasion, and talk to the class that’s doing this. It’s marvelous! How else could you get to score films when nobody's going to ask you to do it for money? So, that part was marvelous. But then the company stopped making them and so I was unemployed, again. A friend of mine suggested I go to a studio called UPA which made the original Mr. Magoo shorts and they hired me to do some shorts. My teacher at the time was working there too. He wrote the one for Gerald McBoing Boing. Do you remember that one?

Vail: Yes I do. It's a fantastic short—exceptional score by Gail Kubrick. [sic]

Curtin: They tried a whole lot of new things. It was a little tiny company stuck behind a building out near Warner Brothers. They cranked out some of the real great stuff. In fact, the first one I did got an Academy Award and the second one got nominated. When Magoo Flew was the one that got the Academy Award. It was wide-screen animation; that shows you how ahead of things UPA was. I started working in TV commercials. That was where I really got going and I worked for a large company that was the “hot" company. That’s what happens these days. The ad agencies get on a company and do all of these ads at this company and if they’re not doing them there, then they’re not being done. I was the composer for Cascade Pictures and I’d write about ten a week. In so doing, I was called out to MGM to do a Schlitz beer commercial and Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were doing the commercial. We got along and we did a nice job. I didn't think anymore about that and finally the phone rang and it was Bill. He said, "Could you write a tune for that?" I called him back in about five minutes and sang it to him. He said. "Could you record that?" This was the way we started; it was over the phone—go do it! They didn’t have time to do any fooling around — no meetings, forget it. And they were on their way. This was Ruff and Ready [sic], their first one and we did the same thing for The Flintstones. That was supposed to be The Flagstones but somebody didn’t like the word ‘Flagstones’ for some reason and so they made it Flintstones. Yogi Bear and all of them were done over the phone, too.

Vail: The theme songs?

Curtin: Yes. And then, of course, there had to be the cues written. In animation, you don’t have lead-ins and lead outs. You let the action handle it. You score the whole thing. So, each episode had to have 22 minutes of music—that’s a lot. It was an awfully busy time. I was doing all of their writing until about last year.

Vail: At what rate were these TV cartoons being turned out back in the ‘60s?

Curtin: I'm not sure how many in 1960, but I know in 1970 we had nine, count them, new shows, new series. And those all had to be scored immediately. They all aired on the same day in September when the network season started. It was really something to have nine shows going. At times it would take ten of us to write that stuff I would write all the themes and then I had to find guys that could write for animation. It's not like live-action. That was a big chore. We put out an awful lot of music but very little of it was recorded at the studio. The studio had a very nice recording studio there, but it isn't big enough for the band. Originally, we used great big jazz bands.

Vail: What caliber of players did you have in the band?

Curtin: I always had the hottest — Pete Condoli, Conte Condoli. Franke Capp — the drummer, Nick Fortula, Barney Kessel. I always had the names, not because of their names, but because they played great. But see, these are the earlier guys. The later guys were hot, but you wouldn’t know their names as well.

Vail: They were studio musicians?

Curtin: That’s right, but they were the best of them. The whole studio scene comes down to a very few guys because the particular kind of music I was writing was very difficult sight reading; it had to swing. We could only get one shot at it; we usually got a run-through. Then we would record it and go on to the next cue.

Vail: The rehearsals/recordings were pretty much a one-shot deal?

Curtin: That’s right. We recorded usually three times a week, three hours each time. They had a big stack of music in front of them and we just went through it. Everybody was geared-up to work hard, get ten minutes off an hour and then come back and hit it again.

I remember now. I have main titles from 142 different series. You know, Speed Buggy, The Jetsons, of course, and things like Wheelies and the Chopper Bunch [sic], These are the Days, and The Smurfs. It was a big pool of music — just hundreds of hours of it. The studio was recently sold to a group and they brought in their own people and it’s going to be sold again, I believe. I think Universal is going to buy it.

Vail: Was The Flintstones your first Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon scoring assignment?

Curtin: I think it probably was the first big one, but they did Ruff and Ready, Quick Draw McGraw, Hokey Woolf [sic], Wally Gator, Huckleberry Hound— those things were first. Then The Flintstones came. It just took off. It started out in prime time — Friday night. It would go off the air, then be revived, and come back with new episodes. One of the things, I think, that helped the music was that the musicians liked to jam on that piece. I know a lot of recordings have been made of it by jazz groups. It’s fun. I love to hear it.

Vail: How long was The Flintstones’ original run?

Curtin: First they made two, maybe three years of new things. Then it went off for a while and later a large food company picked it up and did a series as the sponsor. Then it would go off and it would come back on again. I don’t think they’ve made any new material for some time, but I notice they are going to do a live-action picture with John Goodman as Fred.

Vail: I seem to recall hearing about that some time ago. Isn’t [Steven] Speilberg [sic] producing it?

Curtin: Yes. It’s going to be a real dynamite thing.

Vail: Are there any hopes of your writing the score?

Curtin: Would that I were. They haven’t asked me, but I'm ready. I’d love to do it.

Vail: Like most kids, I grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons. One of my all time favorites was one of yours, Hong Kong Phooey.

Curtin: It was funny because I remember that one very well. We had decided to write a song and to have Scatman Crothers sing it. I forget if Hanna wrote the lyrics to that or if I did. It didn’t make any difference because we went in as a duo. That was Scatman Crothers’ favorite song, too. We had a big Hollywood Christmas parade here and he was the Grand Marshall and when this guy came up to him to interview him, you know, off the street, he started singing Hong Kong Phooey. He was an awfully good musician and a nice guy. He played great — good guitar player. He sang great and was at his best when he accompanied himself. He was really a good scat singer He was in clubs and doing this and that, but when he did this Hong Kong Phooey thing, from then on do you notice he was a contender as far as motion picture acting is concerned?

Vail: Come to think of it, yes. I can recall seeing him more frequently in the public eye.

Curtin: Well, this all started with Hong Kong Phooey. That was his thing. He said, "I want to sing my theme song” and he would sing that thing.

Vail: Another one of my favorites has once again come back— The Jetsons.

Curtin: The Jetsons was another funny one. Every one of them was funny because you just don’t know what you’re doing and you'd wait to see if it worked out or not. It was a nice little show, just an idea, and I wrote a piece for the main title of it—just cute little cars going around in the air and everything. Everybody looked at the picture after it was done and they said, “Hey, this thing works!” So they had me write a chart to go with the chart that was on it. I think if you listen carefully, you can hear the two bands in there. I put strings and every thing on it with all those runs. When were were recording that, we were listening in the headsets to the original track so we’d stay with it. That’s how that was done. That was a two-part main title. You see, they’d see the picture done and somebody would say. "Hey, this is better that we thought it was going to be. Let’s load the music a little bit.”

Vail: Did you use any electronic instruments for The Jetsons?

Curtin: If you heard the record, we did two versions—a main title, the original around 1960, and then later they made a record. That one. I’m sure, had synthesizers. But I can't make that darn synthesizer swing. I have to have the band. You've got to have the swinging guys.

Vail: I've even played it with a college band and it's a fun chart to play.

Curtin: Awful simple, isn't it? Four notes and forget it. You know, it brings back the memory of writing the damn thing. I didn’t have any idea, I hadn't seen anything. I knew what was going to be on the film. We had one animation director who liked to get a tune, a track, and the track should have action and then when would design the pictures to go with it. And I somehow think I liked that because the music flows. You wrote a piece of music and then he'd put the animation on it. The kind that were tough was when you'd get the animated pictures and you had to match it with the music. There were always compromises to make to hit this and that. You can’t swing, it works but not as well. I like to write a tune, a piece, orchestrate it, make it move and let somebody put the pictures to it

Vail: When you found a certain cue that worked extremely well, be it action, suspense, or whatever, was it ever used again for other cartoons?

Curtin: Yes. The cutters get onto cues that work and those are their special cues. They go into their special bin and when something happens that they need it, they use it. But the musicians union requires that we score each and every thing. Then, if they substituted an old cue, nobody cared.

Vail: The consistency seems to be that most TV cartoons run for one, maybe two seasons and then they're off. Are there any cartoons in the past few years that have "stuck out" from the rest?

Curtin: Well, The Smurfs has done beautifully. It came over from Europe and it was Americanized. Scooby-Doo has done beautifully. The Flintstone Kids is still on. There aren't a lot of them as you say. One of the nicest ones I did went off after one season. A lot of times that happens. Wildfire it was called. The tune was written by Jimmy Webb, an awfully good writer. I didn't write the song, I scored it for him. It was a beautiful thing but it didn’t catch on. And that happened a lot

Vail: You wrote a lovely song for The Last of the Curlews.

Curtin: It was about these two curlews, they were just a pair, and they were flying over a field and this doggoned farmer picks up a shotgun and blows the lady away. It brings a tear to your eyes. Then old Clyde has to go wandering off but there aren’t any other curlews left. He's the last of them. That’s what the song is about

Vail: You also wrote an interesting primitive percussion theme for Korg 70,000 BC.

Curtin: It was live-action and it was about cavemen finding fire and all that good stuff I just thought, why not do it with just percussion and a conch shell? I had to find a guy to play the conch shell, of course. I deliberately played it out of tune. There’s a chord at the end and it’s just a little off, by design.

Vail: Could you describe the main difference in scoring for cartoons and live-action?

Curtin: I would say that you're a lot broader in animation. You haven't got facial movements, body movements, emotions, etc. The guy is thinking, the guy is getting ready to blow the town up or whatever—you haven't got that in animation. In live-action, whole areas might carry without music. Music might be an intrusion. Whereas, in animation, you pretty much have to go wall-to-wall. After you write animation, writing live-action is such a pushover. It's like you could write it with both hands at the same time... and I have, when behind.

Vail: Which do you prefer?

Curtin: Oh, I like the animation when the animation is good and funny like it used to be with this guy, Daws Butler. He was their [Hanna Barbera’s] big voice guy — Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw. I’d get to listen to his tracks and it was just easy to write the music.

Vail: In the past thirty years, has the TV cartoon evolved for the belter or the worse or is it still basically the same?

Curtin: You know. I'm deeply rooted in Bugs Bunny and Carl Stalling and that kind of music. That kind of animation is just too expensive, so that's why we have the look we have now. Some of it is very inventive and some of it isn’t. But, if you ask me which would I prefer to watch, it would be the older stuff, naturally. Think of the things they put into it. The studio was required to have a studio orchestra — on call all the time. They had to be paid for ten hours a week whether they played or not so why not use the orchestra to play. That’s why you had all of those great scores.

Below is an industrial film scored by Curtin in 1959. It looks like American Motors shelled out some pretty good cash to make this, considering it was produced at MGM and has a good size cast for this kind of film. The director, incidentally, is Dave Monahan, who wrote cartoons in the 1930s at Warner Bros.

Oh, Dear. Oh, My. Another Birthday

September 3, 2022, 10:07 am

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The Jetsons wasn’t the only effort from the Hanna-Barbera studio to make its first appearance 60 years ago.

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera decided that, instead of having a half-hour show that a sponsor would sell to stations in different cities, they (or, rather, Screen Gems) would market their own short cartoons that a station could air as it pleased. The three different series could be dropped in individually in a hosted kids show, or they could be strung together into a show of whatever length it desired.

After fussing around with different concepts, the studio produced five-minute cartoons starring Lippy the Lion, Touché Turtle and Wally Gator.

This has raised the question—when did the cartoons debut?

It’s pretty much impossible giving an answer when it comes to syndicated cartoons that could be dumped into an omnibus cartoon show with anything else the station rented, or were just another part of a kid show with a live-action host. Someone on-line has raised the date of September 3rd—60 years ago today—perhaps based on a post on this Yowp-tastic blog. If you’re willing to accept the claims of an ad for KCOP in the Los Angeles Times on September 3, 1962, then today is their birthday.

(We can make a possible exception for Lippy’s sidekick Hardy Har Har, who appeared in an embryonic form in the Snooper and Blabber cartoon Laughing Guess that first aired February 29, 1960 when he sadly mutters “Oh dear, oh my.”)

Touché, Wally and Lippy got a preview in the Los Angeles Citizen-News entertainment page on August 28, 1962. It would appear the three made their first appearance on the air the day before (Aug. 27) then settled into regular daily programming the following week. The critic not only thought the characters would be enjoyable for children, she also outlined the plots of the preview cartoons, and mention’s H-B’s other 1962 series.

TV Time
Cartoon Stir Young Minds
By ARLENE GARBER
TV Editor
There may be more in cartoons for children then most of us think.
Because those animated antics are not performed by real people, but the creations of paper and ink, they could easily stir the young minds much more than a western adventure show or a “Dennis the Menace.”
It seems that an animated figure running across the screen leaves a lot to the imagination, especially to the willing imagination of children.
Hanna - Barbara Studios’ latest creations, “Touché Turtle,” “Wally Gator” and “Lippy the Lion” give credence to this idea. All three were previewed Monday morning on Channel 13, before they start their regular run next week at 6:30 p.m.
First thing that will tickle the young viewers’ curiosity is probably the names of these new cartoon characters. Just saying Touché Turtle and Lippy the Lion out loud must be fun for kids.
Lippy the Lion turned out to be just goofy enough to have a feline friend called Hardy Har Har. And the two of them seemed exactly the type of characters who would run from a loud pirate captain without any thought of fighting back.
Because they came across the screen as believable personalities you might never meet in this world, I’m sure the youngsters will not think any of their escapades are impossible.
A TURTLE
Touché Turtle had a rather throaty voice to go with his hard-shelled soft-hearted personality. His pal Dum Dum was an over-grown puppy type who was agreeable to anything.
These two got involved with a rather tame gorilla in what appeared to be a loose spoof on the movie of “Mighty Joe Young.” And they did it without filling the screen with terrifying violence.
l imagine that Touché Turtle could become everyone's favorite as he romps through his adventures as the unheroic underdog.
Wally Gator turned out to be an alligator with more size than sense or courage. His troubles began after an old English hunter mistook him for a dragon on his front lawn.
This segment had some of the best comedy lines of the three cartoons. Children must have enjoyed it when Wally Gator asked, “What are you, an alligator hater?” or “Don’t you recognize a confirmed coward when you see one?” All three series have successfully relied upon continuous action based on story lines with which the viewer can associate himself.
Hanna-Barbera will be giving youngsters lots of laughs, plus something for the imagination to feed upon with their Channel 13 schedule this fall. And adults won’t be turning away from them either.
FOR GROWN-UPS
If grown-ups find these three-cartoon series a shade juvenile for their tastes, Hanna-Barbera have come up with another creation, “The Jetsons,” fashioned for the more sophisticated crowd. It will be seen Sunday at 7:30 p.m. on ABC-TV.
“The Jetsons’’ takes an animated family and projects them into the next century.
There’s the father, George, who drives the skyways to work in his atomic-powered bubble. And Jane, his wife, who has to remind son Elroy not to lose his rubbers during a school field trip to Europe.
Daughter Judy does the solar swivel on an anti-gravity dance floor and meets her friends at orbiting Space-burgers.
Although it looks like many of the lesser cartoon series which began hopefully a year ago will no longer be on the screen, these creative efforts by Hanna-Barbera may very well be among those which satisfy cartoon lovers in the season coming up.

Lippy, Wally and Touché were bi-coastal 60 years ago today. They also made their first appearance on WGAN-TV in Portland, Maine, and on the Sheriff Colepepper Show on WNDU-TV in South Bend, Indiana (one local paper alternated Lippy’s and Wally’s names for the half-hour show). In Salem, Oregon, KPTV aired a half-hour Lippy show starting September 3rd; one paper listed Lippy in the first 15 minutes and “Wally and Touché” the rest of the half hour.

Over the course of the next few weeks, a number of papers ran ads for the coming appearance of one of the three stars, but my favourite ads are in the September 29th edition of the Lansing State Journal. Kids were invited to colour in the cartoon characters on newsprint, and connect the dots on Touché. Yeah, it looks like someone at the paper traced a publicity drawing of Quick Draw McGraw, but they’re still pretty cool.

He's Ready to Animate Ruff and Reddy

September 17, 2022, 7:25 am

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This year (as of July 7th) marks the 65th birthday of H-B Enterprises. The studio only had one main accomplishment in 1957—it convinced Columbia Pictures’ Screen Gems division to put up the money for a TV cartoon series, which the studio then convinced NBC to broadcast on Saturday mornings.

Weekend programming back then was not a huge priority for networks, so NBC had no qualms about tossing Ruff and Reddy onto the schedule after the start of the season. It debuted in December. The second and third seasons began in subsequent Falls.

The first two 13-part adventures to open the series’ third season on Saturday morning, October 17, 1959¹² were copyrighted in September the previous year (Series ‘L’, Dizzy Deputies; Series ‘M’, Spooky Meeting at Spooky Rock). Presumably, they had already been finished and were sitting in cans at 1416 La Brea Avenue awaiting shipment to NBC.

The final two 13-parters were copyrighted on September 15, 1959 (Series ‘N’, Sky High Guys; Series ‘O’, Misguided Missile). By that time, Hanna-Barbera had hired additional artists to handle the load of the new Quick Draw McGraw Show and the theatrical Loopy De Loop cartoons. Also, writer Charlie Shows left in November 1958 to work for Larry Harmon, who was ready to make a series of Bozo the Clown cartoons for syndication.

The first of the 1959-made episodes was “Sky High Guys” (debuting February 12, 1960³) began with our heroes accidentally taking off in a balloon at a county fair and ending up on a desert island trying to stop two crooks (Captain Greedy and Salt Water Daffy) from stealing a treasure chest from Skipper Kipper and his parrot Squawky Talky.

13 cartoons is a little much for one animator to handle, and I’ve been able to identify two of them. Carlo Vinci starts off the series. You can spot him again in “Tiff on a Skiff.” Captain Greedy has a bar of upper teeth. Reddy doesn’t zip out of the scene in a diving exit; he uses a curved back exit that Carlo drew for other characters like Huckleberry Hound and Fred Flintstone. And he also has a particular angle he draws a straight leg with the foot up almost at a 90-degree angle. You can see this in other cartoons.



Two episodes later, in “Squawky No Talky,” there’s a different animator. Add up the signs. The bit lip on the letter “f” and individual upper teeth. He animated Fred Flintstone the same way.



The almost double isosceles triangle closed eyes.



The up-and-down dip walk with no legs. He animated Ranger Smith this way in “Bewitched Bear.” I’ve slowed down the walk in the animated .gif below. And it’s missing a number of frames because of ghosting on the internet dub of the cartoon, but you get the idea. It’s animated on ones.



The animation is by Don Patterson, who joined the Hanna-Barbera staff from Walter Lantz in April 1959. Patterson was unemployed and looking for work according to the U.S. Census taken April 29, 1950. He arrived at Lantz later in the year, animated for a bit, was made a director in 1952 and stopped directing in 1954. He was moved back into full-time animating. His Woody Woodpecker animation includes some great exaggerated takes. I get the impression that as the ‘50s progressed, studios decided wildness was passé and cartoons got tamer and tamer.

Here’s a Patterson take from “Squawky No Talky.” It’s not all that outrageous, even compared with his work at Lantz, but it’s not what you’d expect in a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. You think George Jetson was ever animated this way?



It appears H-B Enterprises loved airbrushed action. Here’s some (with multiples) in a later scene.



For Patterson, as well as some of the other earliest Hanna-Barbera artists, dialogue wasn’t just a mouth or lower part of a jaw moving with everything else rigid. In the scene below, Patterson uses three head positions. The middle drawing is used whenever certain vowels are spoken. The other two positions have the mouth open and close. Bill Hanna’s timing is such that the head moves on ones, two and threes; the in-betweens aren’t the same number, which would make the animation look mechanical.



Because Charlie Shows was gone from Hanna-Barbera in November 1958, I don’t suspect he worked on this episode. If I had to guess, I think Mike Maltese may have had a hand in this. At one point (in “Tail of a Sail in a Whale”), Daffy says “I’m doin’ the diggin’, and don’t forget it,” reminiscent of Quick Draw McGraw’s “thinnin’” line to Baba Looey. And pardon my sloppy research here as I don’t recall if it’s on this adventure, but there are a couple of times where the narrator talks to the characters, which just seems like a Maltese thing.

I’m not sure about all 13 parts of this storyline, but it looks like Bob Gentle provided at least some of the backgrounds. Today’s trivia: though they graduated 3 ½ years apart, Patterson and Gentle attended Hollywood High School at the same time for a brief period (photos below are from the same page of the 1927 annual).



A final note about “Squawky No Talky,” I’d love to do a breakdown of the music, but I don’t recognise any of the music in it. It’s obviously from the same two libraries that were used in Hanna-Barbera’s other cartoons at the time, but these particular cues were exclusive to Ruff and Reddy. I don’t have a complete collection of the Capitol Hi-Q “D” series and I’m pretty sure some music that sounds like Spencer Moore’s in this cartoon comes from one of the missing discs. The second last cue, when Daffy is threatening Squawky, sounds like a Loose-Seely dramatic melody while final cue, when Daffy is being attacked by the parrot, is another of Jack Shaindlin’s sports marches. There is some familiar Moore, Loose-Seely and Phil Green music in other parts of the adventure. The last season of Ruff and Reddy seems to use a lot more music than the first one, which were content with two or three different pieces (saving time and money in editing).

Patterson was still working at Hanna-Barbera decades later, credited as an animation director on The Flintstone Kids (1988), a good 55 years after assistant animating at the Charles Mintz studio (a look at the end credits reveals a wealth of veterans, including Patterson’s younger brother Ray, and Art Davis who went back to the ‘20s at Fleischers).

Donald William Patterson was born in Chicago on December 26, 1909. After Mintz, he stopped at Disney and MGM before Walter Lantz gave him a job. He died in Santa Barbera, California on December 12, 1998. (He is pictured to the right with Lantz in front of the storyboard for Operation Sawdust).

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1 Fort-Worth Star-Telegram, Oct. 17, 1959, pg. 18. See also Feb. 6, 1960, pg. 6^↩
2 KMJ, Fresno, broadcast the show at 5:15 p.m. on Fridays. KERO, Bakersfield, also an NBC station, aired it on Saturdays at 9 a.m.^↩
3 El Paso Times, Feb. 13, 1960, pg. 8. See also Feb. 6, 1960, pg. 6^↩

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Promoting George and Jane

September 22, 2022, 5:26 am

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The Jetsons started life, according to Bill Hanna at a lunch at the Brown Derby, as a stand-by series just in case TV viewers didn’t warm to Arnold Stang playing a cat.

The lunch was with UPI’s Vernon Scott, likely in November 1961, as he reported in early December that “Waiting in the wings should Top Cat become a fallen feline are The Jetsons, The Gruesomes and a medley show starring Cops and Roberts, Bill and Coo Coo, and Casey Jones. Hanna said “The Jetsons are the opposite of the Flintstones. They live several centuries in the future and suffer the same nutty family problems as Fred and Wilma Flintstone.”

At the start, it wasn’t clear when the show was going to air. The Oakland Tribune of February 19, 1962 had it pencilled in on Fridays at 7:30 p.m. opposite Rawhide (CBS) and International Showtime (NBC). Daily Variety, on March 19, revealed: “Rest of the Sunday schedule is fairly well locked in. The Hanna-Barbera cartoon ‘The Jetsons,’ described as the ‘flip side’ of ‘The Flintstones’ and updated to the year 2,000, leads off at 7 p.m.” (A syndicated blurb in the San Antonio Express of April 1 said the series was set “a thousand years hence”). Broadcasting magazine on April 23 put it where it ended up—on Sundays at 7:30 opposite Dennis the Menace (CBS) and Walt Disney (ABC). It estimated production costs at $60,000 an episode, $10,000 less than Dennis.

Sponsors seem to have been found pretty quickly after that. Variety announced on May 2 the show “has been sold to Colgate-Palmolive and Whitehall Laboratories, both through Ted Bates[an ad agency], and Minnesota Mining and Mfg., through McManus, John and Adams [another agency].”

Now that a time slot had been set, it was time to start publicising the show. There was actually something specific to publicise; The Hollywood Reporter’s “TV Writing Deals” column of April 12, 1962 said Larry Markes had been hired to write two episodes. He received the story credit for the debut show with Rosey the robot and the sixth one where George leads a pack of cub scouts on the moon.

Newspapers would get news releases from networks, sponsors, producers, that could be printed verbatim as stories. Here’s one from May. Evidently the publicity department didn’t know George’s employer was “Spacely Sprockets.” I like the way Top Cat is played down, having failed in prime time. You’ll note nothing about the cast as Morey Amsterdam and Pat Carroll were still George and Jane when this release was written.

‘Jetsons’ Offer Animated Look Into Comedy Future Next Fall
"The Jetsons," a new, half-hour situation comedy series featuring an amiable family of animated characters who live the good life about a century or so in the future, will make its debut on the ABC Television Network next fall as a prime time evening feature.
The program will be telecast Sundays, 7:30 - 8 p.m.
Hanna-Barbera Productions, producers of ABC-TV’s top-rate “The Flintstones,” and regarded as one of the most original production organizations in television, created the new all-family series.
"The Jetsons,” which has been in development for one year, is a light-hearted bit of futuristic fun. It deals with George and Jane Jetson, their cute, teenaged daughter Judy, her kid brother Elroy and the family dog, Astro. In their wonderously wacky world, the surroundings and gadgets have all changed — naturally for the better. But the problems we know and cope with are, to be sure, still around.
George works for Space Rockets Inc. [sic] The Jetsons live in the Skypads Apartments, which rise and fall on huge hydraulic lifts to stay clear of the weather. Jane Jetson dials the family's meals on a food console, solves the servant problem with robot maids. Son Elroy is packed off to school in a convenient pneumatic tube and Judy has her space-age singing idol, one Jet Screamer.
For 20 years at M-G-M, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera produced the "Tom and Jerry" cartoons which won 7 Academy Awards. In 1957, they set up their own studios to produce animated cartoons for television with Screen Gems. Their "Huckleberry Hound," now seen on over 150 stations through the nation, was the first half-hour series in TV to consist entirely of original cartoons.
In the fall of 1960, the H-B team embarked on the first animated series on TV network prime time, "The Flintstones," which returns in the fall with all the woes and fun of the Stone Age for its third season on ABC-TV. Last season, "Top Cat" was a prime-time animated series from Hanna-Barbera Productions.

Another release states: “It is understood that ABC has held open a network slot for ‘The Jetsons’ for a number of months, since the idea for the series was simple pencil sketch on a single sheet of paper. Sponsor interest remained strong during all the months in which Hanna-Barbera were busy putting together a presentation to show them.”

Next came the beloved network custom—The Junket, where entertainment reporters from all over the U.S. were given an all-expenses-paid trip to meet the stars of the coming fall season. Since it’s a little hard to meet cartoon characters, Hanna-Barbera brought out master salesman Joe Barbera and p.r. whiz Arnie Carr to promote, promote and promote The Jetsons. One reporter was from the Birmingham News.

Jetson cartoon this fall will make Glenn look stone age
BY TURNER JORDAN
News radio-TV editor
HOLLYWOOD, Aug. 21—From the first visits to the studios it appears TV is after the family in its entirety as viewers . . . The shows will be aimed at catching the adult audience and the kids as well . . . And if you think you've seen the fantastic, there’s more and more to come . . . We learned this while at the Harna-Barbera studios.
Their new project for this fall is the Jetsons, an animated cartoon in color . . . Col. Glenn’s exploits will look like old stuff as compared to the Jetsons . . . and Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna believe in it enough to think it can buck Walt Disney’s wonderful World of Color . . . Both will be on in Birmingham at the same time after Sept. 21 . . . There are George and Jane Jetson, a son Elroy and the dog, Astro.
When Arnie Carr, publicist, and Joe Barbera told about some of the exploits of this new some of the exploits of this new ABC cartoon series, TV editors were in stitches . . . TV reporters are here from Boston, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Ohio, San Mateo. Calif., and Nashville, Tenn., as well as Birmingham . . . But I thought while we were all laughing of how absurd space flights were several years ago until Alan Shephard, Gus Grissom and John Glenn came along.
IN FACT the only fear Joe Barbera has about the Jetsons is that it may be contemporary before the series runs its course . . . The Jetsons have skypool apartments you can run up and down, to let you out of the smog, as Carr and Barbera pointed out . . . And they do have smog out here as well as we do in Birmingham . . . Penny Singleton, remembered most for her role as Blondie’s wife, is thee wife in this one and her voice should be a riot.
There’s even a record coming out on the Jetsons, and Howard Morris, one of Steve Allen’s old funny men, (or was it Sid Caesar’s?) is the voice of Screamie Jet . . . It’s strictly for the bee-bops . . . And the dance for that era will be the solar swivel, so look out twist . . . The things the Jetsons have are “out of this world” and that is literally and figuratively speaking . . . One of them is a seeing eye vacuum cleaner which has two electronic eyes that seek out dirt and dust and even when the Jetsons aren't looking it sweeps the dust under the rug. And there's a shower that works like a car wash . . . You step on a slide-walk that moves you along, washes you off and puts on the powder and finishes the job at the end of the line. . . . There are many more innovations for the Jetsons, and it will be interesting to watch this show . . . Pretesting has brought out that it’s going to be one of the shows of the fall.
HANNA-BARBERA should be all right, if they can do better than Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw . . . Of course, I’ve said from time to time cartoons don’t appeal to me except when the grandchildren are around, but I’ll be on the lookout for the Jetsons.
George Jetson has a three-hour, three-day week (that’s bad huh?) and he still complains about a hard day at the office . . . And life is so wonderful in this Jetson age Grandfather doesn’t retire until he’s 110 and still there’s a lot of life left in the old boy . . . There are already by-products of the Jetsons, such as soap, towers, dolls, books and toys . . . And that’s a big item . . . In the year which ended June 1 gross sales from by-products of cartoon characters grossed $39 millions wholesale and Hanna-Barbera and Screen Gems had a take from that of 5 per cent.
Hanna-Barbera are learning about TV cartoons . . . They have moved from a small studio to a bigger one and now are getting away from animal cartoons . : . The Jetsons are the first series I learned about on this trip hut there's more in store. . . . Hope you stick with us on the trip and let us tell you more about this TV town. . . .
Had lunch . . . sitting at a nearby table was Morris [sic] Gosfield, the Doberman of Sgt. Bilko. and the voice of Top Cat [sic] . . . one of which Hanna-Barbera are not too proud . . . It flopped.

Mike Carroll’s column in the Hollywood Reporter on March 21, 1962 had an unusual little item about the show. He said Nanette Fabray had been signed to play a Martian maiden. If she had, the idea was scrapped. The series wasn’t like The Flintstones, which had already succumbed to the age-old ratings gimmick of celebrity guest stars. Additional voices were supplied by cartoon actors and commercial voice over people like Herschel Bernardi and Shep Menken.

By the way, there was a radio show with George O’Hanlon as George who had a wife named Jane and an overbearing boss who kept threatening to fire him. It was Me and Janie, a replacement show for Alan Young on NBC in 1949. You can hear an episode below.

What the Jetsons Means Today

September 23, 2022, 6:29 am

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The Jetsons turns 60 today, a 20th Century show set in the 21st Century that we now watch in the 21st Century.

In 1962, there was still general optimism for the future, that technology would make life simpler and more docile. Today, does anyone look forward to the future? Isn’t mass media filled with future scenes of dystopia, darkness and hopelessness, a feeling that we’re spiralling out of control because humanity has screwed up everything?

The future, at one time, was a huge sales pitch. Exhibitions and world fairs were full of “tomorrow,” generally consisting of improvements in 1950s gadgets that, naturally, you could buy from big American corporations. When corporate America lost its edge in the world market, there was suddenly a lot less talk about the future.

The Jetsons, for viewers today, is a trip back, not a trip to the future. A trip to a time of positivity, that our lives would improve. Flying cars to save us time. Food-a-rack-a-cycles to save effort making meals. Three day work-weeks to reduce stress.

Any disasters on The Jetsons were not a prediction of an inevitably hopeless future ahead for humanity. They were gags. Like the Supersonic Dress-o-matic that takes George Jetson out of his pyjamas and into women’s clothes.

I generally like the series (I’m referring to the original 24 episodes, not the Orbitty Show of the ‘80s). The background art and other settings are great; especially buildings that look like the Space Needle. The writers went through science and technology magazines to get ideas of futuristic gadgets and some are things we use today. Hoyt Curtin and keyboardist Jack Cookerly came up some neat electronic music. Perhaps disappointing are some of tired old sitcom cliches the writers used (including “Honey, the boss is coming home for dinner” and the “suspicion of infidelity” bit), and the fairly lacklustre animation. There was no exaggeration; characters stood and talked and talked, with animators employing their individual style of head and mouth movement.

Here are backgrounds from the first episode that aired. They’re by Art Lozzi.



This throwaway background gag reminds of something you might see on The Simpsons 25 years later.



The gag above is from one of my favourite episodes— the debut of Uniblab. Computers took up whole rooms in the early ‘60s, so Uniblab has a huge head. For those who don’t know, the “uni” comes from the Univac, a Remington Rand division which made computers for corporations and the military that operated on punch cards or thick tape. The “blab” part came from the spying computer blabbing information and gossip to boss Spacely. I didn’t need to know about corporate suck-ups at age six; I knew George Jetson was getting screwed around and waited for the plot to play itself out with Univac being the victim of karma.

People like quoting from cartoons, and Barry Blitzer’s script gives viewers a chance. “Spacely’s a stupe,” exclaims Uniblab, which George repeats for the computer’s microphone, as the two play Five Card Satellite.



“Jupiter Gin! Planet Poker!” slurs the brain after getting drunk of Henry’s spiked oil.



I haven’t tried adding up all his scenes, but Carlo Vinci seems to have been responsible for much of the animation in this episode. He had unique mouth and leg shapes and angles. By this time, he was teamed with Disney veteran Hugh Fraser on the half-hour series.



One scene in the cartoon bothers me, and it shows you the limits of limited animation. Uniblab shoots hot coffee over the “board of directors” (presumably from Spacely Sprockets’ parent corporation). They just stand there. There’s no reaction to the liquid, let alone it being hot liquid. It’s completely unrealistic. The studio couldn’t even spend the time making a four-drawing yelling cycle.



Because it is The Jetsons, here is an obligatory shot of a flying car. I hope the exhaust doesn’t kill the ozone layer. Maybe it’s water vapour.



There really isn’t more I can say about the series that what’s been posted on the blog. Each cartoon has been reviewed. We wrote a bunch of posts when the series turned 50. Find one with music HERE. There's a post where Joe Barbera talks about the Space Needle and another about futuristic inventions.

Gallopin' All the Way Starting Tonight

September 28, 2022, 4:44 am

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This ad appeared in the Los Angeles Times 63 years ago today, marking the debut of The Quick Draw McGraw Show, replacing Wild Bill Hickok in the Kellogg Monday through Friday line-up.

It seems Monday was a popular night for Quick Draw on the West Coast. Here are some other stations that aired the fastest-shootin’-est cowboy, er, cowhorse, er, horseboy on birthday night, September 28:

KJEO 47, Fresno (at 6 p.m.)
KRCA 3, Sacramento (at 6 p.m.)
KGW 8, Portland (at 6 p.m.)
KSD-TV 5, St. Louis (at 4:30 p.m.)
KAKE 10, Wichita (at 6 p.m.)
WTTG 5, Washington, D.C. (at 7 p.m.)
WVET-TV 10, Rochester (at 6 p.m.)
WNAC-TV 7, Boston (at 6:30 and 7:30 p.m.)
WRGB 6, Schenectady (at 6 p.m.)

The ad shows the first Quick Draw cartoon was “Lamb Chopped” (Production J-11), featuring the orange, bad-guy Snagglepuss. The other cartoons were “Baby Rattled” (J-14) with Snooper and Blabber, and “Million Dollar Robbery” (J-31) with Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy.

78 cartoons were created for Quick Draw’s first season—all of them written by Mike Maltese. In Lamb Chopped, Maltese borrows from Pepe LePew, Robin Hood Daffy and Rabbit Fire, while Daws Butler grabs a voice from Bert Lahr, including a stretched, vibrating “n.” (Maltese pulls off an outrageous pun. When Pepe Le Mountain Goat is amorously chasing after Quick Draw dressed as a sheep, he cries “Wait, baby girl. Two can live as sheeply as one”).

Syndicated columnists Hal Humphrey and Erskine Johnson both penned pieces published in November, along with Don Page of the Times. All praised the series; it wasn’t “violent” like those old movie cartoons.

16mm prints of the half-show show were not struck for all stations. Some were bicycled from station to station and if you read TV listings for the third season (most cartoons were reruns), you can see that different shows appeared in different cities on the same day.

This isn’t intended as a full birthday post; instead you can read an old post on the show here.

When He's 64

September 29, 2022, 5:54 am

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“The biggest show in town” debuted 64 years ago today.

To the right are the TV listings in the Monday, Sept. 29, 1958 edition of the Kittanning (Pa.) Leader-Times. You can see Pittsburgh’s WTAE-TV, which had signed on only two weeks earlier, was one of the first stations to broadcast The Huckleberry Hound Show. WLW-I in Indianapolis was another. So was WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which was picked up in Battle Creek, manufacturing home of Huck’s sponsor, Kellogg.

The cereal company bought the same time slot five nights a week, as it was also sponsoring The Woody Woodpecker Show, Superman and others aimed at kids. Who decided which shows would air on what nights is one of those mysteries lost in time, but an unofficial look at TV listings across the U.S. seems to indicate Thursday was a preference.

The Chicago Tribune’s Larry Wolters was probably the first critic to rave about Huck on the basis of a preview (oh, to know more about that footage!), accurately predicting “Huck and his pals will prove a smash hit in television not only among children but adults as well.” You can read his full review in this old post. Two days later, the Napa Valley Register spoke of “good reports” about the show. And, if you’ve been around this blog long enough, you will have seen all kinds of newspaper clippings that teens and adults tuned in Huck, how he was a hit on college campuses, at least one bar told patrons to stop making noise while the show was on, how an Antarctic island was named for him, and so on. The show came away with an Emmy in 1960, and an animated Huck and Yogi appeared at the ceremony the following year in the first cartoon ever to be part of an Emmy broadcast.

Alas for gentle Huck, whose personality owes as much to Tex Avery’s Southern Wolf cartoons at MGM as anything, he was eclipsed by the more boisterous Yogi Bear. As you can see, one paper used a picture of Yogi in its ad for Huck’s debut in 1958. Another didn’t name any Huck cartoon, instead telling the viewers the initial show would feature Yogi Bear’s Big Break. In fact, Break was the first cartoon aired in the half-hour; Huck was saved until the last segment.

Newspaper ads featuring the characters are always fun. Here are a couple from, I think, 1961. Screen Gems’ promotional department put people in Huck and Yogi costumes in 1959 and sent them all over the U.S. Eventually, a stage show emceed by Eddie Alberian was developed for county fairs and other outdoor events. The second ad is from a time when Hanna-Barbera took up three of Kellogg’s five half-hours purchased as a strip on local stations. (The artwork omits the one other character that appeared in the Yogi cartoon—Yowp).


The Huck DVD purports to have episodes as originally broadcast. That’s not the case. The announcer who provided voice overs for Kellogg’s commercials in 1958 was Art Gilmore. You can hear him over the closing animation in the reconstructed first episode, but a different announcer in the opening, the one hired for the following season.

However, animation with Gilmore providing the opening has been discovered by collector Steven Hanson. While the documentation I have from the studio states that only one opening was animated, that’s clearly not the case as the original backgrounds (and sound effects) were different.

You can play the opening theme song (with no announcer) as you look at some comparisons from seasons one and two:






Gilmore’s voiceover pushes only one cereal: “Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, the ‘get going’ cereal, presents....” And the Randy Van Horne singers take it from there. There’s no “the best to you each morning” yet. That came a year later.

Ten years ago, in this post, we put up a version of Huck’s theme song as played, cha-cha style, by the Scarlet Combo, released in October 1961. It’s a band out of Louisville, fronted by a guy named Jimmy Wayne. Kenny Brookshire’s daughter says that’s her dad on sax and clarinet. Cashbox magazine rated it a “B”.



And finally something I would have liked as a kid—A Huck in a Box. (I had a Cecil in a Box). Huck is the familiar red colour that Knickerbocker liked using; Huck was only broadcast in black and white when this appeared in stores in 1959.



This post is dedicated to Huck fan Greg Chenoweth, our first reader, who dropped away when he moved from Everett, Washington.

Boo Boo's Revenge

October 1, 2022, 7:06 am

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Hanna-Barbera cartoons rarely made fun of themselves in the olden days, but it happened in one of those little cartoons between the cartoons on either The Huckleberry Hound Show or The Yogi Bear Show.

“Hey, Boob! Watcha doin’, Boob? I’ll bet you’re drowin’ our lawn, Boob,” says Yogi, walking over to his buddy Boo Boo. (Why a flower is in a pot not being watered, I don’t know).



“Keep up the good work, Boob. You’re a real buddy, Boob!” Boo Boo is less than happy with Yogi’s patter.



Silently, and with his expression unchanging, Boo Boo turns the hose on Yogi.



“Hey! What’s with you, Boob?”



“After all,” Boo Boo says to the TV audience, “How long can a guy stand being called ‘Boob’?”



For you younger readers, “boob” meant “idiot” until another definition was popularised on the 1970s version of The Match Game.

My guess is this was written by Warren Foster. No one else at the studio would have likely struck back at being forced to write dialogue a certain way (e.g., Yogi’s rhyming couplets).

The animator, I suspect, is Don Williams with the backgrounds by Bob Gentle. The beet-red, fading colours come through the courtesy of Eastmancolor and my inability to improve on them. The print is from the collection of Steven Hanson.

Clean Getaway

October 15, 2022, 6:56 am

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“What are you doin’ with the soap?” ringmaster Huckleberry Hound asks Pixie and Dixie, in one of those little cartoons between the cartoons.

“It’s for Jinks. He’s chasing us,” says Dixie. We hear Jinks off camera. The meeces, with their elfin eyes, take off with a high step.



Jinks runs into the scene . . .



. . . Slides into the washing machine . . .



. . . And into the wash cycle. Check out some of the drawings of Jinks. Pixie and Dixie just move their mouths and an arm comes up; otherwise, they’re rigid.



Ken Muse is the animator.

The frames come from a 16mm black and white reel courtesy of Steven Hanson’s YouTube channel.

The Life and Times of Yowp

October 27, 2022, 2:04 am

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Before he played a cowardly Great Dane that solved mysteries (I’ve forgotten the character’s name, Scrubby or something), and before he portrayed Astro on The Jetsons, what was the first dog Don Messick voiced at Hanna-Barbera?



No, the answer isn’t me! Actually, his first pooch was Woolly the sheep dog on Ruff and Reddy, who first appeared on TV on March 22, 1958.

But forget Woolly. Who’s birthday is it today?



That’s right. Mine. Though judging by George Jetson, fans can just make up their own birthdays for characters and people will swallow it without question so long as it’s on the internet.

It was on this date in 1958 that Foxy Hound-Dog aired on a number of stations where Kellogg’s bought time.

Lew Marshall is the main animator of the cartoon (although the two frames above are by Mike Lah) and he saves Joe and Bill some money by coming up with a few cycles that take up a little more than the first 30 seconds of the cartoon. Here is an endless cycle of my initial run in the cartoon. It takes 32 frames to go from one end of the background to the other. Marshall uses only three drawings; one is used twice to create a four-position cycle, animated on twos.



You’ll notice the inconsistent colour separation. The head/trunk are on one frame, the legs and ears are on separate frames.

The Yowp debut cartoon has a few things old-time animation fans will remember. There’s a variation of the log-over-a-cliff gag that Tex Avery and writer Dave Monahan pulled off in All This And Rabbit Stew (1941). You’ll remember it from other Warners cartoons. I must have seen that, or the Bugs/Elmer version, as I realise my fate. Even with limited animation, Mike Lah draws a nice little expression. Wile E. Coyote could not have done it better. I emit a forlorn “yowp” before plummeting.



The old drag act appears, too. I think this is the only time Yogi did drag. Unlike similar dress-ups by Bugs Bunny or Woody Woodpecker, it isn’t being used to arouse and confuse but merely as a disguise. These two frames are consecutive. Hanna-Barbera was still employing pose-to-pose movement in its animation.



You’ll notice something else. Lah’s animation has my muzzle the same colour as the rest of my body. Marshall’s very is a sporty blue-ish grey. It could be whoever painted the Lah scenes didn’t get the correct colour chart.

There were three Yowp cartoons in all. Duck in Luck first aired on January 26, 1959, where the nemesis was the pre-Yakky Doodle duck, animated by Carlo Vinci. The final appearance came in the second season on Sept. 28, 1959 with Bare Face Bear, animated by Gerard Baldwin. By this time, Warren Foster was the sole writer of the Yogi Bear cartoons and a decision was made to permanently give Yogi (and Boo Boo) a home in Jellystone Park and Ranger Smith as a nemesis. “We’re going in a different direction,” they would say today, as I became unemployed (but that duck later got his own series. Drat!). It’s significant that neither Boo Boo nor Smith are in the final Yowptoon.



During the first year of the Huck Show, Hanna-Barbera marketed its characters, but since there were only five stars (Huck, Yogi, Pixie, Dixie, Jinks), secondary characters were included to round out things. Yes! There were Yowp toys and games at one time. Above is a Knickerbocker Roly Poly Target Game made in 1959. It came with a gun that shot corks and had some kind of tie-in with Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.

With that, I will wish myself a happy birthday. The blog is pretty much shut down but there are are still a few posts left in storage so we’ll try to get them published.

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Quick Draw McGraw, the Psychological Release

November 26, 2022, 12:25 pm

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The first Hanna-Barbera cartoon series were not only hits with viewers, but with critics and even watchdog groups.

A Catholic publication in March 1960 was complimentary about the H-B shows then on the air and quoted Joe Barbera about why he thought the cartoons were appealing.

A non-denominational publication akin to Reader’s Digest republished portions of the story. Here’s what the July 1960 issue of The Family Digest wrote. Note the original name of The Flintstones and the writer’s lack of knowledge of Jay Ward Productions.



Quick on the Draw
Condensed from The Catholic Preview of Entertainment
SOMETIME THIS year, a family known as The Flagstones will make their national television debut, tentatively set for the ABC-TV Network during the prime evening hours. Who are The Flagstones? They are a family of cartoon characters starring in the first full length half-hour animated series designed for adult viewing.
This newest television “first” marks a milestone in the long and successful partnership of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. For more than 20 years these two men have worked together to provide simple, honest and carefree humor for motion picture and television fans through the creation of such cartoon characters as Tom and Jerry, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Auggie Doggie and Quick Draw McGraw.
For Hanna and Barbera, The Flagstones complete the progression to more adult, satirical cartoons which began, almost accidentally, with Huckleberry Hound. Huck, as his many fans call him, was created primarily to keep the small fry amused, following in the footsteps of Ruff and Reddy and adventurous dog and cat team, the first H-B TV series for Screen Gems.
But Huck Hound’s hang-dog willingness to accept any herculean task and still come up smiling appealed to adults, who found his attitude admirable in a pass-the-buck age. College students across the nation began showering awards and honors on Huck, and many of them held special Huckleberry Hound Days on campus.
Sensing the value of this adult interest, the show’s sponsor, the Kellogg Company, ordered continuation of the series, which was the first half-hour television series consisting entirely of original cartoons. Hanna and Barbera quickly followed up with Quick Draw McGraw, a three-part series which spoofs television westerns, mysteries and situation comedies. Of course, the antics of McGraw, a gun-toting horse; Snooper and Blabber, cat and mouse detectives; and Auggie Doggie, the mischievous pup, keep the series alive with action the children love. But the adults see and enjoy the satire behind it all.
Now, with The Flagstones, Hanna and Barbera feel they have developed a new form of television entertainment. The series satirizes our way of life by dealing with the problems of a family living in the stone age, problems which could happen today. Mr. Flagstone drives a tractor, only it’s a dinosaur; the family car is made of stone.
“We think the popularity of our shows lies in providing a psychological release for human beings of all ages,” explains Barbera. “No one ever gets hurt despite clobberings and binding situations. We have tried to give the audience characters they can identify with themselves, then follow up with wild antics impossible to duplicate in real life. The adults have all taken to the satire while the children watch the programs for the face value of the action-packed story.”
Hanna and Barbera began working together over 20 years ago amid Hollywood’s famed atmosphere of jealousy, quarrelling and success at any price. They have found the success but have avoided the quarrelling. H-B Productions operates out of the world’s largest cartoon studio (a studio built by Charlie Chaplin) and is the only company turning out new and original cartoons especially for television consumption.
As Barbera puts it, “Everyone in the business predicted we would fall flat on our faces trying to do a half-hour cartoon show each week. Actually, careful planning makes it possible. For example, when the action calls for a character to change his facial expression, we save the body and simply draw another head. This way we use 80 percent fewer drawings to animate the story.”
Teamwork is also evident in the success of H-B Productions. The two men put in about 16 hours each, per day. They employ 150 artists and technicians in a 24-hour, round-the-clock operation.
Coordination, which can be difficult with so large a staff, is actually a simple matter; there are no vague memos, no closed doors, no time clock. Every worker knows his job and does it.
To the uninitiated, the job of “throwing together” a cartoon might seem like child’s play. Actually, the complicated and highly skilled technique boils down to this:
First the story is written, then a story board is made, composed of a number of rough drawings with the dialogue written underneath each square. Next, through the process of trial and error, the voice men develop the sounds for the cartoon characters.
The men begin working under a stop watch, until finally their voices are properly times and recorded. The recording and the story board go to the animators where action is matched to the sound. Scenic backgrounds are drawn, the penciled lines are “inked” in, a painter provides four color over-lays and then the finished drawings in color travel to the photographers. Altogether, 10,000 of these individual drawings are needed for a half-hour program.
The success of H-B Productions indicates that good wholesome laughter is marketable on television. At a time when charges of corruption, excess violence and lack of originality are being hurled at the entertainment industry, William Hanna and Joseph Barbara can be especially proud of their contributions to show business.

The Cat Man

December 12, 2022, 12:00 pm

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Newspaper cartoonist Feg Murray had a daily syndicated feature where he drew and profiled a celebrity.

Who would have guessed one of his subjects was cartoon writer Mike Maltese?

Here is the drawing from the Brooklyn Citizen of May 15, 1941 when Maltese’s cartoons were released by Warner Bros.



Yes, Ray Katz never directed a cartoon (though he was in charge of contracts for his brother-in-law, Leon Schlesinger, at the time), it’s debatable whether cats were a Maltese speciality, and I suspect he never used a typewriter to write a story, but it’s surprising to see a cartoon writer get recognition. Especially since Maltese didn’t work for Disney, and especially since Maltese had to fight his way into the Schlesinger story department (he related to historian Mike Barrier how Bugs Hardaway and the older writers tried to freeze him out in 1940).

Coincidentally, Variety reported on May 9, 1941 that Schlesinger had signed Maltese to a five-year contract as a story and gag man.

The Cat’s Tale was released March 1, 1941.

Maltese remained at Warners, writing some terrific cartoons for Chuck Jones, until 1953 when the cartoon studio was about to close and he jumped over to Walter Lantz Productions. When Warners re-opened the following year, Jones managed to get Maltese re-hired, and with a $50-a-week raise (“Unheard of,” remarked Mr. Maltese in a 1976 interview). He left for Hanna-Barbera in November 1958 as paisano Joe Barbera offered even more money. In his first year, he wrote all 78 cartoons on the Quick Draw McGraw Show, along with a Huckleberry Hound cartoon and another starring Yogi Bear.

The rest of the story is fairly straight-forward. Maltese worked for Chuck Jones off and on for the rest of his career, finally leaving Hanna-Barbera for good in 1971, indignant over interference by the networks in his stories. His last series for the studio was (I think) Funky Phantom (Didn’t the teenagers in that one own a sand buggy named “Looney Dunes”?).

His pre-Warners career at Fleischer and Jam Handy is related in Barrier’s fine book “Hollywood Cartoons” and Joe Adamson indispensable “Tex Avery: King of Cartoons.”

Maltese remains my favourite cartoon writer. He passed away in Los Angeles on February 22, 1981 at age 73.

Ruff and Reddy at 65

December 14, 2022, 6:49 am

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Who would have thought a dog and cat that barely moved on screen would be the start of a TV empire?

It was on this date, 65 years ago, NBC aired the first Ruff and Reddy Show. It was a rarity, back then, for a Saturday morning. It contained brand-new, never-seen-before cartoons made especially for television.

We’ve written about the series a number of times (see the Topics tree on the right side of this page). To give you a capsule history:

• Rudy Ising claimed he went to Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera at MGM in 1955 with the name and “the format” for the cartoon; they were originally Ising’s “Two Little Pups” at MGM. He sued after the series debuted (see The Hollywood Reporter, June 30, 1958).
• Ruff and Reddy were copyrighted on May 25, 1956 by Shield Productions. This was a company co-owned by Hanna without Barbera (see the U.S. Government Catalog of Copyright Entries and Keith Scott’s book The Moose That Roared).
• H-B Enterprises was registered on July 7, 1957 after MGM closed its cartoon studio. Layout artist Dick Bickenbach told historian Mike Barrier the MGM crew was working on Ruff and Reddy just before the closure.
• NBC buys the series from Screen Gems. The Reporter of Nov. 11, 1957 mentions the show will be in colour “with initial episodes taking them to outer space. Two first-run cartoons from the Columbia library will also be included.”

You can read more about all this, and the copyright episode dates in this post.

What was the first show like? We’re fortunate enough to have a review from Billboard’s Charles Sinclair in the issue of December 23, 1957. It also leaves a hint about one of the Columbia/Screen Gems cartoons that aired.

Ruff and Reddy (Net)
Host, Jimmy Blaine. Producers: Fred Hanna [sic], Joe Barbera. Director, Robert Holtgen. Utilizes cartoons, both new product and former theatrical shorts. A Screen Gems Production for NBC-TV. Sustaining.
(NBC-TV, 11-11:30 a.m., EST, Dec. 14)
“Ruff and Reddy is a slicked-up version of the kind of cartoon show which has often pulled high ratings at the local level when assembled by stations out of available cartoon packages. It may well repeat the same performance in its run on NBC-TV’s Saturday morning line-up.
The format was simplicity itself. Jimmy Blaine, complete with blazer jacket emblazoned with Ruff and Reddy characters on the pocket, gave the lead-ins and lead-outs to a pair of Screen Gems cartoons full of the usual slapstick chases, which in turn sandwiched a cliff-hanger cartoon about the adventures of Ruff and Reddy with space pirates.
Moppet dialers may have been pulled at the clincher in the first cartoon, where a seed-guzzling crowd [sic] stopped ruining a roof garden because it was a “Victory Garden,” but it at least firmly dated the cartoon for adults. A pair of contest plugs, involving Revell electric trains and a doll layout, looked for all the world like regular commercials, complete with “hard sell.”
Summed up: “Ruff and Reddy” should have lots for the tots.

The show wasn’t sustaining for long. Billboard of December 16th reported General Foods bought alternate weeks. The odd thing is Ruff and Reddy was opposite Mighty Mouse on CBS, which was also sponsored by General Foods.

The Columbia cartoon referred to in the review matches the description of “Slay It With Flowers,” a 1943 short starring the Fox and Crow.

The National Parent-Teacher didn’t review the show until its November 1959 issue, but seemed fairly positive about it, though the reviewer had trouble grasping the cliff-hanger aspect.

Ruff and Reddy. NBC.
This is a show designed for “children as children,” not as jet pilots, U.S. marshals, or space men. The scenes are those of Wonderland, the characters whimsical and elfin. Now and then some monster rears his fearsome head, but he’s too fantastic to give rise to more than a short, delicious shudder. Even the commercials manage to adapt themselves to the spirit of the entertainment less clumsily than in most shows where this is tried.
Many of the cartoon sequences have a quality of mystery and charm that suggest the famous Arthur Rackham illustrations for children’s books. Others, alas, are humdrum cartoon staples—not by the artist’s choice, we'll wager, and in future we hope this imaginative cartoonist may be given his head.
The characters have a fine time playing tricks with words (“Mr. Tall met Mr. Small in the hall—that’s all”). A child is sure to follow suit with a perseverance that may drive adults to distraction yet can lay a fine foundation for language skill. But we strongly recommend more caution with the word games. Bad English like “Who am I? You know whom,” “float as good as a boat,” and mispronunciations for the sake of punning (‘“genuwine hareloom,” “‘cat-astrophe”) can make impressions that will take years to come unstuck.
These elements are held together, after a fashion, by a host who is seen briefly with two talking birds—telling a riddle, rattling off amusing nonsense, or raptly reciting his commercials. We say “after a fashion” because the components of the show, delectable as they are, are thrown at the viewer in what appears to be utter confusion. It may go something like this: The birdman introduces a cartoon. The cartoon is interrupted by man-and-bird comment, which is interrupted by a commercial. Then we see another—and different—cartoon. Then there's more man-and-bird comment, with a commercial or maybe two commercials. After that we go back to the first cartoon, which is at last completed, though not without interruption by a song or two and another commercial. Perhaps this confusion doesn’t bother children. They may think that’s the way it is in life and art. But shouldn’t they be finding out that there’s such a thing as form—in art, however it may be in life—and that form begins with unity and continuity?
This lack of wholeness Ruff and Reddy shares with many of the children’s shows, especially those that include cartoons. But surely it is one program that can maintain itself on a higher level. It provides more than passive entertainment for children. It is a show that can teach a child to flutter the wings of fancy. Let it teach him to flutter them in rhythm as well as rhyme.

It didn’t take long for Screen Gems’ marketing people to pounce on the show for tie-ins. The Reporter of December 30 said the show “has already been franchised for a number of toy and clothing items on the basis of previews of the films.”

And it didn’t take long for H-B Enterprises to find a new enterprise. Variety of Jan. 22, 1958 mentioned 52 segments of Ruff and Reddy had been completed (the first four adventures of season one) but production had begun a week earlier on 78 segments for a new programme. Talks were underway with Screen Gems on a new series. It was The Huckleberry Hound Show, which racked up favourable reviews, a cult audience (at least in its first year) and an Emmy. Huck, more than Hanna-Barbera’s other drawling dog, gave the studio its major boost.

Now something for you “list” fans out there. Here’s what the Philadelphia Inquirer put in its TV listings for the first run of the first season. No Columbia cartoons are mentioned and there wasn’t a summary every week.

December 14, 1957
(Debut). Kiddies’ cartoon series.

December 21, 1957
Kiddies’ cartoon series.

December 28, 1957
“The Mad Monster of Muni-Mula.” Ruff and Reddy, that crazy cat and dog team, are told by Mr. Big Thinker that he is going to make robots that look like them for his invasion of Earth. “The Hocus Pocus Focus.” When Ruff and his robot-brained pal try to escape, the Thinker orders their return.

January 4, 1958
“Muni-Mula Mix-Up.” When Ruff and Reddy, the dynamic cat and dog, try to escape from the robots on the aluminum planet of Muni-Mula, they are caught by the ever-present Hocus Pocus Focus, which takes them to the Big Thinker, the planet’s leader. The pair, thinking they are sure goners, are surprised when the Big Thinker’s large metal head opens and out pops an unexpected guest.

January 11, 1958
“The Creepy Creature.” Ruff and Reddy, the adventurous cat and dog, held prisoner on the planet Muni-Mula, fall into good luck when they meet Professor Gizmo, who shows them the real master mind of the planet, a mechanical brain. “Surprise in the Skies.” Ruff, Reddy and Professor Gizmo are attacked by the whole Muni-Mula army of robots.

January 18, 1958
“Crowds in the Clouds.” Reddy is accidentally left behind when the adventurous cat-and-dog team, Ruff and Reddy, try to escape from the plant [sic]. Muni-Mula, on Professor Gizmo’s rocket ship. “Reddy’s Space Rescue.” As Reddy falls through Space, Gizmo saves him with his secret weapon.

January 25, 1958
“Rocket Ranger Danger.” After escaping from the aluminum planet, Muni-Mula, Ruff and Reddy, the adventurous cat and dog, and their friend Professor Gizmo, relax in their rocket ship. “African Adventures.” Ruff and Reddy start a new adventure when they agree to help Pinky the pint-size pachyderm, find his mom in Africa.

February 1, 1958
>“Last Trip of the Ghost Ship.” Ruff, Reddy and Pinky the pint-size pachyderm board the ship “Voodoo Queen” headed for Africa. “Irate Pirate.” The trio meet Cross-Bones, the tiny pirate captain who forces them into the brig.

February 8, 1958
“Dynamite Fright.” Ruff, Reddy and Pinky the pint-sized pachyderm escape from the ghost ship’s brig and are thrown into the ocean when the ship blows up. Their raft is attacked by a swordfish. “Marooned in Typhoon Lagoon.” To evade their attacker, Pinky blows a jet of air from his trunk. It propels them to the African shore.

February 15, 1958
“Scarey Harry Safari.” In Africa, Ruff is kidnaped by Harry Safari, the hunter, who uses him for bait. A lion saves him, but in turn is caught in a trap. “Jungle Jitters.” Ruff beats Harry to the trap and saves the lion. Ruff tricks the hunter into giving him his gun. he little cat aims at a rock. But it’s not a rock, it’s Pinky the pint sized pachyderm.

February 22, 1958
“Bungle in the Jungle.” Ruff mistakes Pinky, the elephant, for a rock, but the little elephant is saved when Reddy spoils his friend’s aim. Now it’s Harry Safari’s turn. He takes aim at Pinky, but is scared out of his wits by the friendly lion’s roar. “Miles of Crocodiles.” Ruff, Reddy and Pinky then try to cross a stream by floating some logs. But they’re not logs—they’re crocodiles.

March 1, 1958
“A Creep in the Deep.” Reddy is luckier than Ruff and Pinky the Pint-sized Pachyderm, who are caught on a crocodile-infested river. From a tree, Reddy swings his friends back to shore. “Hot Shot’s Plot.” Harry Safari finally tracks down the trio. He tricks the naïve Pinky into luring his mom toward one of Harry’s traps.

March 8, 1958
“The Gloom of Doom.” Pinky, the pint-sized elephant, realizes too late that he is trapping his mother. Ruff, Reddy and the friendly lion rush to her air, but they are soon at the mercy of Harry Safari.

March 15, 1958
“Introduction—Western Adventure.” Ruff and Reddy, the powerhouse cat and dog duo, embark on a western vacation when Reddy wins a limerick contest. They head for the Gran Canyon, but take a wrong turn, and wind up in the spooky ghost town of Gruesom Gulch. “Slight Fright of a Moonlight Night.” After meeting some of the frightening spectres who haunt Gruesome Gulch, Ruff and Reddy head for the sheriff’s office.

March 22, 1958
“Asleep While a Creep Steals Sheep.” Ruff and Reddy, the adventurous cat and dog, meet a long-haired sheep dog with a mystery to unfold. Hijackers have been rustling his flock without leaving tracks. Reddy masquerades as a sheep, hoping to catch the outlaws red-handed, but falls asleep on the job. “Copped By a ‘Copter.” Reddy, disguised as a sheep, is hauled into a helicopter by two desperadoes.

March 29, 1958
“The Two Terrible Twins From Texas.” Reddy, the canine half of the cat and dog team, Ruff and Reddy, has been kidnaped by two fierce outlaws who think he’s a sheep. They discover his identity, and whisk him away in their helicopter before his pal, Ruff, can come to the rescue. “Killer and Diller.” The notorious outlaws, Killer and Diller, dream up a gruesome scheme for getting rid of Reddy. They fly him to Dead Man’s Mine, then send him rolling on his “last ride” in a runaway ore car.

April 5, 1958
“A Friend to the End.” Reddy, the drawling dog, is being hurtled to certain destruction in a runaway ore car, when his pal, Ruff, comes to the rescue. Then they head for the boarded-up shack where rustlers Killer and Diller have hidden the stolen sheep. “Heels on Wheels.” The walls of the old shack slide apart, and the outlaws speed out of the building. Ruff and Reddy decide to follow by helicopter, but there’s one small problem. Reddy, the pilot, has never flown before.

April 12, 1958
“The Whirly Bird Catches the Worm.” The heroic cat and dog team, Ruff and Reddy, use a helicopter to chase a pair of escaping sheep rustlers. When the outlaws stop for a quick lunch, Reddy swoops down on them, parking his ‘copter on the rustlers’ moving truck. “The Boss of Double Cross.” Reddy daring jumps from the helicopter to the roof of the speeding truck, but doesn’t realize there’s a tunnel dead ahead. He’s knocked out cold, and the outlaws make a bee-line for their headquarters, the notorious Double-Cross Ranch.

April 19, 1958
“Ship Shake Sheep.” Ruff and Reddy, searching for a flock of stolen sheep by helicopter, discover the hideout of the sheep-nappers, Killer and Diller. The helicopter is about to crash, but the quick witted sheep band together to spell out a warning to their rescuers. When Ruff and Reddy parachute to the ground, the rustlers are waiting for them. “Rootin’ Tootin’ Shootin’.” Reddy is talked into observing the “code of the west” and shooting it out with a killer. The outlaw reaches for his “12 gun” and gives Reddy a frightening demonstration of plain and fancy shooting.

April 26, 1958
“Hot Lead For a Hot Head.” Reddy, the awkward pooch, prepares to shoot it out with those notorious gunslingers, the Terrible Twins from Texas.

May 3, 1958
“Blunder Down Under.” Ruff and Reddy,” the adventurous cat and dog, dive into the ocean to catch a slippery seal, but encounter a strange metal monstrosity, which rises mechanically out of the sea.

May 10, 1958
“The Late, Late Pieces of Night.” Ruff and Reddy set out to sea on Professor Gizmo’s boat, the S. S. Leadbottom, but a strange submarine follows them all the way. They reach Doubloon Lagoon, and discover a sunken chest filled with pieces of eight. “The Goon of Doubloon Lagoon.” The diving bell, with Ruff and Reddy inside, is captured by mysterious magnetic rays from a phantom submarine. Our heroes are whisked off to Gruesome Grotto, a secret hideaway beneath the sea.

May 17, 1958
“Two Dubs in a Sub.” Ruff and Reddy, the foolhardy cat and dog, are tossed into a cell at “Gruesome Grotto,” the underwater hideaway by a pair of sea going swindlers, Captain Greedy and Salt Water Daffy. Their faithful friend, the seal, attempts to rescue them. “Big Deal with a Small Seal.” Ruff and Reddy, along with Professor Gizmo, are trapped in a cell—and the walls are moving in to crush them. But their pal the seal stops the torture device.

May 24, 1958
“A Real Keen Submarine.” Ruff and Reddy, the happy-go-lucky cat and dog, try to escape from Captain Greedy in the Captain’s own submarine, but Reddy and his slippery pal, the seal, are captured. The seal slides away from Greedy’s clutches, and the chase is on. “No Hope for a Dope on a Periscope.” Reddy is hanging onto the periscope of the submerging sub, but the seal comes to the rescue. He drags the water logged dog to shore just in time to encounter, once again, the giggling pirate, Salt Water Daffy.

May 31, 1958
“Rescue in the Deep Blue.” While Ruff, the feline half of the cat and dog duo, Ruff and Reddy, is forced to help Captain Greedy dig for sunken gold, his partner, Reddy, is held prisoner at Gruesome Grotto. Reddy makes his get-away, but he’s trailed by a dog eating shark. “A Whale of a Tale of a Tail of a Whale.” Reddy and his friend, the seal, come ashore on a small island, which turns out to be a big while. They hitch a whale-back ride to Doubloon Lagoon where Captain Greedy has Ruff doing his dirty work.

June 7, 1958
“Welcome Guest in a Treasure Chest.” Ruff, the spunky cat, thinks his partner, Reddy, the dumpy dog, has been swallowed up in the briny deep and continues to work for the pirate, Captain Greedy. But the shrewd seal, Ruff and Reddy’s slippery pal, has a plan for fooling the evil captain by hiding a sunken chest. “Pot Shots Puts Hot Shots on Hot Spot.” Captain Greedy and Salt Water Daffy steal the S. S. Leadbottom and load it with pirate gold—leaving Ruff and Reddy off on a desert island.

Here are two NBC news releases, one outlining reruns in season one and the other announcing the start of season two. You can click to enlarge them.



The Chicago Tribune published on October 4, 1958, the date of the last show in season one, listed the Columbia cartoon as Carnival Courage (1945).

NBC continued carrying the series for another two seasons, but the number of Ruff and Reddy cartoons was expanded from two to three. One newspaper’s listings for Saturday, October 18, 1958 gives the names of fourth, fifth and sixth episodes of the chickasaurus story, meaning the first three ran to start season two a week earlier. The Columbia cartoons may have disappeared. A network news release dated May 15, 1959 stated broadcasts of The Ruff and Reddy Show would begin in colour on June 6, 1959. It seems that was postponed until June 27th, according to a release dated June 2nd, which bragged about the colours on Jimmy Blaine’s puppets, Jose the toucan and Rhubarb the parrot.

Ruff and Reddy disappeared from the schedule after summer of 1960 but returned for the 1962-63 and 1963-64 seasons. You can read the release from NBC below. Note that Blaine was gone.



The last Ruff and Reddy show on NBC on Saturday mornings appears to have aired on September 26, 1964. The cartoons soon popped up in syndication, judging by TV listings in late 1964, including on KCOP Los Angeles with Bob Adkins as a host. Years later, American readers of a certain age will remember when cable television erupted, the cartoons appeared on Boomerang.

I’ve said a number of times I’m not a fan of the show and don’t recall watching it when I was a kid. Regardless, it does deserve some recognition for historical reasons, as well as some really good background art and music selection, but I imagine it’ll be yet another old H-B series that we won’t be seeing on home video.

High Hopes For T.C.

January 21, 2023, 7:00 am

≫ Next: Sing Along With Touche

≪ Previous: Ruff and Reddy at 65

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Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera had high hopes for Top Cat.

The Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw McGraw shows were still attracting audiences in syndication. Both had been nominated for Emmys in 1960—and Huck won. The Flintstones had some critics pouting at the outset, but soon gained an audience. Now, cartoon studios were falling over themselves to put an animated show in prime time. ABC picked up Top Cat.

Considering all that, and the fact the series had plenty of the popular Bilko show mixed into its formula, it shouldn’t lose.

It was likely ABC that set up a junket for entertainment reporters to come to California and find out about its new shows for the fall season. Jim Downing of the Tulsa Tribune was one who took advantage of the freebie and got two columns out of his visit with Joe and Bill as they plugged Top Cat. The first column appeared on June 28, 1961, the next the following day.

It’s a shame the scan of Joe’s drawing of T.C. is poor, but you get the basic idea. The busted hat didn’t make the cut—probably too much pencil mileage involved. And he’s borrowing a sweater from Choo Choo.

FROM TIME to time from now on through the summer I’m going to tell you about the new shows which are scheduled to be introduced on the TV screen next season. I talked with stars and producers of some of them when I was in Hollywood this spring and got a line on a number of them.
You haven’t heard about most of these shows, so I can brag that what you are going to be reading will be real little old scoops on the TV writing gentry.

Let’s start out today with a real scoop. The picture you see here is “Top Cat," star of a coming cartoon series to be seen on ABC-TV this fall.
Joe Barbera, half of the cartoon team of Hanna-Barbera which produces "The Flintstones" among other popular pen-and-ink epics, picked at his lunch at the Tail O'Cock [sic] restaurant—I think that's in Sherman Oaks, Calif., and talked very happily about the success of "Flintstones" and the prospects for "Top Cat.”
"ITS A DAMON RUNYON kind of a yarn,” he explained, rubbing his blue jowls with a talented hand. (He looks pretty much like Fred Flintstone, if you must know.) “Top Cat is the leader of a gang of alley cats and he lives in a garbage can behind a bowling alley. He is trying to improve the standard of living of his pals, see?
“His buddies are Bennie the Ball, Choo-Choo, The Spook, Fancy Fancy and The Brain. He's a real operator—even has a telephone on the pole right by his garbage can. Sometimes his secretary answers it. . .”
“My, my,” I said. “Is he some kind of a nut?”
"WELL, YOU MIGHT SAY SO. He's a kind of an efficiency expert—efficient at conning the general public into supporting him in the style to which he has become accustomed. He— well, here's an example of how he operates: He blows his whistle, see? and times the other cats to see how long it takes ‘em to congregate. No excuses for tardiness."
I said it sounded like he was a Sgt. Bilko type.
“Yeah, that's the idea. In fact, we got one of Bilko's boys— Maurice Gosfield who did the Pvt. Dobermann part— to be the voice of one of the cats. He's Bennie the Brain.” [sic]
So I said that was fascinatin'—but what did Top Cat look like? Barbera took my notebook and scribbled rapidly with a pencil.
"There. That’s what he looks like. That’s the first time we’ve shown him by the way. I guess it’s all right to let you see him now.”
The ABC-TV publicity man who arranged the luncheon-interview was wringing his hands. "We were going to send Jim some nice drawings, glossy prints for good reproduction,” he said. “Later, that is."
“Oh, well, anyway, that's what Top Cat looks like,” said Barbera. "He doesn't have to use this sketch.”
LITTLE DID HE KNOW! MISS an opportunity to reproduce a real Joe Barbera original? From my own note pad? Ha! (I also am treasuring another pair of sketches he made, showing Top Cat’s garbage can-castle.)
Hold your breath until tomorrow and I'll tell you some more about Hanna-Barbera stones factory.

The second column refers to their first studio on Cahuenga, not the one fans would recognise. This was the “window-less bunker,” as layout artist Jerry Eisenberg referred to it. Bill and Joe kept bragging about “no time clocks or memos” but never gave the reason. The bunker was so small, people worked from home. Of course there were no time clocks there.

People are curious about the animating process, so the column gives a brief summary.

My knowledge of Top Cat has huge holes in it, but I don’t recall Barbara Nichols ever voicing a character, though I can see her being cast as Honeydew Mellon. Fans are not helped by the Top Cat DVD having the same end credits spliced onto every cartoon. This is the first time I’ve read that Daws Butler was supposed to voice one of T.C.’s gang. He had been up for the role of Top Cat after Michael O’Shea fizzled out, but Barbera decided Daws was voicing too many lead roles for the studio and hired Arnold Stang, an excellent choice.

BILL HANNA and Joe Barbera produce such pen-and-ink operas as "Ruff and Ready" [sic], "Huckleberry Hound,” “Yogi Bear,” "Quick Draw McGraw” and "The Flintstones” for the panting television public. Now they are working on “Top Cat,” the Bilko-type feline I told you about in Wednesday's column who starts on ABC-TV next season.
These two modest fellows— and they are just that, as nice a pair of guys as you'll ever meet— no longer draw the stuff themselves because they just can’t do that much work. They have a staff of 150 animators, sketch artists, background painters and technicians working like mad to get the strips out. But Bill and Joe still check every detail and either one is capable of filling in anywhere in the production line.
Hanna-Barbera Productions is housed in a couple of one-story buildings sprawled on a hillside at 3501 Cahuenga Blvd. in Hollywood. From the outside the place looks about as impressive as a machine shop.
INSIDE, JOE AND BILL HAVE tiny cluttered, offices and their assistants have even tinier and more cluttered offices. Everything about the place seems miniature after seeing the vast halls of the Disney Studios. Every square foot of space is utilized and everybody works with somebody else's elbow in his ribs. H-B Productions simply has outgrown its quarters, but they're too busy to do anything about it.
"We used to turn out 48 minutes of ‘Tom and Jerry’ cartoons a year for MGM," said Barbera during a luncheon interview. "Now we do twice as much in a week — with half as many people.”
To do that, Bill and Joe have worked out a system which reduces animation to the simplest elements. Their characters don't breathe, for example. And, usually, if one is talking, nothing else is moving about him. Movement is kept to a minimum, in fact. That makes for fewer drawings, faster production.
I have before me as I write this a complete "cell" of a scene from a Flintstones episode. The background is painted (with ordinary house paint, by the way) on white cardboard. Fred Flintstone is walking along in front of his house. He is in three layers. That is, most of him is painted on one transparent sheet of plastic, but his feet are on a second layer and his mouth is on the top layer. To make him talk, all the work needed is to draw his mouth. For walking, merely his feet change. The background is moved slightly each "frame" to make it appear he is walking past it.

All cartoons are done in color, by the way, on the theory that eventually they will be televised in color and also can be adapted for movie theater showing throughout the world.
At the time I interviewed the boys, they did not know who would be the "voice" of Top Cat.
Now it has been decided to give the job to Arnold Stang.
Voices are important in the cartooning business. Dawes Butler [sic] is a busy man at H-B. He does the voice of Yogi Bear and of Huckleberry Hound and will do The Spook, one of Top Cat's buddies. Alan Jenkins [sic], Maurice Gosfield, Herb Vigran, John Stevenson [sic] and Barbara Nichols will contribute their voices to TC (Top Cat) characters.
THE HOURS KEPT BY and Joe and their methods for getting the job done are considered unorthodox even by Hollywood standards. There are no time clocks or memos. If an animator or artist feels he does his best work by coming in at night and working until dawn, that's fine with them. Through a profit-sharing plan, all the employes share in the H-B success.
With nothing but success ahead of them, Bill Hanna (who looks like Barney Rubble) and Joe Barbera can trace their luck back to Huckleberry Hound who started them on the road to the top in 1958. And above each of their desks is a picture of Huckleberry Hound shaking hands with them. The inscription says, “Thank You Huck.”

Top Cat and the other new prime-time cartoons of 1961 failed to get audiences and several retreated to Saturday morning reruns. Some fans say the series was Hanna-Barbera’s best in prime time. “Best” is always debateable, but T.C. and his gang had staying power, were revived on occasion and are still remembered today.

Sing Along With Touche

February 19, 2023, 11:45 am

≫ Next: Flintstones Daily Comics, Dec. 1961, Pt. 2

≪ Previous: High Hopes For T.C.

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Earl Kress was among a handful of wonderful people who loved and really knew Hanna-Barbara cartoons, and would go out of his way to help others who did, too, even if it was just to chat by e-mail.

Hanna-Barbera and other studios employed Earl as a writer. He won Emmys. He was only 60 when he passed away from cancer in 2011. When he died, the good people in animation said many good things about him.

Earl amassed, what I gather, was a huge amount of material; he was involved in publicity of the H-B cartoons after the studio was sold to Turner, in addition to music CDs and cartoon DVDs. Much of it has been sitting in his home in the dozen years since he left for another plane.

Denise Kress went through her late husband’s material some time ago and mailed some of it to me. I’ve passed on some of it in this blog. I think he would have wanted it. Earlier this month, Denise bundled up a package of Earl’s files and took the great expense of sending it to me. It’s a bewildering amount of material, including voice recording session data and animation credits for The Flintstones, a whole episode guide from Wacky Races, one of his draft stories for H-B from 1980, non-cartoon cues from the Capital “Q” library (the one before Hi-Q) and a lot more.

With this overly long introduction, let me post the lyrics and music for what I suspect was a theme song for Touche Turtle.

Yes, Touché’s part of starting-to-get-blah period of Hanna-Barbera comedies. But I post this because the lyrics are by Mike Maltese, my favourite of all cartoon writers, and I don’t know if this was ever used on television.

Touche’s gestation period seems to have started in 1960. A Life magazine spread featured story director Dan Gordon looking over concept drawings for a proposed Hairbrain or Harebrain Hare series. One of the drawings is pretty much Touché Turtle. A Variety story of October 20, 1960 stated a deal had been worked out for two syndicated cartoon series, one starring swordsman Hairbrain and Dum Dum, and the other with Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har Har, another Maltese invention.

Somehow, during development, the rabbit disappeared and Dum Dum was paired with Touché Turtle. Wally Gator was added by August 1961 (sayeth the Hollywood Reporter) and the troika appeared (in colour) on the Beachcomber Bill Show on KCOP in Los Angeles on Monday, September 3, 1962, after a preview the previous August 27th—at 7:30 in the morning! (The station signed on early). The Los Angeles Citizen-News reported “Zero-Hero,” animated by Ken Muse, was previewed. Screen Gems claimed each episode in the three shows cost $9600 a piece, 156 cartoons in all (Variety, Mar. 7, 1962).

Those of you who have seen the series know the theme song before each cartoon consists of the Randy Horne Singers belting out “Touché, away! Touché, away! It’s Touché Turtle.” Maltese did better, though he’s been wittier (eg. “The Flower of Gower Gultch” at Warners).

As you can see below, Hoyt Curtin composed a theme, including chords. I have no skill at playing in A-flat on anything so I can’t attempt to recreate this aurally for you.



It might have been cool if Bill Thompson, the voice of Touché, had sung this, but I don’t know if it was ever recorded.

As you know, this blog is retired but when I get a chance, I’ll put up a few more things Denise has sent this way.