Credits: Animation – George Nicholas, Layout – Dick Bickenbach; Backgrounds – Dick Thomas; Written by Warren Foster, Story Director – Alex Lovy, Titles – Art Goble, Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Yogi Bear, Boo Boo, Chef, Stan, Red-Headed Woman – Daws Butler; Narrator, Ranger Smith, Wife, Tourist in White Cap – Don Messick.
Music: Hoyt Curtin.
Plot: Yogi plans a birthday party for Ranger Smith behind his back.
This cartoon may have been the first put into production to use cues written by Hoyt Curtin. When it first aired may be recorded somewhere but I haven’t been able to find it.
13 Yogi cartoons using the old Capitol Hi-Q and Langlois Filmusic libraries were produced for the 1960-61 season of The Huckleberry Hound Show starting in September. But by mid-October, Kellogg’s had dropped the idea of sponsoring a Mr. Magoo half-hour, started talking with Hanna-Barbera, and then announced it would back a 30-minute Yogi Bear show to begin airing in January 1961. That left little time to get the show together. Some of those Yogis that ran on Huck’s show were re-run, but as the Yogi show eventually featured new Snagglepuss and Yakky Doodle cartoons with Curtin scores, it’s quite possible that “Slap Happy Birthday” and its Curtin cues aired with them during the remainder of the 1960-61 season.
By the time this cartoon was written, a strict template was in place: the plot was a battle of wits between Yogi and Ranger Smith (generally involving picnic baskets), and it was up to Warren Foster to find new variations on the theme. In this one, the twist is Yogi doesn’t want food for himself. He wants it for the Ranger for a birthday party. And the Ranger, knowing Yogi, distrusts the bear’s motives.
George Nicholas animated this cartoon with some assistance from—George Nicholas. He reused his work from Yogi cartoons from the previous season. Yogi had a mechanical leap-walk in “Lullabye-Bye Bear.” Nicholas simply drew new arm and mouth movements.
Lullabye-Bear Bear
Slap Happy Birthday
And how about these from “Papa Yogi”?
Papa Yogi
Slap Happy Birthday
Papa Yogi
Slap Happy Birthday
These two drawings aren’t the same but you can see Nicholas used a variation on the same effect.
Papa Yogi
Slap Happy Birthday
The cartoon opens with a pan over an autumnal painting of Jellystone Park by Dick Thomas over Curtin’s sad clarinet cue he used for running-away-from-home scenes (eg. Dino in “Dino Goes Hollyrock”).
Cut to Yogi and Boo Boo in their cave. Boo Boo proclaims him “smarter than the av-er-age bear,” to which Yogi responds: “I do have more than a smattering of ignorance,” disproving Boo Boo’s claim. Yogi further shows his ignorance by not knowing what a Scorpio is. Anyway, the dialogue involves the ranger’s birthday. Boo Boo got him a present. Yogi didn’t.
Yogi: [H]e thinks you’re the greatest chef since Escoffier.
Chef: Did he say that?
Yogi: I get tired of hearing it.
Chef: I do have a certain flare with a toasted cheeseburger.
As far as I know, this is the only reference to Auguste Scoffier in a cartoon.
Yogi tosses in his “you’re one of the good ones” line before the scene switches to Yogi mooching chicken sandwiches from a tourist family, and then briefly convincing the ranger the bag they’re in contains leaves he’s picking up to tidy the park. The ranger’s puzzled after a tourist couple tells Yogi (who was inviting them to the party) that the bear wasn’t mooching food, and even more so after Yogi ignores a picnic basket left in the open as a trap. Curtin’s cue during the latter sequence is what I’ll informally call “The March of the Ten Little Flintstones,” as it was used in that cartoon when the alien space ship hovered over the Flintstones’ place and zapped out duplicates of Fred.
Yogi grabs the cake out of the kitchen of the inn, and the ranger chases him with little steps past the same cluster of trees eight times before running into another building where the birthday party revellers are waiting. After Ranger Smith reads the ‘happy birthday’ inscription on the cake, the little group breaks into “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Ranger: “Thanks, everybody. But I’m really not a jolly good fellow. I’m an old sourpuss.” Yogi: “A jolly good one, though, sir. And they’re the best kind. Nyea-hey-hey-hey-eee!” And, with that, the cartoon ends.
Here are a few more of Thomas’ backgrounds. The lighter half of the cave on the first one is on an overlay.
Regular readers are well aware that the music cues are always listed on each cartoon review. In fact, the reason the blog was created in the first place was to list the cues on each of the cartoons in the first season of The Huckleberry Hound Show because there was an interest in learning about the stock music used in the first cartoons. I can’t do that with Curtin’s cues. The late Earl Kress explained to me once—and Earl researched this in helping to select cues for a Rhino record release of Hanna-Barbera music some years ago—that Curtin simply listed his cues with alpha-numerics and none of them had real names. I don’t have a list of them—and Curtin wrote several hundred cues in the first couple of years—so they’ll have to remain unidentified.