Joe Barbera once told UPI’s Jack Gaver: “Any similarity [in the names] was pure accident.”
Mr. Berra once told UPI’s Vernon Scott: “I was going to sue the Yogi Bear program for using my name, until somebody reminded me Yogi isn’t my real name—it’s Lawrence.”
It would seem highly improbable that Mr. Bear and Mr. Berra would meet, one of them being a cartoon and all. But they did—in the punch-line of a Sunday newspaper comic 50 years ago this month.
The almost raison d’être for the Yogi (Bear) comics in the middle part of 1964 was to give a free plug for the movie “Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear,” which was released on June 3rd. The comics didn’t have a continuing story line per se, but they featured stories about Yogi going to, and traipsing around, Hollywood. The Hollywood series ended in August, and one of the comics included a gag about Mr. Berra—who appeared in cartoon form (one wonders if H-B caricaturist Ben Shenkman handled the design).
So here are the comics for the month.
August 2, 1964
August 9, 1964
August 16, 1964
August 23, 1964
August 30, 1964If you want to see the Yogis (Bear and Berra) in full colour, Mark Kausler has posted them on his blog from his personal collection, clipped from newspapers way-back-when. Please go HERE.
This post will conclude our regular monthly reprints of the Yogi comics. They have simply become impossible to find in complete (three-row) form on-line. My access to some newspapers has been paywalled. In other cases, Google has dropped some old papers as their owner has elected to go elsewhere and paywall them. In still other cases, the newspapers themselves dropped the comic. And in still still other cases, even the two-row versions available have been scanned so poorly that they’re black and unviewable.
Mark offered to send me his two-row colour comics but I don’t want to put him to the trouble. And, as I have indicated for some time, I am trying to wind down this blog due to a lack of time to post. I have banked posts until the end of the year.