A Few Hanna-Barbera Staff Pictures

There’s something pleasing about seeing pictures of the people who worked on the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons. Of course, publicity photos of Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera have been around since their days at MGM. Cartoon histories/biographies come up with snapshots of some of the artists, writers and musical director Hoyt Curtin.

A few were published in an article on the studio in Hollywood Studio magazine’s issue of April 1967. I’m sure you’ve seen clearer copies of the photos of writers Tony Benedict and Warren Foster. But there are also pictures of two of the studio’s sound cutters which I don’t remember seeing before.

Greg Watson worked with Hanna and Barbera at MGM. He was the junior film editor under Jim Faris and moved over to H-B in 1957 (Warner Leighton was hired for the H-B sound department the same year). Watson, Hanna and Barbera brought some of the MGM cartoon sound effects with them; Fred MacAlpin was MGM’s original sound editor in 1937 and some of his effects can be heard in early H-B cartoons. Among Watson’s creations, according to a 1994 USA Today article, was the pitter-patter of Fred Flintstone’s feet while starting the Flintmobile. It was made by Watson pounding the palms of his hands on Hanna’s leather couch.

Also pictured is Don Douglas. Watson told Fred Seibert about him in 1995: “He most recently was working at Universal, and he created a thing by combining violin plucks, you know, pizzicato, and a couple of other sounds, and we called it ‘Pixie and Dixie Hop’.”

Watson has passed away. I don’t know about Douglas.

Though the article was written in 1967, the photos are several years old. You’ll notice the cinder block walls in the back of the sound cutting room. They’re from the second Hanna-Barbera studio in the windowless “bunker” studio at 3501 Cahuenga Blvd., down the street from where they constructed the studio familiar to fans.



I’m not going to re-post the article as it deals with mid ‘60s Hanna-Barbera cartoons, but you can read it at on this site.

Note: This is post 1,400 on Yowp. I can’t say it’s the last as I have things from Earl Kress I’d like to post but I can’t find the time to write. Posts on my other blogs were written months ago.

Unmatched Pilgrim

Grim Pilgrim is, in a way, a Thanksgiving cartoon, as Huckleberry Hound makes peace with an American Indian stereotype—and the turkey they both want to eat—as they all sit down to dinner at the end.

It’s Thanksgiving in Canada today. Canada doesn’t have any pilgrims but there are turkeys in grocery stores or ovens, so we’re marking the occasion with this brief post about the Huck cartoon. You can read a full review of it in this post.

The animator is Ken Muse, who turned out footage faster than anyone at Hanna-Barbera. I’m not an animator and I’m not quite sure how Muse worked, but I get the impression he didn’t make each extreme in consecutive order from start to finish. My uneducated guess is he drew long shots and then went back and did closer shots.

Sometimes, the positions of the characters don’t match when the director cuts from a close shot to a longer one. Here’s an example from Grim Pilgrim. The two frame grabs below are consecutive.



At times, this kind of thing can be really jarring. It’s not so bad here, perhaps because the Geordie Hormel stock music in the background binds the scenes together, or because there’s no change in animators.

You’ll notice the native’s head is a slightly different colour than the rest of his body. Muse animates the head, the rest of body is held on a cel.

I really like the background being panned at the start. The colours are a bit off on this clipped together version. The credits say Dick Thomas painted this. He had arrived at the studio after being laid off at Disney. Before that, he spent many years at Warner Bros., first with Bob Clampett and later settling in with Bob McKimson.



This was the first Huck cartoon put into production in the 1959-60 season. Mike Maltese wrote the first two cartoons of the Huckleberry Hound Show (the other was Yogi Bear’s Lullabye-Bye Bear) until Warren Foster was hired after his gig on Rhapsody of Steel with John Sutherland Productions.

It was also the first Hanna-Barbera cartoon voiced by Hal Smith; a newspaper story earlier in the year said that Joe Barbera was looking for additional voice talent. Smith said he was the first voice of Barney Rubble but when Bill Thompson had problems handling Fred Flintstone’s voice, the two parts were recast (Joe Barbera once said Mel Blanc wasn’t available at first). Despite that, Smith went on to a long career at Hanna-Barbera and turned up at other studios, too.

Anyway, I give Thanksgiving greetings to Canadians and to non-Canadians willing to accept them, and suggest you mark the day watching at least one Huckleberry Hound cartoon.

On Location With Mike Maltese and Warren Foster

One afternoon in the 1960s, little me was talking to my mother, and I decided to inject some Quick Draw McGraw vocabulary into the conversation. My mother scowled.

“It’s ‘sheep,’ not ‘sheeps’,” she chastised me.

Before I could say anything, my father responded, “He heard that in cartoons. He’s not serious. He knows better.”

My father evidently knew my sense of humour far better than my mother. (And, yes, I did know better).

If I had to analyse where I got my sense of humour, one of the influences would be Mike Maltese. He’s my favourite cartoon writer. He wrote loads of great cartoons at Warner Bros., and then jumped at the chance for more money at Hanna-Barbera in 1958. He was responsible for all 78 cartoons in the first season of The Quick Draw McGraw Show (1959-60) and wrote two cartoons for The Huckleberry Hound Show until Warren Foster arrived a few months later and took over. Maltese’s name was the one that stood out because I wanted to know who wrote the funny cartoons.

Any time I see an interview with him, or contemporary newspaper stories about him (he died in 1981) it’s always a treat. Columnist John Crosby interviewed him and you can read that post here. I’ve found another newspaper piece. The Oak Leaf, the paper of the U.S. Naval Hospital in Oakland, published a front page story about a visit by Mike. And Warren Foster. Better still, there’s a picture of them! I think the only other pictures I’ve seen of them are in animation history books or studio newsletters. There are several other people in the photo who cartoon fans should know.

Here’s the article from January 8, 1960. I wonder how many of these sojourns were made by Hanna-Barbera staffers.

Jeannie Wilson’s Hollywood Artists Here for Ninth Annual “Operation”
It was mid-December, and here and there throughout the compound people were grouped about artists and models, who appeared to be equally eager to make a success of their work. Other groups watched cartoonists turning out their favorite characters as fast as you could say “Quick Draw McGraw.”
It was Jeannie Wilson’s ninth annual visit to Oak Knoll, and this time her "Operation Art for the Armed Forces" included nine other artists of who happily gave two days of their valuable time and talent to cheer both patients and staff.
A special feature of this year’s visit was the showing of an hour-long cartoon—the popular TV feature, “Huckleberry Hound,” by Warren Foster and Mike Maltese. Mr. Foster is a writer, ideas man, and producer for “Huckleberry Hound” and “Yogi Bear,” and Mr. Maltese produces and directs “Quick Draw” and “Dixie and Pixie.” In addition to showing the film, the two TV cartoon men—sent by Bill Hanna of Hanna, Barbera Productions—explained how the cartoons are animated and distributed several hundred original “cells” used in filming their cartoon features. Each was in full color, attractively matted, and of course autographed by Yogi, Quick Draw McGraw, and others.
Returning artists who have been here enough times to know their way around the compound were Johnny Johnson [sic], MGM portrait artist and background man for MGM’s Tom and Jerry cartoons; Benjamin Duer, nationally-known artist, illustrator, and teacher; and Bill Mahood, portrait artist, who was here for the seventh time and still recalls how faint he became the first time he tried to paint the portrait of an admiral!
First-timers were Maurene McCulley (daughter of the creator of Zorro), whose brush technique won acclaim at a recent “one-man” show at the Hollywood Woman’s Club; Ben Shenkman, who has done portraits and caricatures for Disney and MGM and is now with UPA; Phil Duncan, formerly of Disney and MGM Studios, now owner of TV Cartoon Products and doing UPA cartoons; and Fred Crippen, Magoo artist.
Mrs. Wilson, who recruits the artists from her long list, started the art project 16 years ago and has boosted servicemen’s morale from coast to coast and in Korea.

Johnsen was Tex Avery’s background man at Warners and then MGM. Shenkman drew caricatures at Columbia and then Warners, later surfacing at Hanna-Barbera. Phil Duncan animated some of the mini-cartoons on the Huckleberry Hound Show on a freelance basis, while Crippen left UPA to operate Pantomime Pictures, which made some fine, stylish animated commercials.

The photos accompanied the article.

Since we’re talking about Mike Maltese, here’s a squib from the trade publication, The Ross Report, giving a capsule of information about the The Flintstones. Maltese co-wrote the first episode that aired, “The Flintstone Flyer” (it was not the first cartoon produced) but the bulk of the writing in the first year was done by Warren Foster.



There are several others things interesting here. Distributor Screen Gems doesn’t warrant a mention.

None of the secondary voices mentioned appeared on that first episode. Incidentally, Variety of May 31, 1960 mentioned that Daws Butler, Bill Thompson and Paul Frees had joined the four regular actors.

Hanna-Barbera was indeed in Hollywood, at the Kling studio at 1416 N. La Brea Avenue, but moved on August 1, 1960 to a window-less, cinder block building at 3501 Cahuenga while the Flintstones was in early production. Here's the building as it looks at the time of this post:



The Flintstones didn’t run on the full ABC network. I haven’t checked to see how many affiliates the company had but, by comparison, The Real McCoys began the 1960-61 season on 169 stations, My Three Sons was on 165, while The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet was picked up by only 136 stations and Alcoa Presents could muster only 116 stations.

And, no, Winstons wasn’t the only sponsor and, yes, cigarette companies spent tons of money advertising on family shows, first on radio and then television (until the ads were banned). Everyone connected with The Flintstones constantly beat the drum that it was an “adult cartoon.”

Maltese left in 1963 to work for Chuck Jones at MGM on a revived Tom and Jerry, returned in a couple of years, and quit Hanna-Barbera again in 1971 because of network interference in his stories. He wrote comic book stories, teamed again with Jones (who apparently threw out his story for a Duck Dodgers sequel).

Layout artist Maurice Noble once wrote: “We were so fortunate to have Mike Maltese, who had a ‘pixie’ quality—by this I mean a twinkle in his eye, a wonderful sense of humor, and a zany slant on things. Full of ideas.”

Cartoon fans were fortunate, too.

Mike Maltese and Friends, 1961

During its short life, this blog has been blessed with the help of former artists of the Hanna-Barbera studio. They’re always friendly and willing to share their knowledge.

Mark Christiansen is one of them. He’s patiently answered my e-mails and, on one of his own blogs, has posted a few great, sometimes unique, things that I’ve been tempted to purloin. Today, I’ve given in to temptation because he’s posted a picture of my favourite cartoon writer, Mike Maltese. And, as Maltese might have Pepé Le Pew say, “Quel belle de bon-us!” Warren Foster is there, too.



The photos come from a 1961 article in the TV-Radio Mirror, yet another one of those We-Got-Kicked-Out-By-MGM-But-Had-The-Last-Laugh stories. But it’s got pictures of some of the staff, and I was quite happy to see some people I’d never seen before.



Fernando Montealegre and Art Lozzi both worked for Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera at the MGM studio and came along (Dan Bessie, an assistant at MGM, notes in his autobiography there were two Fernandos at MGM, both from Costa Rica). Art is still living in Greece as far as I know, and I would love to hear from him some time.



Roberta Greutert, the head of ink and paint, worked under Art Goble at MGM. I’ve presumed as her married name was Marshall, she married Lew Marshall.



Frank Paiker (his name is misspelled in the caption) goes back to the silent era. He worked for the Bray Studio, then as an inker at the Fleischer Studio in the 1930s before he rose into management. He was an MGM refugee as well.



Alex Lovy’s career is pretty known. He worked in New York, came west to work at the Lantz studio, stopped for a time at Columbia before UPA took over its release schedule, then left Lantz a second time around the end of 1958 for a story director’s job at Hanna-Barbera.

The reposting of the full article is HERE.

Warren Foster With Guest Star Mike Maltese

A lovely surprise has come via e-mail from Tony Benedict who, 51 years ago, joined the writing team at Hanna-Barbera which consisted of the grand total of two—Mike Maltese and Warren Foster. Tony has saved a bunch of stuff from his time there, including caricatures of co-workers. Such drawings seem to have been a by-product of life at an animation studio, either inspired by boredom or something that happened over the course of the work-day. If you’ve read either of Chuck Jones’ autobiographies, you’ll see some of Maltese and others, including a couple drawn by a young, soon-to-be-fired Warners writer named Bill Scott.

Here are two by Foster of Maltese. This first one is from 1964:



This one features Mike and Tony, undated.



Tony sent a couple of other sketches we’ll get to in a minute.

Someone reading my posts about Mike Maltese asked me about Warren Foster. The best source about him is Mike Barrier’s exhaustive Hollywood Cartoons. Not a lot of information about him exists. Foster and Maltese both worked together at the Fleischer studio in the ‘30s and both were native New Yorkers. Foster was born in Brooklyn to Charles C. and Marion B. Foster on October 24, 1904. He seems to have been the oldest in the family; he had a younger brother named Leslie.

Foster was musically inclined. It-May-Be-True-Pedia claims he was educated at Brooklyn Tech and the Pratt Institute. Maltese told Mike Barrier that Foster “was a cut-rate music school owner on Broadway who [had] folded up.” Foster later wrote songs not only for the Warners cartoons, but also for the children’s division of Capitol Records in the 1950s, either with Tedd Pierce or Maltese, and for Allied Record Sales (which pressed the Mercury and Disney labels). Foster became an opaquer at Fleischer’s by October 1935, three months after Maltese.

Maltese left for the West Coast in 1937 but kept in touch with Foster, who desperately wanted to make the same move. Maltese put in a good word for him and Foster was hired in 1938 to write for the Bob Clampett unit, apparently replacing Clampett’s high school buddy Ernie Gee. Foster moved to the Frank Tashlin unit in April 1943, and finally settled in at the end of the decade with Friz Freleng, who had rather unceremoniously wrested him from the Bob McKimson unit, much to McKimson’s dismay.

Charles M. Jones doesn’t seem to have been too enamoured with Warren B. Foster, telling Mike Barrier he liked to downgrade the other writers. But the late Lloyd Turner, who briefly ascended from the assistant animating ranks to co-write for the Art Davis unit in the later 1940s, got along well with Foster and told some wonderful stories. If you haven’t read them, click HERE. Let’s give you a snippet of one. Turner and Foster used to hang out. Turner was 19. Foster was just past 40.

So I'm into this thing of calling Warren “Dad”—I don't even realize it, it’s just a pet name I’ve picked up. The next day, or the next week when we went to work, he came in, and he sat down, and he started to giggle. I said, “You're getting ready to tell me something. What is it?” He said, “I want you to cool it with the ‘Dad’ thing. I’m out with this girl, she’s only twenty-something, and you're calling me ‘Dad.’ Find another name.”

Warners closed the cartoon studio for a number of months starting in June 1953, but Daily Variety reported Foster was one of ten staff members who remained. Foster finally left near the end of 1957, about a year before Maltese. The two ended up at Hanna-Barbera but that wasn’t Foster’s first stop. He had quit Warners to work at the John Sutherland studio and actually arrived at H-B after Maltese. Foster was originally tasked with writing The Huckleberry Hound Show.

Foster was interviewed by no less than the New York Times about the characters on the show. We’ve posted his observations elsewhere on the blog, but here are some of them again. From August 28, 1960:

“I think of Huck as human,” he said. “He is a sort of Tennessee-type guy who never gets mad no matter how much he is outraged. He is the fall-guy, and a large part of his humor is the way he shrugs off his misfortunes. To Huck nobody is really bad.”
Yogi Bear, the incurable filcher of picnic baskets from visitors to Jellystone Park poses two problems.
Since he is “bright in a stupid sort of way,” his adventures must show ingenuity as well as blunders. Second, there is the problem of what to do about the morality of thievery.
“So we let him get his picnic basket—and then we get him punished.”
Mr. Foster is happy about the philosophical quality of the mice, Dixie and Pixie, toward the cat, Mr. Jinx [sic]. “The mice make allowances for the occasional attacks on them by Jinx. They understand he is not evil. He is just a cat and he can’t help being himself. They are disillusioned each time the cat’s thin veneer of civilization cracks. The important thing in these stories is to keep out the rough stuff and mayhem.”

The late designer Iwao Takamoto worked with Foster upon his arrival at Hanna-Barbera, and this is what he has to say in his autobiography.

Warren Foster was technically considered a writer, but like all cartoon writers from the old days, he drew his scripts. Warren had been on the staff of the Warner Bros, cartoon studio for decades, but once he moved over to Hanna-Barbera, he all but took over “The Flintstones” for its first season, and I believe his influence was one of the key factors for its success. I say this because one time Bill Hanna told me: “Joe and I wrote the first episode and Warren wrote all the rest of them.” He put it as simply as that. I remember Joe describing Warren sitting at his desk, working like crazy, drawing and writing a sequence down, and periodically breaking out in laughter. Warren just couldn’t contain himself, he was having such a good time, and Joe [Barbera] used to love to stand around outside his door and just watch him.

Foster loved parodies; fairy tale reworkings were a specialty at Warner Bros. and Foster did a bunch at Hanna-Barbera featuring the usual suspects: Snow White, Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Pigs. But he took a cynical aim at television when he arrived at Hanna-Barbera. Several of his cartoons involved the disposability of TV outsiders with stars in their eyes—Yogi in Showbiz Bear, Fred in The Monster of the Tar Pits (Director: “By the way, did the writer write an ending?” Writer: “You’re joking. Do you know what a writer costs?”) and George in Elroy’s TV Show (Foster envisions a future where special interest groups will have shamed everything but educational shows off television. TV producer to his writers about viewers: “You’ve educated them so much, they’re too smart to watch TV”). Both he and Maltese loved word-play. Foster’s the one who, with Daws Butler, put mangled English in the mouth of Mr. Jinks (in A Wise Quack, he facetiously laments “I’m dispic-a-bih-a-buh-a-bob-bob-ble, like”) and the cat’s many asides to the audience (after creating a robot mouse in Mouse Trapped: “And only I know she is a masterpiece of electronic ingenuity. Which is, uh, pretty good, you know, when you consider, like, I’m only a cat”).

Hanna-Barbera went into the action/adventure business with Jonny Quest but Foster stuck with the comedy cartoons. He decided to retire around the time Joe and Bill sold out to Taft after working on A Man Called Flintstone (1966) and died December 13, 1971 at age 67.

Finally, a couple of other drawings from Tony’s collection. Among the writers hired after Tony to work on Loopy De Loop and the TV shorts was Dalton Sandifer, who had been added to the Walter Lantz staff in the late ‘50s after Homer Brightman left. No one, except his mother perhaps, called him Dalton, as you can see by this undated drawing.



One of Bill Hanna’s accomplishments at MGM, besides winning a bushel of Oscars with Joe Barbera for Tom and Jerry, was providing a scream used whenever necessary for Tom. After opening Hanna-Barbera studios, Bill’s responsibility was the production end of the cartoons and, by several accounts, was noted for raising his voice in a not-quite-Tom scream in an effort to keep everything flowing on schedule. Tony saved one of those screams for posterity in this 1962. Bill was proud of his accomplishments with the Boy Scouts but evidently his vocabulary could be something that wouldn’t earn him a merit badge.



Tony’s agreed to have a chat about his time at Hanna-Barbera when the studio was creating half-hour cartoon sitcoms watched for years and carving out a dynasty of Saturday morning shows. And I hope he’ll talk about the many people he worked with, including a couple of the best cartoon writers of all time you’ve read about in this post.

Hedda on Huck

Long before there were catty show-biz gossips on the internet, there were catty show-biz gossips in newspapers. And two of the biggest catty show-biz gossips in print during the glittery-est era in Tinseltown were Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper.

Louella was parodied (in a not-so-catty way) for immortality’s sake in the great Bugs Bunny cartoon ‘A Hare Grows in Manhattan’ as Lola Beverly (with Bea Benadaret doing a gushy voice instead of Lolly’s real-life nasal whine). Hedda—and I’ll stand corrected—seems to have escaped the brush of the animated satirist, perhaps because she and her hat collection became an obvious self-parody, leaving nothing to satirise.

However, Mrs. Hopper found time to put aside innuendo about Cary Grant and Randolph Scott living together and from knifing Louella in print to be swept up in one of Joe Barbera’s numerous fired-to-riches tales to promote the Hanna-Barbera studio. Evidently, Joe must have granted one mass interview to a bunch of Hollywood media or he cracked the same lines to them individually about the same time. This column is from newspapers of April 26, 1960. Two days later, Barbera’s identical “We have no time clocks” quote appeared in a rival New York Times column on the studio.

What’s nice to read is credit being given to the cartoon’s writers and voice artists. And you get an idea of the kind of potential money MGM stupidly threw away by its disdain for the concept of making cartoons for TV.

Looking at Hollywood
Speed Cartooning Puts Pair Back in Business
By HEDDA HOPPER
Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were dropped at Metro after 20 years because a new studio head decided the “Tom & Jerry” cartoons, which they originated, made so much money on reissues they didn't need new ones. That was two and a half years ago. It looked as if the cartoon industry was washed up and Hanna and Barbera with it. But as things turned out, that kick in the pants was a major piece of luck: They got up from a prone position and developed a new streamlined method of animation. It brought theatrical cartoons, which had begun to die because of the expense of making them by hand process, back into our theaters.
“We’ve just made 12 cartoons in one month for theaters,” they told me. “Where we used to do eight a year, we now do 179 with approximately the same sized staff, due to our new streamlined technique. Even Walt Disney hasn’t been making many cartoons lately; it’s lucky for us he slowed down as we were entering the field.”
Deal Set in 15 Minutes
Not everyone can bounce up from disaster like these men. At first it looked like the end of the line. But “Tom and Jerry” had always made money and won seven Academy Awards. No human star ever got more than two or three.
“We were turned down by MCA, Ziv, and Twentieth Century-Fox, none of whom could see cartoon stories for TV. Then we went to Screen Gems, put the story board on the floor, explained it, and in 15 minutes we had a deal. We were turned down originally by Columbia also. Our first is a theatrical series, ‘Loopy De Loop,’ a charming French wolf; now we’ve signed a five-year deal. We have four half-hour shows—three on TV, another coming up this fall.”
They own their own company, and George Sidney holds stock in it. Hanna and Barbera are doing animation on two sequences of “Pepe”; one a dream sequence where Cantinflas on horseback fights windmills, while in the other he fights the bull.
“Our ‘Huckleberry Hound’ and ‘Quick Draw McGraw’ are wonderfully successful. High school and college kids go for ‘Huck’ and ‘Yogi Bear.’ Ohio State adopted them for their homecoming theme. Yale Alumni magazine named Huck as one of their favorite shows, and at the University of Washington, a fraternity changed its dinner hour so they could see Huck.”
Artists Catch On Fast.
The entire Metro cartoon staff came to work for them. People who’d operated by the old slow method for 20 years switched to the quick way like a bunch of kids. “Our story men. Warren Foster and Mike Maltese, are all of 50, and they’re fabulous. No one ages in our business and these men have been in cartooning since they were kids. Mike came to us from Warners, and has a delicious sense of humor. He used to do eight theatrical cartoons a year, but wrote 78 stories for us in nine months—the entire McGraw series. Two of our voice men—Don Messick and Daws Butler—are remarkable. They move from one voice to another, each do eight or nine voices, sometimes as many as seven in one cartoon. Butler does Huck, Yogi, Jinx [sic], Dixie, McGraw, Snooper, Oggie Doggie [sic] and Doggie Daddy and Babalu. [sic] And remember, we do four cartoons at one sitting.”
"We have no time clocks, no closed doors, no memos. The cartoons are all in color—Kellogg is spending an estimated $12 million on shows and time. And they’re made in Japanese, Spanish, French, go all over Latin America, England, New Zealand, and Australia. We’re hot in the merchandise field, too. Our Yogi Bears and Huck Hounds sell from $2.50 to $10 each, and Whitman Publishing company has some 30 books and games on our cartoons.”
(Released by the Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate, Inc., 1960)