Lion-Hearted Huck Backgrounds

Fernando Montealegre was one of a number of MGM émigrés to the new Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio in 1957; he had received credits for background art in the Droopy cartoons directed by Mike Lah during Metro’s last days.

His name appears frequently on “The Huckleberry Hound Show” in 1958 but seems to show up less often in 1959 when the studio put “The Quick Draw McGraw Show” into production (it was still working on a reduced number of Hucks and Ruff and Reddys).

One of his cartoons was “Lion-Hearted Huck,” which aired the week of October 6, 1958. There are only ten backgrounds in the whole cartoon. The one seen most often is this junglescape.


This is one of those famous Hanna-Barbera repeating backgrounds. During the opening narration, Huck drives past that dark tree seven times before director Joe Barbera cuts to a close-up shot. You probably know how this works. That dark tree is at both ends of the drawing. The background moves and when the cameraman gets to one end of the drawing, he moves it back to the other end. The trees are supposed to match so the drawing looks seamless. In the early cartoons, things didn’t always match up exactly but viewers didn’t notice. Look at these two consecutive frames. See how the lines on the dark tree aren’t the same? This is where the background drawing is moved back.



Here are some more of Monte’s backgrounds.



From the opening of the cartoon.



This is the TV set where a little monkey monitors big-game hunter Huck driving in his jeep. It was designed by Dick Bickenbach, who laid out the cartoon.



These two feature cel overlays. The second one is a little more obvious. The first drawing is used when the monkey runs into the tree, the second when Le Roy the lion reaches for a phone inside the tree.



Here’s another jungle background; the blue rock on the right is on an overlay, as is the square patch of dirt. There’s a pan from one to the other but I couldn’t get the colours to match to recreate the full drawing, so you’ll have to settle for both ends.

This is a pretty typical Huck cartoon. He gets smashed and even chomped by a huge trap but thinks it’s all kind of funny. He doesn’t get his lion, though. One of Le Roy’s pranks backfires and the cartoon ends with the lion in the sky, screaming for help.

When we reviewed this cartoon ages ago, the stock music cues were enumerated but we didn’t have links to them available then. So let’s provide them now. Most of the music is by Jack Shaindlin. A hunt for a copy of ‘On The Run’ has been fruitless (the late Earl Kress made a concerted effort to find it but could not. Apparently the current rights holders don’t even have it). Spencer Moore’s ‘Animation Comedy’ consists of little bassoon parts that could be used as production elements.

0:00 - Huck sub-main title Dixieland theme (Hoyt Curtin).
0:26 - ZR-49 LIGHT EERIE (Geordie Hormel) - Monkey warns lion that Huck is looking for game.
2:01 - LAF-1-1 FISHY STORY (Shaindlin) - Huck follows tracks, chases lion into cave, digs hole.
4:00 - L-1158 ANIMATION COMEDY (Moore) - Lion starts bulldozer.
4:06 - LAF-2-12 ON THE RUN (Shaindlin) - Lion covers hole, snares Huck, tosses tacks in path of Huck’s jeep.
5:13 - LAF-21-3 RECESS (Shaindlin) - Lion jacks up jeep, Huck caught in trap, lion steals motor.
6:48 - LAF-2-12 ON THE RUN (Shaindlin) - Lion rides motor in sky.
7:12 - Huck sub-end title Dixieland theme (Curtin).

Huckleberry Hound — Somebody’s Lion

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Dick Lundy; Layout – Sam Weiss; Backgrounds – Joe Montell; Story – Warren Foster; Story Sketches – Dan Gordon; Titles – Art Goble; Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice cast: Announcer, Director, Elephant – Don Messick; Huck, Leroy – Daws Butler.
First Aired: week of October 26, 1959.
Plot: Huck tells a TV adventure show how he captured Leroy the Lion.

Jack Benny ran into an assortment of odd characters on his radio show, but none stuck out more than John L.C. Sivoney, the slow-thinking sweepstakes ticket-winner whose goofy, redundant rambles were punctuated with a building, wheezy laugh or bawl. Jack broke up. The audience howled. And Jackie Gleason remembered, because he borrowed the character for his TV show, stuck him in a bar with a tender named Joe and created Crazy Guggenheim.

Crazy was played by a man named Frank Fontaine, who witnessed first-hand how one’s character can overwhelm and typecast an actor. Fontaine could do more than act as if his thoughts were fighting a frozen brain and tongue. He was an accomplished impressionist—his first break was on the amateur portion of Fred Allen’s radio show in the mid ‘30s doing imitations—and evidently got tired of doing virtually the same low-IQ, asthma-laugh routine week after week on the Gleason show. The story goes Gleason unexpectedly heard him singing in his dressing room and decided to put him on the show crooning old-time songs in his normal voice. It’s reminiscent of how Jim Nabors wanted to show the world he wasn’t some half-wit hayseed but instead could burst into a stirring baritone version of The Impossible Dream. People seem to have viewed Fontaine’s singing as a kind of a curiosity. But they loved Crazy.

And so did the people at Warners cartoons. Bob McKimson and Tedd Pierce came up with Rabbit’s Kin (1951), where they handed his voice to Stan Freberg and put it in the throat of an incredibly stupid mountain lion named Pete Puma. You’d have sworn there were a whole series of Pete Puma cartoons in the ‘50s because everyone remembers him. But there was just this one, re-run over and over. Later, Friz Freleng would borrow the same voice and stick it in an alley cat named Sam in the Sylvester-Tweety short Mouse and Garden (1960). Sam was voiced by Freberg’s friend and cohort Daws Butler.

But that wasn’t the only time Daws did the voice, and Warners wasn’t the only cartoon studio which borrowed it. Hanna-Barbera remembered Fontaine, too, and Daws inserted his version of the voice into a king-of-beasts adversary for Huckleberry Hound in Lion-Hearted Huck, a first season cartoon written by Charlie Shows. When Warren Foster arrived to write the second season, he dragged the lion out of retirement, gave him a name, added a cynical edge and created Somebody’s Lion.



I love the opening of this cartoon. I don’t mean the pan of the jungle, although it’s nice. What’s great is Foster’s sense of observation. Huck is on an atyptical 1950s interview show about daring adventures, yet Foster’s already noticed that even the most daring adventurers can come across as stiff in the phoney world of television. And phoney it is. For all of Huck’s interview responses to the chatty host are completely scripted as he struggles badly to read them off a cue card. So there you have Foster’s commentary about television, one of many he injected into stories over the years at Hanna-Barbera. To add to the satire, Huck continues to glance back and forth from the camera to the cue cards, even leaning over to get a better look. Daws Butler contributes with a halting delivery, wonderful in its obviousness.

On top of that, the director sounds completely bored and his pre-show countdown is stuck at “two” while a production assistant constantly puts Huck’s pith helmet back in place because it keeps dropping over the hound’s eyes.

Watching all this on TV in his cave (the entrance is decorated with a gold plaque with a crown) is Leroy. Huck reveals (in his normal delivery; the cue card joke’s over, son) that after the show, he’s going to hunt Leroy again—and has a surprise for him.

Leroy: That fu-nny, fu-nny hunter. I love westerns. But a good comedian kills me.

The wheezing, inhaling Fontaine laugh follows. The inhaling is in six drawings, with the timing between them varying. Leroy loses his whiskers along the way. I’ve slowed them down so you can take a look at how Lundy did it, as least in this part of the cartoon. There are five more times (not all drawn the same way) where we see the laugh and several more times when we just hear it.


What’s the surprise? “Huntin’ him, Maharajah-style,” Huck confides to us as he rides an elephant that goes up and down behind the bushes so his legs don’t have to be animated. Leroy loosens the buckle on the seat holding Huck atop the elephant. Huck slides underneath and hangs upside down for a conversation. Leroy asks for “the usual elephant hunting license.” Unlike most cartoon characters, Huck does and whips it out for inspection.



So the gags can now begin. Huck shoots Leroy in the tail, which he puts out on a tree like a cigarette butt (“He’s one of the good ones,” Leroy observes in one of Foster’s favourite lines). The lion responds with the old mechanical mouse bit (used by Foster in Sahara Hare). Huck expects the trick and informs us his elephant isn’t afraid of mice. Afraid you’re wrong, Huck. The elephant, with the hound aboard, climbs a tree and hangs onto a branch. The elephant’s weight does the expected. “You know somethin’?” Huck says to us after popping his head up from under beast on the ground, “That’s a right heavy elephant.”




Leroy gets the worst of it now. First, he surreptitiously empties Huck’s six shooter, counting the bullets to make sure he has all of them, then pretends to be a midway target (with an appropriate wind-up mechanical sound effect) asking Huck to shoot him. He does. “A seven shooter. What won’t they think of next?” the chortling lion comments.

Huck puts out a sign. ‘Lions Club Meets Today Behind Rock.’ Leroy peers behind the rock. “I got a hunch I shouldn’t ask the next question,” the lions tells the audience before asking where the Lion’s Club is. “Right here!” cries Huck. Pow he goes with a club.

The final gag has a lot of padding for dialogue but it involves an old cartoon gag—Leroy hides a cannon inside a box camera and convinces Huck to have his picture taken. We all know what’ll happen next. Leroy accidentally turns the camera around and shoots himself. We don’t see it happen, of course, because that takes a lot of drawings. Instead, the black blanket (or whatever it’s called) that covers Leroy moves, the camera (shooting the cartoon, not the one Leroy is using) shakes and wisps of smoke rise above the blanket.

Back we are at the TV studio watching Huck “Well, I see you finally did it,” the off-camera host joyously exclaims, “You caught Leroy.” How did he do it? Leroy tells us in his own words. “What’s to tell?” hyucks the lion, wearing a paper bag over his head to hide the gunshot injury. “He was just lucky, I guess.” And we get a wheezy inhaled laugh for a final time.

Frank Fontaine’s career had yet to hit its heights, but Leroy’s was finished. Warren Foster seems to have given a bunch of antagonists from the Charlie Shows cartoons— the dog next door, Pierre, Chief Crazy Coyote, Leroy—a try then went off in his own direction. As for Fontaine, he went on to fame with Gleason, gave his wife labour pains on eleven occasions and had friends bail him out when his home was seized in a $450,000 tax dispute with the U.S. government. On the night of August 4, 1978, he walked off stage after his fourth encore in a benefit in Spokane for the Fraternal Order of Eagles, collapsed, and died of a heart attack. He was 58. And after all those years of others doing his duncey voice in cartoons, Frank was about to do it himself. He had been working on a pilot for a TV cartoon show called ‘Happy House’ at the time of his death.

It’s interesting to see Lundy has drawn both Huck and Leroy with half of one eye-lid closed in portions of the cartoon.



Lots of Spencer Moore music here, including one of a number of bassoon effects in L-1158. Huck “dum-dee-dums” ‘My Darling Clementine’ twice in the cartoon over the stock music. The last cue from Jack Shaindlin starts with a fast march, then a trombone going up five notes and back down in an octave, like a scale, but the sound cutter just uses the first part and the stab at the end. And we get that ‘march of the hiccuping squirrels’ muted trumpet music of Shaindlin’s that I haven’t been able to identify.

0:00 - Huckleberry Hound sub-main title theme (Hoyt Curtin).
0:13 - ZR-49 LIGHT EERIE (Geordie Hormel) – Pan across jungle and TV truck.
0:26 - TC-432 LIGHT MOVEMENT/HOLLY DAY (Bill Loose-John Seely) – Huck in studio.
1:14 - TC-301 ZANY WALTZ (Loose-Seely) – Leroy’s cave entrance, Leroy watches TV.
1:45 - L-1154 ANIMATION COMEDY (Moore) – Huck on elephant, “That lion must’ve gone into hidin’”
2:39 - LAF-25-3 bassoon and zig-zag strings (Shaindlin) – Conversation under elephant, Leroy shot, mouse zips toward elephant.
3:54 - LAF-2-12 ON THE RUN (Shaindlin) – Elephant scared by mouse; lands on ground on top of Huck.
4:05 - L-1158 ANIMATION COMEDY (Moore) – “You know somethin’” line.
4:11 - L-1139 ANIMATION COMEDY (Moore) – Leroy grabs gun, empties it of bullets; Huck shoots him.
4:49 - TC-303 ZANY COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – “What won’t they think of next?”
4:56 - L-81 COMEDY UNDERSCORE (Moore) – Lions Club scene.
5:45 - TC-202 ECCENTRIC COMEDY (Loose-Seely) – Picture-taking scene.
6:32 - LAF-74-4 fast circus sports ‘scale’ music (Shaindlin) – Huck in studio, Leroy has bag on head.
6:59 - Huckleberry Hound sub-end title (Curtin).

Huckleberry Hound - Lion-Hearted Huck

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation - Ken Muse; Layout - Bick Bickenbach; Backgrounds - Fernando Montealegre; Story Sketches - Charlie Shows and Dan Gordon; Titles - Art Goble; Production Supervision - Howard Hanson.
Cast: Huck, Lion - Daws Butler; Narrator, Monkey - Don Messick.
Episode: Huckleberry Hound Show K-002, Production E-33.
First Aired: week of October 6, 1958.
Plot: Huckleberry Hound goes to Africa to hunt big game, and takes on a practical-joking King of the Jungle. Huck takes a pounding and doesn't capture the lion, who gets his in the end when one of his tricks backfires.

The best part in this cartoon is, as usual, Daws, this time using his Frank Fontaine-ish voice for the lion. Huck’s cartoons are pretty typical. He gets picked on, sometimes violently, then stops and remarks something to the audience, generally so casually it’s like pain doesn’t bother him. It’s really a concept Tex Avery created in the M.G.M. cartoon Billy Boy, right down to the same Southern accent Butler gave to the wolf in that cartoon. And while the wolf whistled Kingdom Coming (aka The Year of Jubilo), Huck gave us Clementine, though he hadn’t learned it when this cartoon was released.

Joe Barbera and writer Charlie Shows seem to have loved the idea of a narrator. You’ll find one in a bunch of the H-B cartoons in 1958; it’s probably an idea left over from Ruff and Reddy, like a bunch of things found on the Huck Show cartoons (including Reddy’s “Huck” voice). They wisely use one here just to establish the story and then the action takes over.

We open with a shot of Africa, then the usual right pan over the jungle background, and then Huck in his jeep passing the same light green tree seven times. However, this being the modern, high-tech world of 1958, one of the jungle palms sports a grid-shaped antenna. It detects Huck and sends a warning sound to a monkey, who spots Huck on a radar scope (bringing new meaning to the theme song lyric “tune up your TV set”), and warns a sleeping King of Beasts.



Here’s where a clever animation-saving device can be found. Movement is simulated by holding the monkey in the air and then doing a leg spin-cycle for a few seconds; Jinks did this in Cousin Tex as well. This same airborne-monkey cycle is used a few seconds earlier, thus saving more animation.

Oops! There’s a continuity screw-up. When the lion is woken up by the phone, he is not wearing a crown. There's a cut to his arm reaching to answer the phone, and then the scene cuts back to a full shot of the lion and he’s wearing a crown.



Now comes the “mixed-up tracks routine” as the lion tries to throw Huck off the scent. First, there are lion tracks, then hen tracks, which cause Huck to remark “Maybe this lion is chicken.” OK, it’s corny but it’s my favourite line.








Sneaker tracks follow, and then the lion in killer high-heels. Huck takes a short cut to investigate (why didn’t he do that in the first place?) which results in a conversation where the lion realises Huck’s the hunter he’s trying to avoid, and he beats a retreat into a convenient cave.

Next comes the ebb and flow of the battle of wits. Huck digs a lion trap but the convenient cave has a convenient bulldozer which is used on our hero. Now, it’s the lion’s turn. He first snares Huck’s jeep (which Huck somehow gets down), then uses thumb tacks to puncture a tire and helpfully hoist the stricken jeep, crushing it (and Huck) under the branch of some firm foliage.



Huck tries laying a trap, but he has to get inside it to separate the jaws. Unfortunately, Huck tells the lion what he’s doing is “ticklish business,” which gives the lion a gitchie-gitchie idea and “Thwap!” When Huck is caught, the audience never actually sees it; there’s a cutaway shot to the lion. On top of that, there’s a five-second hold on the shot while the lion laughs. Can footage be any easier?

The climax scene arrives as the lion pulls his “best gag”—the missing motor bit. But cartoon karma strikes, for when Huck turns the ignition, the detached motor chugs into action, sending the lion on a ride in the sky, as the blue hound remarks “that there lion will do anything for a laugh.” But don’t worry. The lion returns in the second season (and with a name) in the funnier Somebody’s Lion.



Only four music beds are used in the cartoon itself, along with one of Spencer Moore’s bassoon effects. This one has the most common of the circus-chase pieces found in the early H-B half-hour cartoons (and Ruff and Reddy before then) called On The Run by Jack Shaindlin. And this is pre-Clementine, so an earlier “Dixieland” opening theme is used with drums at the start.

0:00 - Huck (drums) opening theme (Hoyt Curtin).
0:26 - ZR-49 LIGHT EERIE (Geordie Hormel) - Monkey warns lion that Huck is looking for game.
2:01 - LAF-4-1 FISHY STORY (Shaindlin) - Huck follows tracks, chases lion into cave, digs hole.
4:00 - L-1158 ANIMATION COMEDY (Moore) - Lion starts bulldozer.
4:06 - LAF-2-12 ON THE RUN (Shaindlin) - Lion covers hole, snares Huck, tosses tacks in path of Huck’s jeep.
5:13 - LAF-21-3 RECESS (Shaindlin) - Lion jacks up jeep, Huck caught in trap, lion steals motor.
6:48 - LAF-2-12 ON THE RUN (Shaindlin) - Lion rides motor in sky.
7:12 - Huck drum close theme (Curtin).