The Unfinished Snagglepuss

Why would Hanna-Barbera leave some cartoons unseen?

I’m afraid I don’t have the answer to that one. All I know is it happened.

The last production number for a cartoon in the Yogi Bear Show was R-83. But ten years ago, I posted panels for a storyboard for R-88, a Yogi cartoon titled “Beast Feast.” It never appeared on the air and possibly could have been abandoned during production.

At the time, I wondered if there were also productions R-84, R-85, R-86 and R-87 that were not finished or did not air. It turns out the answer is “yes.”

Animation director Robert Alvarez has an incredible collection of discarded artwork from various studios. For a number of years, he has been posting and re-posting it on Facebook. The other day, he re-posted a nine-panel sheet for a Snagglepuss cartoon which I did not recognise. I checked the production number up top and it is R-86, so this is from another cartoon that either wasn’t finished, or was not broadcast.


The drawings (and lettering) look to be the work of story director Alex Lovy. Mike Maltese likely wrote the story, and it appears reminiscent of The Wabbit who Came to Supper (Warner Bros., 1942) in which Elmer Fudd gets a telegram telling him he'll lose his inheritance if he harms Bugs Bunny. That story was written by one M. Maltese.

Whether Robert has the whole board, I haven’t asked, lest I impose on him. Some time ago, he posted these two sheets. The production number is faded on the first one, but I suspect these are both from R-86. You can click on them to enlarge them.


I thank Robt. for allowing me to purloin these. Pur-lion, even.

P.S. As you know, I’m resting the Tralfaz blog. This blog is supposed to be on permanent hiatus as well, but I have cobbled together new monthly posts you’ll see through the start of December.

Quick Draw McGraw at 65

My favourite Hanna-Barbera series first appeared on television screens 65 years ago today.

The Quick Draw McGraw Show was Hanna-Barbera’s attempt to gently lampoon the types of shows popular on television at the time—detective series, the family sitcom, and the ubiquitous Western.

The name “Quick Draw McGraw” pre-dates the series. It was the name of a character (who doesn’t appear) in the Ruff and Reddy episode “Slight Fright on a Moonlight Night,” which aired March 15, 1958. As the dialogue on the series was written by Charlie Shows, it may be safe to assume that he came up with the name.



Mike Maltese arrived at Hanna-Barbera from Warner Bros. in November 1958. The Quick Draw series was already in development—model sheets were made by Dick Bickenbach, dated Nov. 25—and Maltese ended up writing all 78 episodes of the first season of the series. In one interview he said he was doing two and later three stories a week for the studio.

Kellogg’s agreed to sponsor the show, and it was originally sold on a barter basis to stations across the U.S., the same as The Huckleberry Hound Show (stations got the show for nothing, but had to run the half-hour intact, including the commercials for Kellogg’s). KTTV in Los Angeles, WNAC-TV in Boston, KSD-TV in St. Louis and WTTG Washington, D.C. were among the stations which put Quick Draw on the air on September 28, 1959. Sponsor magazine that month said 150 stations had signed to air Quick Draw (compared to 175 for Huck).

Both Huck and Quick Draw were nominated for Emmys that season, with Huck winning.

The show’s theme song, “That’s Quick Draw McGraw,” was copyrighted on August 24, 1959, with the lyrics credited to Joe Barbera and the music to Hoyt Curtin and Bill Hanna.

There were two slight differences between the two shows. In the press, Joe Barbera said he was looking for new voice actors for the studio; Huck had pretty much exclusively employed Daws Butler and Don Messick in the 1958-59 season. He found some. Hal Smith, Jean Vander Pyl and Julie Bennett show up on a regular basis on Quick Draw’s first season. Barbera cast two new regular voices as well. KFWB disc jockey Elliot Field was hired to play Blabber Mouse opposite Daws Butler’s Snooper, and Daws recommended truck driver and ex-radio actor Doug Young to be Doggie Daddy.

Elliot explained to me his Blabber career (he did incidental voices as well) ended not long after he was hired as he got sick. A decision was made to have Butler do both voices, though Field came back for a Flintstones episode before moving to Detroit. Young imitated Jimmy Durante. Daws had done the same imitation for Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera at MGM but felt his voice wasn’t up to it and suggested Young, who gave winning performances. Mark Evanier mentioned that Peter Leeds, who was in Stan Freberg’s voice stock company, had auditioned as well, and you can hear him narrating the Quick Draw cartoon “Scat, Scout, Scat.” And Vance Colvig, Jr. shows up in the Quick Draw cartoon Bad Guys Disguise more than a year before he returned to the studio to play Chopper.

The Augie Doggie/Doggie Daddy relationship was based more on Garry Moore and Jimmy Durante's interactions from their variety show on radio for Camel cigarettes than any TV sitcom (which tended to include long-suffering wives and bubbly-but-angst-ridden teenage daughters). “Dat’s my boy who said dat!” Durante would bark to the audience about Moore. Baba Looey sounded like Desi Arnaz’s Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy, except Baba substituted ‘thinnin’ for ‘splainin’ (Arnaz actually talked that way. Before Lucy, he was known for singing "Babalú," hence the character's name). Snooper was a take-off on Ed Gardner’s Archie from Duffy’s Tavern, though Daws insisted there was some of actor Tom D’Andrea in the voice. Quick Draw was just another Western dullard, like Red Skelton’s Clem Cadiddlehopper. [Note: Joe Bevilacqua has written saying Daws created Quick Draw's voice by adding a western twang to Charlie Butterworth. As Joe was a long-time friend of Daws, I don't doubt that's correct.]

The other difference is one you may not have noticed. Hanna-Barbera had been utilizing the brand-new Capitol Hi-Q production library for both Ruff ‘n’ Reddy and The Huckleberry Hound Show. Hi-Q was also heard on Quick Draw, but there appears to have been a deliberate attempt to use different music than what was heard on the other two series. Many of the cues were composed by Englishman Phil Green, and were originally pressed on 78s in the EMI Photoplay library. Like the other two shows, the Langlois Filmusic library, which credited Jack Shaindlin as the composer, was also used.



While Quick Draw was on drawing boards in November 1958, and production of the Quick Draw and Snooper and Blabber cartoons was underway in December, Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy needed a bit of time in development. Variety reported on January 8, 1959 that Screen Gems had approved production of the father-and-son series Pete and Repete. By January 28th, the characters were now, according to Variety, Arf and Arf. The March 23rd edition of Television Age mentions the segment was named for Augie Doggie; Augie was named for an in-law of Mike Maltese. Production numbers suggest the Augie cartoons were started well after the other two segments of the Quick Draw show.

Maltese came up with memorable side characters for the show as well. A pink mountain lion named Snagglepuss shows up to heckle in all three segments; in the Quick Draw cartoons, he’s animated by George Nicholas. Quick Draw was assisted in his sheriff-ing by Snuffles, who loved dog biscuits so much he’d float into the air in ecstasy after eating one, and do the bidding of whoever had them, hero or villain. And Maltese told columnist John Crosby he was inspired by the silent Doug Fairbanks’ movie The Mark of Zorro (1920) to invent Quick Draw’s alter ego of El Kabong.

Two cartoons Maltese wrote for Augie and dear old dad featured one of Bill and Joe’s favourite characters—the duck that would become Yakky Doodle, voiced by Red Coffey.

Why do I like Quick Draw? The characters make comments to the viewer, there are lots of wisecracks and puns, Quick Draw is incompetent but enthusiastic about righting wrongs, which makes him likeable.

Now if only the series was available on home video.

{Late note: Jeff Falewicz has written to say that Elliot Field passed away last Monday at the age of 97. He was the last of the studio's pre-Flintstones voice actors].

Sing Along With Touche

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 Gulch” 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.

Late note: Kurtis Findlay, who is the only person who subscribes to this feed who has met me in person, gave it a go. That is so cool. Don’t expect perfect pitch as he has a cold (I was a boy soprano. My choir teacher told me I had almost perfect pitch. I’m a pensioner now and am extremely flat).



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.

The Cat Man

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.

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.

The Psychology of Huck and Quick Draw

Did Quick Draw McGraw give me a psychological release at age 5?

At that age, I don’t know what I’d want to have been released from, but Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera thought so. At least, that’s what they told the Valley Times from North Hollywood in its issue of May 26, 1960.

Their article (if, indeed, they wrote it themselves) talks about the appeal of the Quick Draw McGraw Show, which is my favourite of all the Hanna-Barbera series. Better still, it gives credit not only to the great writing staff at the time but even some of the animators who worked on the series. George Nicholas and Carlo Vinci are among my favourite early H-B animators along with Mike Lah; Don Patterson is up there, too, for some fine expressions in the earliest Flintstones seasons.

Hanna and Barbera liked to talk about “no time clock” in their earliest interviews. At this point, they weren’t in the building everyone associates with them. They were in much smaller confines which forced some people to work at home. Naturally, there’d be no time clock. I’ll bet you Hanna was watching the footage count, though.

At the risk of being repetitive over the years here, it’d sure be nice if the Quick Draw show—even just the individual cartoons—would be released on a home video format.

Enjoy this bonus post.

SECRET OF CAPTURING AN AUDIENCE
By BILL HANNA and JOE BARBERA
Television viewers are darn smart. And, what's more, they're selective as well.
No longer can a television producer foist a tired and trite story with a one-dimensional hero, whose vocabulary consists solely of "Yep" and "Nope" on viewers and hope to capture a large audience for any length of time.

We think the popularity of our shows "Huckleberry Hound," and "Quick Draw McGraw" lies in providing a psychological release for all human beings of all ages. No one ever gets hurt despite clobberings and binding situations our characters encounter. We try to give the audience characters that they can identify with, 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.
Quick Draw McGraw, our newest series, appearing on KTTV-TV Channel 11, Tuesdays, at 7:00 p.m., is the combined efforts of our whole staff.
We drew up rough sketches of characters based on three of the most standard TV shows—the western, the private eye, and the family situation comedy.
These sketches were turned over to our writer, Mike Maltese. Mike developed and named the characters and started writing.
Maltese made Quick Draw, the hero of the Western segment, the fastest drawing critter west of Peoria. He is aided by his faithful sidekick. Baba Looey, a fearless little burro with a Cuban accent.
Current Trends Vital
Being in the cartoon field for many years, we know that current trends are vital. The TV private eye show inspired the "Snooper and Blabber" segment of the show. Since most detective shows are a cat and mouse affair, we made Snooper a cat with a voice reminiscent of Archie in Duffy's Tavern, and Blabber, a mouse with undying admiration for his leader, Snooper.

We watched many situation comedy shows and came up with "Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy," a father and son canine pair, who encounter all the problems of fathers and sons everywhere.
But the big reason for our success, we feel, is our talented staff who brings our shows to life. We have the two most gifted writers in the business, Warren Foster and Mike Maltese, along with the two best story directors in the industry, Alex Lovy and Dan Gordon.
Ken Muse, Lew Marshall, Carlo Vinci, Dick Lundy, Don Patterson and George Nicholas are a few of our great animators who gave life to our characters. 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. Everyone knows his job and does it.
TV animation is much more than pen and ink. It's a lot of talent—organized and hard working.

The Great Maltese

Mike Maltese is my favourite cartoon writer. It’d take forever to list all the incredibly funny cartoons he was responsible for at Warner Bros. I still laugh at them. It’s impossible not to.

In November 1958, Maltese left for Hanna-Barbera. Despite the restrictions on visual gags imposed by limited animation, and the fact he was now churning out more than a story a week instead of a story a month, his cartoons were still (for the most part) funny.

Maltese departed for a year and a half to re-unite with Jones at MGM in the mid-‘60s only to return to Hanna-Barbera before leaving in frustration several years later.

There are few reminiscences by Maltese about his long career in animation. That fine columnist John Crosby talked to him in 1960; it was posted here. Historian Joe Adamson spoke to him in an interview transcribed in the book Tex Avery, King of Cartoons. And snippets of another interview appear in Mike Barrier’s tome Hollywood Cartoons. But there was a round-table with Maltese conducted on March 14, 1977 involving several top people in animation. It is full of great stories about his time at Warners (grazing over MGM and with only one mention of Lantz). He also talks a bit about his time at Hanna-Barbera. Unfortunately, he doesn’t discuss arriving there. Instead, he focuses sourly on what network television did to the cartoon business. The things Maltese tossed into a Quick Draw McGraw cartoon (such as Quick Draw accidentally shooting himself in the face) in 1959 would never, ever have been allowed a decade later. Maltese certainly wasn’t nostalgic for late ‘60s and ‘70s TV animation.

I’ve transcribed the portions involving Hanna-Barbera; the discussion goes in various directions and simply comes to a stop.

Mike Maltese: In 1958, I went to work for Hanna-Barbera. I quit in 1971 because the network boys were telling me how to write cartoons, and this I didn’t want....
The cartoon is a good business to be in, but rough today. They’ve got to pull out of those Saturday-morning kiddie-cartoon show things—if they can do it. Get the hell away from that. And you have to fight the network boys who tell you how to write cartoons, and, of course the animators have to fight this cutthroat animation in Australia and other foreign countries, where they’ll work for peanuts....
At times a story man worked in tandem with another story man. At other times he could be working in a group. As for myself, I preferred working alone as much as possible, and with directors who gave me that freedom. In that way, a future audience could say, hopefully, “That was a Mike Maltese story; those were Mike Maltese gags.” In that respect, I was fortunate to spend many happy years working with good directors, chief among whom were Chuck Jones at the Merrie Melodies/Looney Tunes fun factory, and, later, Joe Barbera at the Hanna-Barbera nut farm.
They gave me as much freedom as my ego—or whatever prompted me—required. Their guidance and particular talents helped me tremendously. I’m happy to say I enjoyed the good years of animation. Unfortunately, the days of the big studios and theatrical cartoons are all but dead. The big market today is television. Let’s not be satisfied with just Saturday Morning kiddie cartoons; perhaps we should go after prime-time audiences—with the audience values of a Mary Tyler Moore show, or an All in the Family show.
Now I’d like to read a list of some cartoon characters for which I’ve written stories...at Hanna-Barbera: The Flintstones, Super Snooper and Blabb, Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy, Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Looey, The Jetsons, Squiddly Diddley, Snagglepuss, Top Cat, The Wacky Racers, Harlem Globetrotters, Josie and the Pussycats, The Impossibles, Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Secret Squirrel, Atom Ant, Magilla Gorilla, Hardy-Har-Har and Morocco Mole, Chopper Dog and Canary [Yakky Doodle], Perils of Penelope Pitstop, Funky Phantom, the Hair Bears, and others I can’t remember. Over 2500 cartoons.

Darrell Van Citters: Did you find that any particular characters were more difficult to write than others?

Mike Maltese: Yeah, the Hanna-Barbera characters like the Harlem Globetrotters and the Wacky Racers, because we were working under the conditions set up by the network bosses. They thought the more characters in a story, the better it was. Trying to make of that stuff funny was impossible. For instance, I went in one day (this was later on, when the network boys had taken over the Hanna-Barbera studio.) Well, before I tell my story to Joe Barbera, he says, “Great—Do another one.”
At Warners’ I did one a month, 12 a year, sometimes one every two weeks. At Hanna-Barbera I did two a week, then three a week. 150 stories a year, and we went like that. (snaps fingers several times). One right after another. We moved from three rooms in the old Chaplin studios on La Brea to where they are now, in Cahuenga. And then the network boys took over, and when I went in one day to tell Joe my story he said, “I like it, but you’ll have to tell the story crew.” They told me, “Drop it on the desk, and we’ll call you and let you know.” Boy, those were rough times.
For instance, there was a series I refused to do completely. I went in one day, and Joe Barbera says, “The head man (I won’t mention his name) at CBS got a helluva idea, he thinks, for an animated series he wants you to work on.” I go, “What is it?” and he says, “It’s a Secret Fighter for Justice Whaaaale.” (Laughter) “And he’s got a name for it—Moby Dick!!!” (Laughter).
“And he’s got all this here sparkling electric stuff—‘beep-beep-beep-“Trouble in Morocco!!”—‘beep-beep-beep-’—The whale is off!—Who cares? I told him, I says, “Forget it!” He says “Please,” I say, “NO!”...
So I refused, but there was other stuff I had to work on. Finally I said, No more. I quit. If we had had to do the cartoons at the old Warner Brothers studio with the pressure put on us by the network boys, we wouldn’t get a Bugs Bunny done. We wouldn’t get anything finished....

We discovered at Warner Brothers many years ago, that if we write a cartoon for the kids, the grownups aren’t going to like it. But it we write our cartoons for the grownups, the kids are going to like it. They’re gonna like it anyway. Now, many of the Merrie Melodies I wrote some 25 years ago that you see on television still hold up in time. Because I learned long ago to try to write cartoon stories that would hold up in time like Laurel and Hardy, or Chaplin. Abbott and Costello today look real corny. They’re all right, but they don’t hold up as well as Laurel and Hardy. So I tried to learn that much about a cartoon, to write stories that aren’t hurt by time, if possible.
But the kiddie cartoons done later by Hanna-Barbera, they’re (snaps fingers) quick, quick, get ‘em out. Which is all right, but then you have these bosses from the networks telling you how to write them, locate ‘em, and all that, but not only that—You are not allowed to have a cartoon character crash into a wall. “Ummm. Just missed that wall.”
They told us, “No machine guns. No machine-gun bullets.” We had a bunch of these tough little guys with the black shorts and white ties [the Ant Hill mob on Penelope Pitstop], and all—They all jump like the Keystone Cops. And of course, there’s a foul-up and BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG with the machine guns, but they don’t want to use then, even though the machine guns miss. So, I go, “What are we supposed to do?” and Joe Barbera says, “I don’t know.....We’ll...use...cream pies.” So what I did was have ‘em shoot chocolate syrup, and they say, “Here come the fudge!” Those were the rough cartoons to make....

Brad Bird: I was wondering if it was easier to think up gags for full-animation rather than limited animation.

Mike Maltese: There is a difference, but the amount of work is almost the same. You can do a storyboard for full animation, and what they do with it is up to them; you can get a director who’ll say, “Well, I can cut this down to limited animation.” Now the way we used to do that was we’d have Quick Draw McGraw go off-screen; we’d set up the thing that was going to happen to him off-screen. That would require good sound effects. “Hold on thar!!!” He’d walk off-screen, and we’d hear this BOOM-CRASH-BANG—and they you’d cut over and you’d see the result....
No, there isn’t a helluva lot of difference. The amount of work in writing a story—it’s there. You think of the idea. The only thing you show is maybe a few little drawings of the thing happening to the guy. But you had to think about what was happening to him, and then cut it down to fit the limited-animation method. That kind of explains it....
All I can say is that it’s a great business and I hope that someday you’ll be able to take it out of the kiddie-matinee thing, and bring it up to something better, because it’s going to die otherwise. There’s just so much time on Saturday Morning, and you know what they do to make way for the new stuff on Saturday morning is to move this kiddie crap to Sunday.
Now, Hanna-Barbera tried unsuccessfully for prime time with Just Wait Till Your Father Gets Home. Prime time. I know the writers, and we were hamstrung. They were stopped. Experienced writers who know the cartoon business, were stopped by the network boys. They’d say, “We want this, that the other thing—we—I say, “Wait a minute. We know what we’re talking about.”
Joe Barbera was a great salesman. He could sell anything to the networks. I heard that CBS was going to build a cartoon studio in California and compete, and hire, if necessary, the talent from the other studios, and put their boys in charge.
What they did was they went down to the other studios, and would pit one producer against another—“You do it our way, the way we want, or we’ll give it to De Patie-Freleng or Filmation or whoever!” The result was the producers, who never said anything before, shoulda got together and said “The hell with you guys, you do it our way or we don’t wanna play with you guys at all, cause we’ve got the sponsors, the advertisers. Without them, you can’t live!”

But they got chicken. They got chicken and did it their way. The result was great talents like Joe Barbera and the rest of them backed off and made room for these boys put in by the network boys.
Now, Bill told me he was going to retire, he’d had an operation. Joe Barbera will never retire; he’s married to his work; this is his life. I haven’t seen him in six years. I just saw him again this week, and the first thing he says, doesn’t even say “Hello”—he says, “You know what we’re doing, we’re doing Heidi!” “Now, listen to this record, this is a scene where Heidi’s father is forced to leave her...” Like, who the hell cares? I’m passing his room and.. “Mike, listen to this! Guess who’s singing?” I say, “I don’t know.” He says, “Give it a guess, give it a guess!” (Sings hammily) “Heidiiiiii, you arre my lit-tul girllll.” I say, “Herschel Bernardi.” He says “NO NO NO.” His daughter was there. She says (whispers) “He was in Westerns. Used to play the father.”
I say, “Lorne Greene.” Joe says. “How did you know?” I say, “Wellll.” (Laughter.) So I say, “Sorry, Joe, I gotta leave.” I shook hands with him, and I left.
This is the wrong way! Bill wants out. And he should go out. He’s going to be 67 in July, and I was 69 in February. I could still work, but not under those conditions....

John Musker: Has Chuck Jones ever approached you on doing stories on his TV specials? It seems like there’s a pretty noticeable decline in the story content once you left his unit at Warner’s.

Mike Maltese: Yes, he wanted me to come back, but I wouldn’t leave Hanna-Barbera, because I didn’t go want to go back to work for Warners’s. I knew Warners was on the way out. Because Warner Brothers, unlike MGM, who publicized Tom and Jerry, never publicized Bugs Bunny or any of the cartoons. Any publicity on the Warner cartoons was done by word of mouth. The only time I went back to work for Chuck was when I had a hiatus at Hanna-Barbera and Joe Barbera says, “Well, I’ll call you.” It was the end of ’63. I waited about two or three weeks. Chuck called, and says, “I got a chance to get the MGM release, but I have to do a couple of Tom and Jerries. Will you write them for me?” I say, “Sure. I’m not working.”...
I did about 14 Tom and Jerries for him. And Joe Barbera called me up and he says, “How much is Chuck paying you?” I say, “$250 a week.” He says, “I’ll give you $500.” I say, “I’ll be in in the morning.” (Laughter.)...
So I went back in 1965 and I worked on a whole bunch of different things—different type cartoons, that was the whole secret of it—writing various types of cartoons.
Fred Silverman, who was the head of children’s programming at CBS, had three or four crazy characters—Aquaman, Wireman, and all those (who remembers? This was 12 years ago.) And he says, “Could you get a couple of ideas?” I said, “Sure.”
I went home and wrote 15 story ideas. And I knew the villains in each one had to be strong enough to challenge the talents of these four ‘super-guys.’
I had Paper-Man, who could fold himself up and fly like a paper airplane. This one guy, Electro-Man, could appear on a TV screen at some home, and step out and rob the place, just back into the TV screen, jump in a car, and zoom off. Now, it was up to these guys to get him. They trapped him in a phone booth, he disappeared through the wire. They trapped him in the wire, they tied the wire in a square knot! (Laughter.) I had 15 ideas like this, and I called them, “The Impossibles.” Joe Barbera says, “The Impossibles?” I say, “Yeah, call them The Impossibles.” So he told the ideas to Fred Silverman, and he says, “Unless Mike Maltese writes these things, you’re not gonna get the show.” Joe says, “I’ll give you another $100, Mike.”
Like, stupid. I coulda asked for another two or three hundred. I was always eager to work. I say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

The thing is, you go along, and you try to make your buck. I never made the big money, because I never had the opportunity to go into live-action. I’ll tell you one thing, Joe Barbera got fooled by a lot of live-action writers who tried to write cartoons.
He found out that a cartoon writer could write live-action stories—they write Phyllis and a few other TV shows—the transition from cartoon writing to live-action writing is easier than the other way around. Because live-action guys come in and say, “A guy comes in here—and he has a damn funny walk. And the way he walks funny—you know how you guys draw it---he meets this other funny character here—could be an aardvark or a lion, and—oh well, YOU know how you guys do it. I don’t care, if it’s funny, ha ha.” (Laughter.)...
I also had a lot of fun doing the McGraw show, and I also used Snagglepuss, I don’t know if any of you remember him—the guy who talked like Bert Lahr.
Bert Lahr threatened to sue us. I made sure not to use any of the real Bert Lahr material [evidently Maltese forgot the origin of “Heavens to Murgatroyd”], I added my own Bert Lahr-isms, as it were.
“Exit—Stage left!”
“I’ll be with you in a forthwith—in a fifth-with, eee-ven.”
All that stuff. But we had to stop because he threatened to sue....
Well, that’s all, fellows.

The Great Maltese

Is there any doubt that Mike Maltese was the best cartoon writer of all? Not for me, there isn’t. Some of the funniest stories ever concocted at Warners Bros. were his, and he somehow managed to pump out 79 cartoons (all in the Quick Draw series and one Huckleberry Hound) in his first year after being hired at Hanna-Barbera. Variety announced on December 4, 1958 his arrival at H-B to be the head of its new story department.



From the collection of former H-B writer Tony Benedict comes this picture of Maltese with another of the greats of the cartoon writing business, Warren Foster. Both of them were native New Yorkers, both worked for the Fleischer studio in the 1930s and it was on Maltese’s recommendation (the story goes) that Foster was hired at Warner Bros.; Maltese was an assistant animator at the time. Foster was hired at Hanna-Barbera on April 14, 1959, so it seems likely Maltese hired him there, too. Foster had left Warners in November 1957 for John Sutherland Productions.

The insightful critic John Crosby interviewed Maltese toward the end of 1959 when the Quick Draw McGraw Show was on the air. We reprinted it some time ago but you can click HERE to read it.

Another indispensable interview with Maltese is in Joe Adamson’s essential book Tex Avery, King of Cartoons. We await the day when historian Michael Barrier publishes his in-depth interviews with Maltese, snippets of which appear in his book Hollywood Cartoons.

Hanna-Barbera was in the Kling Studios (the former Chaplin Studio at 1416 La Brea) when Maltese arrived but he apparently worked from home until the company opened its own building easily recognisable by fans at 3400 Cahuenga Blvd. in August 1963 (plans were announced in March 1962).

Maltese’s “The Flintstone Flyer” episode of The Flintstones, co-written with Joe Barbera and Dan Gordon, was the first to air in September 1960. His name can also be found on the first Yogi Bear Show to air in January 1961. Whether Maltese was freelancing for Chuck Jones at Warners at the time is unclear. His name can be found on “The Mouse on 57th Street,” released in 1961. It’s hard to believe the story was completed before Maltese left for Hanna-Barbera in 1958, but it is possible. Maltese was listed as a writer on “five new half-hour animation projects” for H-B (Variety, December 13, 1961). What they were is unknown. The trade paper the following September mentioned Maltese was assigned to work on The Flintstones and The Jetsons, but I don’t believe he worked on any Jetsons episodes.

It appears Maltese came and went from Hanna-Barbera several times. Variety of August 30, 1963 revealed that he would be working with Jones again, this time on the Tom and Jerry theatricals to be released by MGM. Two days earlier, the trade paper announced Norm Prescott was producing a four-part satire called “How The West Was Lost (Almost)” featuring characterisations of the Marx brothers with Maltese handling “pictorial layouts.” The project languished until February 1966 when Variety mentioned Prescott’s Filmation had found a distributor for the series, Groucho Marx would be a technical advisor, and Maltese was credited as a writer. It never did air.

Maltese was back at Hanna-Barbera in 1965, his name appears on screen as a co-writer on a Secret Squirrel/Atom Ant special, then on the Secret Squirrel Show itself. His last Tom and Jerry short for Jones was released in 1967 and his last project for Hanna-Barbera appears to have been in 1971 when he put together stories for the Funky Phantom, an unfortunate mixture of Snagglepuss and Scooby Doo. Toward the end of the decade, Maltese reunited with Jones for pale carbon copies of their Warner Bros. cartoons and, as the story goes, had his storyboard for the Duck Dodgers sequel tossed out by the director. Fortunately, Maltese lived into the era where old theatrical cartoons were written about and praised, and he was awarded by his peers before he died on February 22, 1981.

Picking a favourite Maltese cartoon, even a favourite Maltese moment, at Hanna-Barbera is pretty much impossible. El Kabong bashing a bad guy with an out-of-tune guitar, Snuffles’ self-love and leap into the sky after eating a dog biscuit (made by sponsor Kellogg’s) are things the most casual cartoon watchers of a certain age remember, even if they don’t know the writer responsible. And people still quote the line Maltese handed to Snagglepuss: “Exit, stage right.”



Here’s another shot of Maltese outside the concrete brick bunker studio at 3501 Cahuenga, where Hanna-Barbera was housed by August 1960. On the left are layout artist Dick Bickenbach and production supervisor Howard Hanson. On the right of Maltese is someone whose picture I don’t recall seeing before. He’s Paul Sommer, who was a story director at the studio. He would have been about 50 at the time this photo was taken and died in 2011 at the age of 99. The photo was provided by Tony Benedict, who was writing at Hanna-Barbera at the time.

Mike’s daughter Brenda told the Los Angeles Times in 2008: “He was always funny . . . he had charisma . . . He would walk in a room and take over . . . He took a lot of [his ideas] from our animals. We had dogs and cats, and he would pick up on anything . . . I was that obnoxious girl [in the Bugs Bunny cartoon Little Red Riding Rabbit].” (Brenda used to shout “Ta have!” as a girl. Mike put it in the story).

Wherever he got his ideas, they were brilliant at times. And he somehow coped with the huge workload at Hanna-Barbera. He really was the greatest of them all.

Mike's Daughter

It’s been a pleasure and privilege to chat on-line with many people about cartoons, and it’s been a special joy to talk with those who worked in the animation industry or their families. Over the last couple of years, I’ve exchanged notes back and forth with family members of my favourite cartoon writer, Mike Maltese.

So it’s with sadness I pass on word that Mike’s daughter Brenda passed away yesterday morning.

Brenda grew up as an only child. Her brother Michael died a day after birth. After graduation, she worked in the ink and paint department at Disney before taking a secretarial job at Warner Bros. where, of course, her father worked for almost 20 years before going to work for Hanna-Barbera. She met her future husband there and they were married for 53 years. She later opened Maltese Management, a theatrical management agency. (No, I don’t believe a singing frog her father wrote was among the acts she booked.)

Not too many days ago, she came down with an infection that spread to her brain. It was sudden and a shock.

I never met Brenda but I’ve corresponded her daughter Lisa. From what I can tell the Malteses were a loving, caring family who touched many lives. They were rightfully very proud of Mike’s fine work in the cartoon industry.

My condolences to the extended Maltese family on their loss.

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.

Mike Maltese and The Legend of El Kabong

So just how do you come up with a new cartoon character?

Not being a cartoonist, I don’t have the definitive answer. Long-time cartoon writer Mike Maltese once pointed out “no one can take the credit for the finished product.” And Maltese ought to know, though he lived into a time when some people decided taking credit wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Still, cartoons have to start somewhere. It’s pretty safe to say that, in many cases, it’s in the head of a writer whose charge is to come up with a story that’ll fill seven minutes of screen time. And in the case of the idea of the inept masked hero El Kabong, that writer was Mike Maltese.

Cartoon writers are generally anonymous people. So it’s certainly a surprise to go way-back-when and find them being interviewed about the work of the Hanna-Barbera studio. I’d like to think it was because of the respect Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera had for Maltese and Warren Foster when they were hired from Warner Bros., though one could cynically suggest that mentioning the two in interviews and letting them to talk to the press gave Joe and Bill a chance to trade off on the popularity of the Warners cartoons.

We’ve posted one old interview with Maltese given shortly after his arrival at Hanna-Barbera HERE. I’ve found another from the St. Joseph News-Press of October 31, 1959, probably the earliest interview he gave anyone outside a studio newsletter. It looks to be either a re-write of a studio hand-out or a syndicated piece, though I haven’t found it anywhere else and it’s unbylined. It was published a little over a week before El Kabong made his debut and Maltese explains how he came up with the idea, and a little about himself.

New Style in Masked Avengers
Out of the past, out of the annals of show business, comes a dark figure. The masked marvel rides again . . . and again . . . and again.
This time, when the mysterious stranger lifts his mask at the final fade out, who will be under it but Quick Draw McGraw, the newest sensation of Western TV, host and hero of the half-hour cartoon series that’s now seen each Wednesday evening at 6 on ABC-TV [sic].
“I had to put in a Zorro-type character,” explained gray-haired dignified Mike Maltese, writer of the Quick Draw McGraw series. “But I wanted him to have his own special gimmick, no sword, no bull whip, something different and all his won. Never mind how, but I finally decided to give him a guitar. With a swish and a flourish,” said Maltese demonstrating saber technique, “he’d clobber the bad guys over the noggin with a guitar.”
The masked marvel has been haunting Maltese ever since he began studying the entertainment industry, 35 years ago at the RKO Colonial on Manhattan’s upper west side. Every Saturday, Maltese and his young friends would congregate at the local theater to study all ancient forms of theater, including two features, a cartoon, travelog, two serials, community sing and prizes.
“And almost every Saturday, there’d be a masked marvel on the screen,” Maltese recalled. “By the end of the 12th chapter, we couldn’t stand the suspense anymore. The bets among the kids were running high as the sun went down behind the mountain, and the heroine looked up at the mysterious stranger and said, (falsetto) ‘But, but, who are you?’ You’d see the mask twitch a little, so you’d know he was about to speak. Then suddenly a shot rang out, he’d fall, and cut. Darn it, you’d have to come back another week to find out.”
“So who was it?” Maltese was asked.
“It turned out to be her father, who disappeared in the first episode.”
After giving Quick Draw the mask and guitar, the professional Maltese began scratching his head for a Spanish-sounding name for the mysterious stranger.
“In a cartoon storyboard, whenever you have one of the characters getting bashed over the noodle, you know how you script in the sound effect? You write ‘KABONG’. So that’s what I decided to call him: El Kabong.
When the sponsors saw the Quick Draw McGraw spoof on El Kabong, they had Maltese write the masked wonder into four more episodes.

For the record, there were four El Kabong cartoons in the first season, three in the second and three (of the six Quick Draws made) in the final season. And while a sponsor may have been partially responsible for willing cartoons into being, a sponsor can’t force people to like them. That’s a collaborative effort, a cartoon writer once intimated. But a new cartoon character has to start with an idea. And you can credit the idea for the ridiculous and funny El Kabong to one ridiculous and funny Mike Maltese.

More Fun With Layouts and Model Sheets

A little while ago, you were promised more Hanna-Barbera drawings that were gleaned off auction and art sites on-line. Unfortunately, I didn’t make a notation of the sources. Sorry.

First we have (I think) layout drawings, one from the closing of the original Huckleberry Hound Show and the other from the original Quick Draw McGraw Show. For you newcomers reading, Kellogg’s sponsored both half hour shows and the company was worked into the opening and closing credits. The Huck show was the most Kellogg-friendly. Besides Cornelius the Rooster (who hawk-a-doodle-dood Corn Flakes), the end sequence featured all the spokes-characters popular at the time in 1958—Snap, Crackle and Pop, Tony Tiger and Tony Jr., Super Pops Pete and Smacksie the Seal. My guess is the layout is by Bick Bickenbach. Compare it to how it appeared on TV which, unfortunately, isn’t in colour. I gather only the black-and-white version (which looks like it was recorded on a VHS machine) exists.




Here’s one from the end of Quick Draw McGraw. You can compare it to what it looked like when combined with the background.




Speaking of sponsors, this looks like a colour chart for some kind of promotional art, as H-B kisses up to the sponsors of its various half-hour cartoon shows. Magilla Gorilla began airing in syndication in 1963 when, as a six-year-old, even I rolled my eyes at the obviousness of including his sponsor in the theme song lyrics (the Peter Potamus theme was equally ham-handed about it). Evidently, this drawing was done after The Jetsons was cancelled. Too bad Fred isn’t taking a big drag on a Winston.



Next a couple of storyboard drawings from El Kabong Strikes Again. You’re looking at the handiwork of one Michael Maltese.



Finally, some model sheets from Jonny Quest, which debuted in 1964. Cynthia Lowry of the Associated Press described it as “an adventure series that looked like a realistically drawn animated cartoon strip. It is designed to identify with young viewers...The kids will adore it.” Well, I loved the show and I was sad when it wasn’t renewed for the following season. That’s more than I can say for Magilla and Peter Potamus. Apparently Jonny Quest was reworked a couple of decades later and included a bunch of back stories for people who don’t want to use their own imagination.

If you’ve seen the JQ documentary on some on-line video sites, you’ll know the show went through a pile of changes while in development. That’s certainly reflected in the model sheets. You have to wonder how long it took to make each half hour before it got on TV. The Dr. Quest-Jonny-Race size chart is dated July 9, 1964, less than three months before the pilot aired on ABC. The Bandit sheet is signed by Bick, the rest are by Doug Wildey.







There were only two questions about Jonny Quest I had as a child. The former I can answer now, but the latter still puzzles me. I could never figure out why Dr Quest sounded like John Stephenson one week and Don Messick the next. And I wondered why Dr. Zin couldn’t make us all happy and get rid of stupid Bandit once and for all.