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The anonymous artists called on to use dry brush during innumerable exit scenes at Hanna-Barbera did a marvellous job. Here’s part of a scene from Rapid Robot, a 1959 Pixie and Dixie cartoon. Jinks tells the meeces he...

Daws Butler is still with us, in a way, even though he’s been gone physically for 32 years. You can pull out a DVD of one of his cartoons and enjoy his work. His recordings with Stan Freberg (commercials, radio, 45s)...

They were partners in animation for years—and they died about three months apart. Ken Spears passed away last Friday of lewy body dementia at the age of 82. We mentioned in our post about Joe Ruby the two met at...

The real TV money is in prime time, thought John Mitchell at Screen Gems. So he approached Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera to come up with a cartoon show for night-time viewing. All kinds of stories have popped up around the...

You know the voice of Fred Flintstone today—all because of pralines. The main cast of The Flintstones were hardly neophytes when it came to acting without being seen on camera. All four had acted on top radio shows....

His first credits at Hanna-Barbera were as a film editor. You see one to the right from the “Elroy’s Mob” episode of The Jetsons. And if the screen credits still existed, you would see his name on the debut...

63 years ago today, some forms were signed by George Sidney, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera creating what eventually became the biggest TV cartoon operation in the world. This is the birthday of H-B Enterprises, the...

The cartoons on the Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw and Yogi Bear shows were, as layout artist Bob Givens recalled, 500 feet (without titles, I presume). He also recalled Ken Muse was the footage king. Muse would...

Snagglepuss and Yakky Doodle can thank Hank Saperstein for the boost in their careers. In June 1960, a deal was being firmed up between Kellogg’s and Saperstein’s UPA. Variety reported on August 10th the two had a...

She was a favourite of Jack Webb in Dragnet. She turned up on I Love a Mystery and co-starred in Grand Central Station and Whispering Streets on radio. And in November 1955, The Hollywood Reporter revealed she had made...

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...

I love old cartoons and I love 1950s stock music. This blog was started ten years ago as a place to document the stock cues used on every cartoon on the first season of “The Huckleberry Hound Show,” along with a few...

Take the idea of people dressed in huge cartoon character costumes (like at Disneyland) with personal appearances (like the Lone Ranger or a TV kid’s show host) and what do you get? Huckleberry Hound on location. The...

Huckleberry Hound was probably never animated as gracefully than on the little cartoons between the cartoons on his show. It’s so nice to see Huck and the stars of his other shows move fluidly (in full animation at...

Daws Butler taught all kinds of newcomers the art of acting, but Daws got a few lessons himself—from his own children. So he admitted in an article that appeared in the San Antonio Express and News on April 14, 1963....

The concept of Saturday Morning Cartoons didn’t last comparatively long, and a case can be made that it was pushed into being by Hanna-Barbera. When network television started expanding its weekend hours in the early...

Is it possible to fairly compare cartoons made by Hanna-Barbera and the Jay Ward studios? I don’t think so. The two studios had a different attitude and pace. The Hanna-Barbera cartoons were fairly gentle in their...

Dick Thomas pulled a huge workload at the Hanna-Barbera studio. He arrived in 1959 from Walt Disney (after almost two decades at Warner Bros.) to work on the Kellogg’s series, and was providing backgrounds not only...