 This is the SF Productions podcast network This is a tape on the Indian. Let me hook this up here. Let me see what we got. Oh damn radiation. Back with us to the 60s and 70s, the dwelling place of the lost generation. An era whose heroes, role models, and very lives were molded and formed by weekly installments of favorite television programs. Welcome to the place your parents didn't understand. Welcome to the vast wasteland. Welcome home. For an exciting episode of Vast Wasteland, I'm your host, Mark Schmabar along with Wilbur Neal and Marty Wiley, and we're here to talk about 60s and 70s television. Well, all the things that have been happening lately in the movies and on television, what with the new Simpsons show and the new Jetsons movie, animation is certainly starting to move back up as far as a viable art form and also a commercial art form. So, tonight we decided to go ahead and really start to get into some of the animation and what better to start with than the animation of Hannah Barbera. Yeah. So, we're going to turn the thing right over to Marty tonight with a little report of the history of Hannah Barbera. Take it away, Marty. Thank you. This is my report on Hannah Barbera. By Marty Wiley. Okay, basically these guys are old. Anyway, Barbera, his name is not Barbara. Mr. Barbera, anyway, Barbera, whatever, he was born in New York City in 1911 in an Italian family. And he said Disney was his inspiration. And his first job was with... Oh, don't play all. Yeah, everybody says that. Yeah, Disney inspired me too, right. His first job was with the Max Fletcher, the people who did Popeye and Betty Booth and Neal. Good, black and white cartoons for the cinema. He actually quit that job after four days because he didn't think there was a future in it. But through a friend, he found a job with Terry Toones that was just starting up. And they did, like, Heckel and Jekyll. Heckel and Jekyll, that's our name. Okay, but Disney actually put Terry Toones out of business. So, he had to find another job. He kind of moved on out west, left the East Coast. At the same time, the Hannah Guy, he was, like, grew up on the West Coast. Well, they have first names, too, you know. Yeah, like Joe and something. Yeah, like Hannah and William Barbera. Yeah, like Joe and Bill or something. Okay, well, anyway, he first started working with the Harmonizing Company, who was doing Looney Tunes and Mary Melodies. Yeah, those things. That was the Leon Schlesinger. Schlesinger. That was that group. In 1933, they broke with their group, and they started out with, started doing Looney Tunes. And about the same time, well, Hannah didn't break with them. He stayed with the Harmon Group, and they went with MGM. And MGM was forming their company that they were doing cartoon movie theaters. Am I boring you? Where's your brother? Shut up. That's the MGM lion. Well, that was sick. Not a very good one. Yeah, yeah. Okay, anyway, the guys met. They got together in 1938 while working for MGM. And together, they created a... Joe, Bill, Bill, Joe. Yeah, it felt like that. A cartoon called Puss Gets the Boot. And Puss Gets the Boot was the basis for Tom and Jerry. And they worked on Tom and Jerry for like 17 years. They were the artists and writers of this cartoon. And they, you know, had a nice long run there with MGM. And then MGM said, we're not making cartoons anymore. And they just closed shop one day. Yeah, basically. Well, Hannah Barbera decided since they got along so well together and everything to go out for this new wonderful media called Television. This was the late 50s. And that's when they created Rough and Ready. And in order to create this, TV did not allow very much money. It was like $3,000 per cartoon. And they were used to like a $30,000 budget. Tough breaks, guys. So they went back to an old animation technique that was called Limited Animation and basically your character's just talking, might wave or, yeah, and use the same background for the five minute cartoon. And you notice that when they run or something, their body stays straight and their feet might move. Yeah, that's limited animation. They went back. And their mouth was open or closed. So that like, you know, drastically went down on the quality. People know of the old Tom and Jerry cartoons. They're very beautiful. Of course they were created with a huge budget. They lost the detail. They lost the quality, but they saved like a whole bunch of money. And they got to have long extended houses and things there. Run along and they run past that same window or that same door several, several times. Well, that's limited animation. I don't particularly care for it, but it did bring us a lot of characters because from Rough and Ready, they went on with the Huckberry Hound with Yogi Bear, who really got him like boo-koo money. Okay, Yogi. Okay, and then it's like, in the 1960s, they were doing so well with the little short cartoons that they were able to move into primetime and do the Flintstones. Yeah. And that's where we got to start off. Because I know, as kids, we all watched the Huckleberry Hound show with the little five minute Diddy, Yaki Dool, all of those guys. All the same music. So basically, Yogi Bear got them in the door so they could do the Flintstones, which was primetime. Yeah, that's right. We were talking 7.30, I believe it was on. 7.30 was considered primetime. And they actually sold the show. Half of it was bought by the Reynolds Tobacco Company and half of it was bought by Miles Laboratory. Oh, real sponsors. That's how it was financed in the beginning. This show was on for six years. That's the amazing thing. I mean, of course, it's been on Saturday morning and it's syndication ever since, pretty much. But yeah, they went, what, 8.30 on Fridays and then like 7.30 on Thursdays and Fridays at 7.30 again. Yeah, and they also tried at first, like in 1960, the Flintstones started in 62. They tried it with the Jetsons in primetime, but it failed. Right. And so the Jetsons got whisked to Saturday morning where they did excellently. And there was only 24 until the new match came out. There were only 24 original episodes. The Flintstones on the Jetsons. The Jetsons. The Jetsons, only 24 episodes. They just was about three years ago or two years ago. They made the new batch, which are markedly inferior. But it did bring them up to like 45 episodes so they could handle syndication a lot better. And something I didn't know, this is what I learned during my report. If anyone gets to the Comedy Channel, that fortunate, and you watch Joe McDokes behind the eight ball. The actor's name is George O'Hanlon. He's George Jetsons voice. Wow. Isn't that amazing? Wow. I'm so excited. And then the, okay, Jane Jetsons voice was done by Penny Singleton, who had been blondie for ever and ever in the theaters. In those movies, which are real cute. But this was something that Hannah Barbera had to do, that they hadn't had to do before, was find voices. Because Tom and Jerry was noise. They didn't, they rarely, rarely ever spoke. And they only had really one voice. And that was Mammy Two Shoes, whatever it was. Mammy Two Shoes was about the only, and then Tom did say a few words. Okay, I like the one of Tom where he's singing is you is or is you rape my baby. Which is just, it's funny. Okay, trust me, it's funny. So really the two big names that work, and one still works for Hannah Barbera is Don Messick. And the late Dawes Butler worked for them up until his death in 1988. So those guys are pretty much the voice of everybody. Yep. Well he didn't, didn't, didn't Mel do like Barney. Mel Blank also did quite a bit. Mel, Mel usually did background characters or at work. Like one-time guests. Right, right. Was Barney. Right. Parkingmoreland did a lot of voices for the Flintstones. Spacely too. Yeah, I believe he was Mr. Spacely. Okay. But he wasn't really the major, major. Right. Major, major. Which is, which is what caused problems when they did shows like that in the 70s when they did, when Hannah Barbera I think realized that we have the copyrights to thousands of characters that we only use for like one season. So they put them all into one show which is why you saw that show with the, I can't remember the name of the show. Not the, not the Yogi's Race. Yogi's Space Race or whatever. There were several. The Olympic thing. Yeah. The one with Yogi's arc and all that. That's when people realized that there weren't all that many people doing the voices because a lot of characters had the exact same voice. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Dawes Butler did lots and lots of voices but he changed. He was like Huckleberry Hamlet with the Southern Draw. Right. He was Top Cat. Right. He had that voice. He was Yogi Bear also. So he had, you know, a rank. If you ever noticed all the Hannah Barbera superhero guys, they all had the same voice. Yeah. And they were all Gary Owens, weren't they? Most of them. Quite a few of them were. The Phantom guy. The Blue Falcon. The Blue Falcon. The Blue Falcon. And that dumb dog of his. Dinomut. Dinomut. Well here's sort of. The Blue Falcon, buddy. If we can get a person on this. Here's like a big combination they did called Yogi's Treasure Hunt with like every character, even Mr. Dick Dastardly. It's got. Dick Dastardly and Mutley. There we go. It's got Oggie Doggy in it. I mean that's basically like everybody who like really made it famous in the early 60s. Top Cat's in there. I don't know, you just see them all in there. Exactly as the robot thing. What is that? I forget. I don't know. I think that's something they just made up. Yeah, that wasn't it. Yeah, we've got to put a new character in it so it's a new show. That's my big. Yeah, I don't like it that they put all the characters in. Right. Yogi's Space Race and Yogi's Treasure Hunt. The Laugh Olympics. The Laugh Olympics. All that stuff was like, crappy. Well that's, we're jumping ahead there because there's like a lot of good single shows that were in between there. Which one you want to talk about? I got the book. Okay, well. Yeah. We'll talk and she'll show the book. Okay, like in the mid 60s there and then work up to the 70s we had a lot of the adventure, the good adventure shows. Well, well Johnny Quest, we didn't look at that. Johnny Quest was, it started off in primetime and that was probably the first good adventure cartoon although I'm sure a colleague over here is going to say something about the animation and everything. When you're a kid, you don't look for perfection really. You're looking for the story there. I was always looking for the action personally. This is Johnny Quest for kids that don't know. This is Johnny Quest. This is his friend Haji who was like, picked up on the streets in India and just stayed with the quests forever. Ever. And this is Bandit, the only dog in Hanna-Barbera's library that doesn't have an obnoxious whiny bark. He doesn't have a bark, doesn't have a laugh. Yeah, Bandit Bark. Well, I mean, doesn't have a silly, a silly, it's not a silly character. It's like a real dog. Bandit's the only real dog. And of course, Johnny Quest played by Tim Matheson. Yeah, Tim Matheson. They never really had to be in the Animal House. Just several other movies there. We just saw him the other night and something there. 1941. 1941. Yeah, he's in there. Got it. But then, okay, we go along here and we've got other adventure shows. We had Space Ghost. That was probably... Do the voice. Space Ghost! Ah! Ah! Space Ghost. That was great action choices. Now, Space Ghost pretty much works real nice on this limited animation because space always looks the same. This is true. You're always going to see the same background, but it's always going to be stars. You've got Jan and Jace there, the twins, and I think Jan, well, Jan's the girl, isn't it? Yeah, Jan's the girl. Jan's the girl. I think she had one of the voices that's reoccurred through Hannah Barbera and quite a few other cartoons. Pamela Ferdin. Oh, she's like... I think we'll talk more about her in another show, but Pamela Ferdin, she's always showing up in these darn things. And then they had their little monkey. It was them. Blip. Blip. Blip the space monkey. I'm never fond, really, of the sidekick animals. I mean, give me the adventure, but I think they could have left the sidekick animals out. Like, you had that one. Okay, then you have... Well, of course, with Bandit, you're always dragging this little dog around. The little dog's always screwing up. Leave the dog at home. Well, they couldn't really. It's like they... I know you travel a lot, kid, but put him on a leash. Exactly. There's none of those dogs for everyone on a leash. This is strong. The little monkey could have been on a leash. Broken leash laws, major infraction in most big cities. Not in space. In space, no one can break your leash. And if that leash does break well, back out of his blip, just float away. No way. Space goes, turn around. We've lost grip. It's too bad. Oh, sorry, kids. We can't turn around now. We're after the mantis, sir. So then they had... Well, Space Ghost was in the future. Then they jumped back to the past. They had Mighty Maitor. Oh, it's going to make me look for Mighty Maitor. Oh, yeah. Let's see. Mighty Maitor and Shira was his girlfriend. Ooh. That sounds close to something. She had a little brother who had this dumb flying thing that he used to... It's a dodo bird or something that he would fly around on and he would pretend to be Maitor. They could have left him at home, too. They could have left both of them. Just lock them back in the cave somewhere, throw some rocks in front of them. We don't need those guys. But no, they had to have them, too. And then, well, let me see. There was the Moby Dick cartoon. Well, that's got two little tiny... And it had two kids and what, a seal or something. A seal named Scooby, which brought us to Canada Barbera's other big one. And I think they said, I think, well, I grew up late near Kings Island, so I heard a lot of propaganda. Scooby-Doo was supposedly the one that raked in the most dough and the ones kids wanted to see more often, then Fred Flintstone or anybody else. Wow. Well, that's kind of true because Scooby- That was in the 70s when the Big Mecca Kings Island opened there. Yeah, Scooby just kind of appealed to kids. He and Shaggy probably appealed more to kids than Freddie. And who was it? Freddie and Thelma and... Thelma and Freddie. Well, here's a quick quick. What's the other girl's name? Daphne. Daphne. Lovely little Daphne. Well, that's Scooby there, not Scrappy, dude. This is Scooby. This is Scooby. This is Scrappy who's obnoxious, but Scooby-Doo's pretty cool. You know, it was a cool show. But Shaggy and Scooby, they were always, I mean, they were like the kids. They always wanted to eat and then when something scary happened, they ran away from it. Do you think that it's possible that Scooby-Doo might have been an ancestor of Astro? Well, this is quite possible. Look at that voice. In the same... Big old great day. In the same line. In the same, yeah. And it's like as they go further into space, then they just turn blue or something. That's very possible, because I mean, you know, here's Astro. Okay, a little grave, but it's like sometimes you'll see Astro. He's blue, man. Like what in space and in the future, have they know heat? That's like a major thing I've noticed in Hanna-Barbera. A lot of the characters have gone through color change. Well, yeah. Cindy Bear. Right. She was sort of off brown. She turned blue. It's like, well, they put her in deep freeze for something. Well, put her in deep freeze till we need her. Then we pull her out and she's blue. And when they revived Tom and Jerry, Tom's gone to blue. Yeah, Tom is blue. They... It's a blue-gray. It must be a cheap color. They got gallons of it. So let's just probably take a paint brush and do them all. And little Jerry Mouse has gone through different shades of brown. I don't know. I like some continuity in my life. Be it just the color of the character. Well, you'd think that once they got along there, they would improve the color. No. It's like the further along they go, the worse the color gets. It's like, we leave these stills out in the sunshine or in a bright light so the color just fades out of them or something. And they started using the cheap computer animation, which I really noticed really more in the later 70s. Right there. And I kind of stopped watching cartoons. I just stuck them all together there in the same thing. You can actually do some wonderful things with computer because parts of the new Jetson movie actually have some computer animation, but it's not the cheap computer animation stuff. This was the beginning stuff. In the mid-late 70s, when they just started using the computers a lot and stuff, and it was more like they were playing and I think it got cheap there for a while. I mean, I turned it off. And the characters weren't that like they were doing the combinations. And they added Scooby-Doo's entire family in order to keep that show going. Scooby-Doo, Scooby-Doo, Scooby-Doo. Scrappy-Doo. That went on forever. I mean, yikes. Doopie-Doo. I know one of my favorites when I was a kid was Top Cat. Not Top Cat, hey. And they pretty much he's been, well, this is Top Cat at Officer Dibble. Hey, they've got the song over there. And they've got the song over there. Top Cat. Okay. This was like a real cool part, too. This poor character who was like, he was like a major star. Shut up. He was like major, okay? So now he's like, what do they do? He had that whole band of cats, and they all had such neat personalities. And what do they do? They shovel Top Cat onto the Yogi Space Race art picture. Yeah, some sort of deal. And the whole character of Top Cat is lost now. The lost characters. You lose Top Cat. You have, well, let's jump back here to the 60s, early 70s. You had the whole wacky races. There were several cars in the wacky races. You have Peter Perfect in his We've got cars down here. This is the amazing thing. In his Well, whatever it's called. I can think it was Thunderbolt Greaselapper, but that's not his car. Tom Slick. He's had some kind of big powerful car there. And there's Penelope Pitstop there. What's there? The compact pussycat was her car. You have Dick Dastardly in his mean machine or whatever it was called. There we go. You have the the creepy the creepies in their creepy mobile. It grew some twosome in their creepy mobile. That's who they were. But then they were always racing to get Dick Dastardly. Because he was always trying to make everybody else lose. He was always doing something sneaky to make everybody else lose. Always had these wonderful gadgets so he could actually the wacky races is based on the great race. The great race because you've got the evil character in there. A lot of his things they took right and put them into Dick Dastardly. You can watch the great race by Jack Lemon. If you look at the cars it's like there's a lot of stuff ripped out of that car. Exactly. The rockets on the back are in their part. This thing in the front here in the great race they use it to melt snow. Here's the two movies they say they use the great race and those magnificent men in their flying machine. Dick Dastardly and the Yankee Doodle Pigeon well that whole show there that's his whole crew. That grew off of the from the wacky races there so they did base a lot of that on that too. It's like once they had the wacky races okay then they chose they took out Penelope Pitstop put her in a show the perils of Penelope Pitstop and they took Dick Dastardly out and put him in the show where they're chasing Penelope Pitstop and the ant hill mob and they stick them in there and then from there they just yanked further and put them into one of those other darn shows too which was really something. Dick Dastardly went a long way because he shows up in the Yogi Bear show. He shows up in the stuff well Mutley's probably the most prolific dog for not keeping the same character that had a Barbara has. Actually Mutley started in the 18th century it was Mugger Mugger Mugger Okay Mugger Come on Mugger Give me back my hand Come on Mugger It's like they clicked on that they clicked on that obnoxious doggy and he's been Mutley forever Yep and he's gone through a lot of color changes Yes he has He's been gray he's been brown He's gone from brown to gray to blue and see he's another one he's just throw him in one of our better characters were cryogenically preserved So who knows what happened to Disney but then we've got other great there were other great adventure cartoons back there too there were Frankenstein Junior and the impossible Frankenstein Junior was this great big gigantic robot and it was this little kid that rode around with him buzz and they lived up in this mountain somewhere and they flew around and they saw a man there was fluid man and there was Coyle man and they went around and they saw different crimes too Well of course the crimes that they solved were pretty much the same ones that Scooby-Doo saw which were pretty much the same ones that Josie and the Pussycat had to solve Witch Cassidy everyone basically it was always the same crime Well in in fact see now I like the adventure the adventure shows better because Josie and the Pussycats it was like they seemed fantastic but then it just boiled down to somebody that was just trying to swindle some money off of somebody or something it was nothing really great there were no ghosts there are no monsters it's all just people and that just kind of ruins the effect of a cartoon or something you're here you're Hollywood you can do whatever you want you can get people to believe somebody in a suit he's oh he's projecting a picture over here so it's not really a ghost he's just trying to scare you and he wants to get the money away from the rich widow who's always going to have a heart attack or something it's just and then I think it's like a shame what they've done to the Flintstones I don't know if we want to get into that because from what I've been told we have like maybe a minute or so left so we have I've certainly more than one material for show number two we'll have that next time so very exciting it's a two part it's a two part so we'll be continuing and hey just so you remember we're on Tuesdays at six Wednesdays at ten and Thursdays at 3 p.m. here at Vast Wasteland so hey if it's not just the next time we might finish up with Hanna-Barbera so we might get into some of the other cartoons too sure why not if we finish up with these guys what the heck but hey so for all of us here at Vast Wasteland we'll see you next time with more Hanna-Barbera good night everybody wait a minute