Thursday, January 1, 2009

Happy New Year – from Yogi and Me!

Let’s ring in the New Year with a Yogi Bear cartoon – set in winter, of course!

Enjoy the great Daws Butler and Don Messick – and a great script by Warren Foster.

Here’s another wonderful early Hanna-Barbera cartoon that WB has not elected to release on DVD! Let’s hope for 2009. Happy New Year!


2 comments:

Chris Barat said...

Joe,

Happy 2009 to you, too!

How early was this episode in Yogi's career? Ranger Smith seems more sarcastic, somehow, than his later wont. Maybe that's just my imagination...

The "staying awake" gags reminded me of that FLINTSTONES episode in which Fred supposedly has the dino-peptic germ and the others try valiantly to help him stay awake. I can't recall whether Foster wrote that one, too.

Chris

Joe Torcivia said...

Chris:

As best as I can piece things together, this would have been from (…or certainly AROUND) the first episode of the Second Season of THE HUCKLEBERRY HOUND SHOW (1959-1960), one year before THE FLINTSTONES. This would be when Warren Foster took the writing over from Joe Barbera.

I think the Second and Third Seasons of THE HUCKLEBERRY HOUND SHOW were the characters at their best… and it’s a pity WHV has not released these to DVD yet.

The “energy” of Joe Barbera’s First Season stories may be missing from these later cartoons (…See “Pie Pirates”, “Slumber Party Smarty”, or “Yogi Bear’s Big Break” for examples of that “energy”.), but I think Foster crafted better stories overall (…See my previous postings of “Piccadilly Dilly” and “Rah-Rah Bear”, as well as “Lullabye-Bye Bear”), injected more personality, and certainly did better dialogue. It’s a trade off, I guess.

Huck’s Fourth Season, by Foster and Tony Benedict was good too, but not quite as good as what preceded it. By then, Yogi had spun off into THE YOGI BEAR SHOW and, oddly, his cartoons there (also by Foster) were not nearly as funny as they had been on Huck’s show.

Warren Foster did indeed write, that episode of THE FLINTSTONES, borrowing (…it would seem) from both THE HONEYMOONERS and this Yogi cartoon.

The Second Season seemed to “solidify” the character of Ranger Smith (as is clearly seen here) into one of my favorite classic H-B characters. In the first season, his personality – and his LOOK (a flaw superbly lampooned by John K. in the nineties) – varied from cartoon to cartoon.

I love the bit where, over the phone, he recounts his trying to impress a woman with his knowledge of TREES… and she couldn’t care less (at about 4:10 of the cartoon). That’s the kind of great dialogue contributions Foster brought to the table.

Joe.