Here's another interesting little "Charlton Oddity", from HANNA-BARBERA PARADE # 6 (Charlton Comics, Cover Date: April, 1972)...
Poor Huckleberry Hound (...apparently on a carnival date with a HUMAN female) is (pardon the expression) "roped" into one of those "boxing challenges" that occurred so often in the comedy/entertainment media of the early to mid 20th Century, and that hopefully no longer exist in real life! (Click to Enlarge!)
A well placed banana peel (see the third panel above) allows Huck to emerge victorious, but get a good look at the conquering hero's gal...
...And darned if it doesn't look like some 20th Century ancestor of JUDY JETSON!
Golly, I wonder what happened to his old "Darling Clementine"?
Oh, and before we go, also note the not-so-valiant-attempt at recreating the "GOLD KEY STYLE - THE END LOGO" in the lower right corner!
On some level, I suppose even CHARLTON knew that Gold Key had produced the best Hanna-Barbera comic books!
THE END!
15 comments:
Oh, please tell me there's a "dog in this fight" joke in that Huckleberry comic!
There would be if *I* wrote it, Achille! …But, alas not!
You know that I would “hound” the editors with “dogged determination”until I got one in!
Alas.
Also, as regards the date with a human woman: yes, that is a bit odd, isn't it? It never bothers me when Donald pines after some beauty with more curves than webbed feet, but this feels different… I think because Huckleberry doesn't wear any clothes.
Really, that's something that's always been a hindrance to me in getting into either those comics or the old Looney Tunes-based stuff. They have, from what I've seen, a tendency to try to have Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck existing in urban environments as Donald or Mickey might, and that tends to feel… off, somehow (at least if the characters aren't doing a specific "bit" — which, in the cartoons, usually involves them putting some clothes on, e.g. Daffy's turns as a Wild West marshall, a Sherlock Holmes type, Robin Hood, and whatnot). Bugs is the kind of rabbit who has plush middle-class furniture in his burrow, but he does live in a burrow. I'm less familiar with Huck, but I think he belongs in much the same liminal space of anthropomorphism. When the chips are down, he's a dog who happens to act like a human, not a human who happens to look like a dog. Looking at him next to "Judy", you could easily imagine a children's book where he was her anthropomorphised pet dog, or a Calvin-and-Hobbes-esque comic-strip where he's her imaginary friend.
(Hmm. The cavemen are called Flintstones. The future-folks are called Jetsons. What would the archetypal family of the "present day" be called? Carsons maybe, for the 20th century edition, but that doesn't feel right for, er, the present-day "present day".)
Achille:
Mid-20th century family, eh? I’d just call ‘em “The Joneses”! And for a specific reason beyond the genericness of the name…
In Gold Key’s THE JETSONS #2 (Cover Date: April, 1963) Vic Lockman and Tony Strobl teamed up for a wonderfully satiric untitled lead story that I call “Keeping Up with the Jones”. Rather than describe it here, I’ll direct you to THIS POST where you can read all about it – and some other Jetsons stories of note!
For today? I dunno… “The Media-Slaves” is appropriately accurate, but doesn’t sound enough like a name to me.
And, yes… There is the rub in the various forms of anthropomorphism that we love… that nagging question of species! And it is exactly such a question that prompted me to write this post.
Huckleberry Hound should not be dating a human female, and Donald Duck should not have any interest in “some beauty with more curves than webbed feet”. Then, there’s that age-old matter of Mickey Mouse walking, bathing, and teaching tricks to Pluto, yet going on adventures with Goofy!
Applying it once again to Huck, there’s even one cartoon where he works as a dogcatcher! …And no, he didn’t turn HIMSELF in or any meta-thing like that!
There’s a perfect exchange in, of all places, an episode of LOST IN SPACE titled “Space Beauty” READ ABOUT IT HERE where recurring guest character Farnum B. and Will Robinson have a exchange over the relativeness of beauty.
Farnum is gathering female species of all types (some of them quite humorous) for a beauty contest he’s been tasked with producing by an unknown but powerful alien leader. Will (rightfully) questions the so-called “beauty” of many of the contestants. As Farnum does not know the species of his mysterious backer, he’s simply trying to cover any and all possibilities.
FARNUM to WILL: “If you were a FISH, would you think a female GRIZZLY BEAR was beautiful? ”
…And THAT pretty much sums up the inter-species attraction matter to me!
About the only exception where I can say that it even remotely worked would be HOWARD THE DUCK and Beverly Switzer… and that is a bizarre and particularly singular example.
…What say anyone else?
Well as I said, the funny thing is that it really doesn't bother me with Donald. Perhaps it's just because, like Don Rosa, I saw The Three Caballeros at a formative age! But actually, I think there's more to it…
After all, grizzly and fish don't have any body language in common — in fact, they don't even have language in common. Seductively-animated cartoon females have been many little boys' first crush, even if they happen to have tails and whiskers — so why shouldn't the reverse be possible? We think nothing of a sci-fi protagonist who falls for a girl with antennae, or of a goblin who's got a thing an elf. If we willfully posit a universe in which humanoid, fully sapient dogs participate in the same multi-species society as humanoid ducks, humanoid mice, and good old humanoid apes (hi!), then while it wouldn't be for everyone, it would be churlish of us to deny the citizens of that world the right to have "interracial" relationships.
No, I think what bothers me about the image of Huck with Judy Not-Jetson isn't so much the idea of them being attracted to each other in the abstract, as the way it uncomfortably shines a light on the fuzziness of the "person"/"animal" boundary in his universe, which is precisely the thing that the stories need the reader not to notice. Their worldbuilding is inherently "fragile". In Ducks & Mice comics, much as people might hemm and haw about Goofy and Pluto, the boundary is actually quite intuitive. Nobody actually expects Goofy to live in a doghouse and fetch sticks; it would be bizarre if Pluto had a conversation with a "human", or if a cat tried to catch and eat Mickey.
(The Brer Rabbit and Pigs casts are somewhat fuzzier, as are Chip'n'Dale, and that more than anything else is why they on some level don't seem like they "fit" in the Barksian universe. Ditto the Cinderella Mice, whom Gottfredson felt the need to enlarge to Mickey's size when he put them in the strip!)
I've tracked down the Dogcatcher Huck cartoon — it's on YouTube, albeit cut up into a couple of chunks — and was amused to discover that his quarry is in fact identical to him except for not wearing any clothes, and having a different colour scheme. I think that's as clear an illustration of the "problem" as anything, and it's clearly not one shared by Goofy/Pluto! (I say "problem", but it's a fun cartoon, of course.)
Also: LOST IN SPACE, eh… I've got a fun and unexpected bit of news about that. Email incoming!
Well, as regards "inter-species" attraction, I'd say that Stan Sakai's "Usagi Yojimbo" does it pretty well :) I've never seen any inter-species pairing from the series as disturbing, perhaps because nearly all characters are anthropomorphic animals with the general build similar to humans.
Achille (you write): “… it would be churlish of us to deny the citizens of that world the right to have ‘interracial’ relationships.”
Well, far be it from me to be considered “churlish” – though, in one cartoon titled “The Unmasked Avenger” (another great one for you to look up), Huckleberry Hound masquerades as a “stupid, churlish dolt” to conceal his avenging-identity as “The Purple Pumpernickel”!
I guess what it REALLY comes down to a character’s physical form and attributes!
Nobody bats an eye at Clarabelle and Horace (cow and horse), or Clarabelle and Goofy (cow and dog) because they “stand” similarly. …But Horace and DAISY would be an entirely different story! …And let’s not even consider Horace and Snow White – who is an established character in the Disney comics realm (…I just can’t bring myself to say “Universe”, after all that “Infinity Dime” stuff), albeit in the Chip ‘n’ Dale, Bambi and Thumper, subdivision.
And that’s why I offer up a laugh at Huck and Judy! More a poke at CHARLTON (which I have been oft known to do) for their typically “just not getting it”! Not a thing about the story would be any different (for both better AND worse) if Judy were a female hound! They could traverse the “human world” in the same way that Porky and Petunia or Woody and Winnie do in their respective settings. Even Huck’s pal Yogi Bear has Cindy – and they inhabit a world of human park rangers and picnic-basket-toting tourists!
In fact, it’s DISNEY who is the “odd studio out” when it comes to the surroundings of their characters, by maintaining an almost exclusively anthropomorphic environment, largely made up of dog-faces, rather than suitably cartoon-like humans. Ex. Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Ranger Smith, Officer Dibble, etc.
And MICKEY seems to be the “odd *character* out” because there are NO other “mice” like him, save for Minnie and various relatives! Mickey is not like Jerry and Tuffy, Pixie and Dixie, Herman and his pathetic, cookie-cutter cousins who constantly call him for help against Katnip, Speedy Gonzalez, Hubie and Bertie… and even the Cinderella Mice! Blabber, of Snooper and Blabber, is the only exception I can think of where, just like Mickey, nothing about him hinges on his “being a *mouse*” – just an overly-loyal, hero-worshiping, subservient sidekick to detective Snooper – who, oddly, is a CAT!
Gottfredson’s altered size of the Cinderella Mice becomes all the more strange because the story was written by “Master-of-the-Weird” Bill Walsh – who could just as easily have contrived some oddball way of shrinking Mickey down to the size of the other mice (and, by extension, their tiny kingdom) for that specific adventure.
But, it’s all in (decidedly non-churlish) fun, because we love this stuff so much!
Can’t wait to learn what’s up your cryptic sleeve concerning LOST IN SPACE! Shall I assume that to be an off-the-Blog communiqué?
T.:
I certainly KNOW OF Usagi Yojimbo, but have never read it. My tastes simply don’t run toward more “realistic” anthropomorphic characters and Japanese-type lore to begin with. My shortcoming, admittedly, but it’s the same with POGO. Neither is quite “my thing”, but I do genuinely respect them from afar because their undeniable followings can’t be wrong.
“Disturbing” isn’t exactly the word in this case, as I’d hoped to clarify with my reply to Achille above. “Odd”, or perhaps even as strong an adjective as “Off” is more the case here.
But even a milder “Odd” or “Off” might be because I can sometimes get “too into” this stuff (as, let’s face it, we *all* do), where whoever was behind that Charlton story never gave it a micro-second’s worth of thought.
Of course, given this, who would you rather have editing and dialogue-writing your favorite comics… David Gerstein and me respectively, or the ghosts of those Charlton editors and writers? “Too Into” as opposed to “Little-or-No-Thought” is always the better place to be in such a situation!
It does feel a bit weird seeing Huck date a human. They'd have done better to make her a female hound. There being no such character already in existence at the time of the story's production (if I'm not mistaken, Desert Flower from 1988's "The Good, the Bad, and Huckleberry Hound" was Huck's first and so far only canine love interest), maybe it was faster/cheaper for Charlton to create a random human character than an analogue to Cindy Bear?
I don't think the weirdness has anything to do with Huck wearing fewer clothers than Donald or Mickey. To be honest, I never gave cartoon characters' clothing or lack thereof much thought! I think it's just because it seems out-of-character, given the proliferation of seemingly-tailor-made female companions for male anthropomorphic animal cartoon stars.
Personally, I've never had any trouble applying the logic of Carl Barks' description of the Disney ducks as "humans who happen to look like ducks" to characters from other cartoon universes, regardless of how much or how little clothing they were. To me, it makes perfect sense to think of characters like Huck, Bugs, Donald, Mickey, etc. as human caricatures. As Chuck Jones once wrote of Wile E. Coyote (I'm paraphrasing), his expressions are exaggerated, but the emotions they convey are fully human.
As for Huck's girlfriend's apparent relation to Judy Jetson, why not? It wouldn't be the first time an ancestor of a Jetsons character appeared in the realm of the early H-B anthropomorphic animals. At the Yowp blog, I once saw a Yogi Bear comic strip where a character named Orbit appears. (Ranger Smith is annoyed by Yogi's use of hyperbole to describe his golf game. But "you really put the ball in Orbit!" turns out to be anything but hyperbole!)
Finally, it took me a while to get the pun in your title. "Punch" and Judy! Good one! I've heard of Punch and Judy shows, but I didn't immediately perceive the connection between the punch in the title and the punch in the story (though it's pretty obvious in hindsight). I only noticed it on my second reading of your post. Don't take it as in any way a slight of your title, which is fantastic (or should I say Funtastic?). It's just a reflection of how it often takes me several readings of a story to notice some of its gems, including rather obvious ones.
Ach, the "twould be churlish" was meant only as a turn of phrase! No offence meant to present company, of course. I did say "of *us*"!
And yes, the LiS thing is confidential… Sorry, got called away by some of that Horrifical Busyness right after sending the previous comment and didn't get to finish composing the long-awaited catch-up email. And now it's ghoulishly late in this time-zone, the kind of late that loops back to being early, so it'll have to wait for tomorrow… but that's a promise!
The Cinderella mice showed up in one of Bill Walsh’s more peculiar stories in Floyd Gottfredson’s newspaper strips…as mice as big as Mickey!
(Email sent last night, by the way! Do let me know if it got snagged…)
Achille (you write): “Ach, the "twould be churlish" was meant only as a turn of phrase! No offence meant to present company, of course. I did say "of *us*"!”
…Wouldst that I take-eth OFFENCE o’er thy keen wit? NO WAY-ETH! To be even thought of as a word I first learned from a Huckleberry Hound cartoon is, in some way, almost a weird sort of “honor”! In fact, in THIS POST I name Huckleberry Hound as my “Favorite Product of Animation, Television Division” – with Bugs Bunny taking the top spot for “Theatrical Division”.
Oh, and I *did* receive your interesting and welcome message, right about the time I find myself digging out from under a pile of different things, but I expect to reply by the weekend.
Deb: (you write): “The Cinderella mice showed up in one of Bill Walsh’s more peculiar stories in Floyd Gottfredson’s newspaper strips…as mice as big as Mickey!”
And, when you describe one of Bill Walsh’s stories as “more peculiar”, you’re REALLY saying something!
Bill Walsh delivered the type of “sixties madness, absurdity, and outright fun” that I so enjoyed – then AND now – long before there WAS a “sixties”! One of my many “Dream-Pairings-That-Never-Happened-But-Should-Have” would have been for Bill Walsh to write ‘60s TV scripts for Irwin Allen!
It would have been, as I had The Phantom Blot say in THIS COMIC, “SUBLIME!”
Unfortunately for that dream, but quite fortunately for the greater world-at-large, he spent the period writing Disney movie classics like “Mary Poppins”, “That Darn Cat”, and “The Love Bug”! …Sigh! What might have been…
Sergio:
Lots to cover here… Perhaps the primary reason there was no recurring female hound character was that old bugaboo known as “economics”. When it began in 1958, THE HUCKLEBERRY HOUND SHOW, like RUFF AND REDDY before it, relied on only two voice actors – Daws Butler (as mostly “larger” male characters) and Don Messick (as mostly “smaller” male characters, narrators, and authority figures).
By the second season (1959-1960) the cast had expanded to occasionally include Jean (“Wilma Flintstone”) Vander Pyl, Hal Smith, and other occasional female voice actors like Julie Bennett. But, overall, female characters in the Huck Hound and Quick Draw McGraw shows appeared sparingly for that reason. That’s why Augie Doggie had a “Doggie Daddy”, but not a “Doggie Mommy”!
Same thing for the almost exclusively male casts of Looney Tunes voiced by Mel Blanc. Bea Benaderet and June Foray were called upon as needed but, with the exception of Arthur Q. (“Elmer Fudd”) Bryan, it was primarily Blanc’s domain.
Also note that the “proliferation of seemingly-tailor-made female companions for male anthropomorphic animal cartoon stars” is a more of a relatively recent development outside of comics, where “your head” supplied all the voice actors (male and female) you could ever need… and without pay!
I agree with you on “Huck wearing fewer clothes than Donald or Mickey”. Many major animated stars up to that point were unclothed, save for those ubiquitous WHITE GLOVES such as Bugs Bunny and Woody Woodpecker – followed later by Bullwinkle J. Moose. But, more often than not, they were simply unclad, like Daffy Duck, Sylvester, Wyle E. Coyote, Foghorn Leghorn, Tom and Jerry, and so on.
Indeed, Hanna-Barbera might very well have done more for “funny animal accessories” (at least) than the classic era studios, in terms of hats, ties (especially bow-ties), scarfs, collars-with-and-without ties, sleeve-cuffs-without-shirts, sweaters, and vests adorning all their major characters, save Yakky Doodle!
The strangest thing *I* found about that is that those characters invariably wore MORE CLOTHING while SWIMMING than appearing in public before a crowd fully-clothed humans! …Talk about “being comfortable in your own skin!”
I’d take the Jetson ancestors even further, by saying George and Jane are descendants of Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead! Jane’s voice actor, Penny Singleton, even PLAYED Blondie! Another ancestor of George Jetson could be JOE McDOAKES from those wonderful Warner Bros. theatrical comedy short subjects. If you’ve never seen one, look them up! And another ancestor of Judy Jetson could be the teeny-bopper baby sitter who appeared in Tom and Jerry!
Finally, always look for puns in anything I write – particularly titles! No slight at all! In fact, it’s a particularly good feeling when you “get one” later on! At least such a delayed reaction has always been so for me! Why there was a gag in “The Flintstone Flyer” early episode of THE FLINTSTONES that I didn’t get until FORTY YEARS LATER! …But, I’ll only admit to what it was if you, or someone else, asks!
It’s become my view that EVERYTHING benefits from additional viewings or readings, ironically at the precise time in my life where such viewings or readings have become virtually impossible to fit in due to the sheer volume of things to enjoy, and time in which to enjoy them!
I know that, whenever I *do* make the time to do so – mostly for research, GCD indexing, or my Thursday Night Film Group – I rarely fail to discover SOMETHING that had previously gone unnoticed!
Post a Comment