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Tag "Joe Barbera"
Jerry Eisenberg’s Flying Hippo
Like all professional toonheads, I’m sometimes asked to identify my favorite cartoon character. More specifically, those who know I tend to specialize in the history of Hanna-Barbera often want me to pinpoint my favorite H-B character. I usually reply with a laundry list of characters, saying that there is not [...]
More Enduring Than the Average Bear
This week marks the 52nd anniversary of the premiere of The Yogi Bear Show on television, and it would seem that the smarter-than-the-average bear is busier now than he has been in decades. The 2010 feature Yogi Bear turned out to be a box office hit, and next year will [...]
Gene of All Trades
Some things stay with you for a lifetime. When I was a kid I read a Yogi Bear comic strip in the newspaper in which Ranger Smith punks Yogi by filling his enormous Christmas stocking with an enormous artificial foot. It sounds like a simple, obvious gag, but the memory [...]
Under the Table with J.B. and Friz
Most cartoon historians are aware that the fluid that fueled the medium during its Golden Age was not ink or paint, but alcohol. Among my favorite booze-related tales from the toon trenches involve enterprising studio reps trying to hire an established talent away from a competing studio by getting them [...]
Remembering Gene Kelly in Toon Town
Legendary dancer, actor, choreographer and director Gene Kelly is being feted this week by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which is staging a centennial tribute to him. Kelly’s stint at MGM during the heyday of the movie musical, of course, resulted in such classics as Singin’ in [...]
Hoyt Curtin’s Jug band Session
You may or may not know the name Hoyt Curtin, but there’s no question you’ve heard his work. So has anyone who has owned a television since 1960. Hoyt was the musical director for Hanna-Barbera during their television heyday, and the composer of such classic theme songs those that opened [...]
High School Pranks with Joe Barbera
I can almost hear the voice of a reader somewhere out there saying, “Joe Barbera again?” Well, yes, actually. Out of the hundreds and hundreds of interviews in my files, I have more material from Joe than just about anyone. This is because we were ostensibly working on a book [...]
Eep-Opp-Ork…Uh-Oh!
It was the rock song that defined a generation. All right, it wasn’t really. Instead, Eep-Opp-Ork-Ah-Ah, which highlighted 1962’s A Date with Jet Screamer, the second-aired episode of The Jetsons, is a spoof of two generations at the same time. But the combination of the wailing, jazzy tune by Hoyt [...]
Alex Toth: Out of Griping Comes Success
Like politics, animation sometimes makes strange bedfellows, particularly when creative visions and egos are involved. Back in the late 1990s, when I was regularly meeting with Joe Barbera in the hopes of putting a book together for him (one that would never be completed, alas), I heard a lot about [...]
Ed Benedict and the Cartoon Revolution
The recent release of Disney’s Winnie the Pooh illustrates just how much the look of animation has changed over the past twenty years. Today, of course, we regard such changes as being matters of dimension: two-dimensional, hand-drawn (like Pooh) as opposed to three-dimensional, digital imagery (like damn near everything else). [...]
‘Family Guy’...
Those crazy, irreverent kids on FOX TV’s Family Guy team have done it...
Allers’ Animated...
Liam Neeson, Salma Hayek, John Krasinski, Frank Langella, Alfred Molina and...
