The Messick Mystery

Dave Mackey operates a terrific website filled with info about great cartoons, over at www.davemackey.com.  One thing he currently has up is a guide to the year-by-year color schemes that were used on those concentric circles that opened and closed all the great Warner Brothers cartoons.  I never realized it but they were color-coded and Dave explains how.  He also just e-mailed me with his solution to the mystery (put forth here) about how, in the MGM cartoon, House of Tomorrow, the narrator briefly changes from Frank Graham to Don Messick and back again…

Don Messick's narration was during the pressure-cooker gag.  The narration makes mention of a specific year: 2050.  Joe Adamson's book , Tex Avery: King of Cartoons, notes that the cartoon described the House of Tomorrow – "Tomorrow" in the original cartoon being noted as 1975. This was the only scene in the whole picture with a hard date reference.

I have a feeling that MGM's sound engineer, Lovell Norman, had the dialogue replaced when the cartoon was packaged as part of CBS's The Tom And Jerry Show in the mid-1960's, thinking that the cartoon's date reference would soon be outdated.  Norman may have had access to enough original sound elements to be able to do a nice, neat patch job, albeit without Frank Graham.  Another less likely possibility was that the line was changed when the cartoon went into local TV syndication in 1977.

That all sounds possible to me but, at least in the print on the Cartoon Network, the editing was not a nice, neat patch job.  It was a pretty sloppy edit, out of style with the other ins-and-outs, which were done via fades.  (The animation in the Messick-narrated segment also seemed a little out-of-style, as if it had been animated by others, but that may just be my imagination.)

But you're probably right that it was done when the show went on CBS (1965, I believe).  And wasn't that the same time that they re-animated and revoiced the episodes that featured the black, stereotyped maid to give her June Foray's Irish accent?