Paul Carpente sent me a paragraph from the IMDB listing for director Gordon Hunt. I saw many fine plays and musicals Gordon staged and he was also a fine director of the voice tracks for Hanna-Barbera cartoons. He directed hundreds of shows there, some of them written by me. An awful lot of what I know about voice directing, I learned watching Gordon.
Anyway, Paul sent me this from Gordon's IMDB page and asked me if it was true…
While working on Yogi's Treasure Hunt (1985), Gordon Hunt was looking over a storyboard, and, what seemed to be a new character, caught his eye. He asked writers Mark Evanier and Earl Kress, who this "new character" was. They both told him it was Yogi's friend, "Boo Boo", and was not a new character.
The answer to Paul's question is: No, that is not true. Not only have I no memory of such a thing but well before Yogi's Treasure Hunt, Gordon had directed a number of Yogi Bear projects for Hanna-Barbera with Boo Boo in them, including a prime-time Yogi special that I wrote in 1982. Gordon was not a seasoned expert in Hanna-Barbera history — there were few of those in the building apart from Earl, myself and Scott Shaw! — but he certainly knew stuff like that.
Would someone who knows how to tell IMDB that they're wrong please tell IMDB that they're wrong?
Paul also asks why, if I worked on Yogi's Treasure Hunt, my name is nowhere on it. Because I quit, that's why. I was the first writer on it and Joe Barbera asked me to do it and told me he trusted me to make it work. I thought that's what I was doing but around about the second or third script, Mr. Barbera suddenly decided to take an interest in the show and started coming up with all sorts of different ideas to change this or change that.
It was a low budget series for syndication and because of my love of the characters — and the fact that Daws Butler would be voicing the ones he'd voiced in my childhood — I took a considerable cut in pay to do it. That might have made me a little less good-natured about rewriting scripts to please Mr. Barbera, who I felt was reneging a bit on his promise not to micro-manage. I respected the hell out of that man and as such, I had a little trouble disagreeing with him and arguing with him, even though such arguments were always cordial and friendly.
Some of the disagreements were actually funny and much talked-about in the halls of the studio. The premise of the show (not my idea) was that in each episode, Yogi and his friends would go on some treasure hunt. In one episode, I had them seeking a rare jewel which had the power to enable its bearer to become a beloved singing star and to sell out huge stadiums. I called it The Neil Diamond.
J.B. laughed at that but said, "At this studio, we don't like doing puns on the names of celebrities" and I said, "You mean like Yogi Bear?" He gave me one of those looks — anyone who worked for him can do one for you — and insisted it be changed anyway. A week or two later, after a few more such disagreements, I decided it was time for me to stop working for Hanna-Barbera and did, though I remained on good terms with J.B., lunched with him a few more times and turned down a few offers to return. I believe it was Tom Ruegger who took over my position and took Yogi's Treasure Hunt more in the direction the boss wanted. Earl Kress wrote some of them.
Lastly, Paul asks, "On your IMDB, it states 11 years has passed between your work on Superman and The Garfield Show. Why did you take such a long break from cartoons?" I didn't really. I was hired for a few projects that didn't get made and for a few that did but I removed my name from them or never put it on in the first place.
Also, in-between Superman and The Garfield Show, I wrote on and voice-directed Channel Umptee-3, and I started on The Garfield Show a year or so before the dates they list for it. There can often be a wide gap between the time you start writing a cartoon show and when finished episodes are broadcast. But yeah, there have been periods when I've been so occupied with non-cartoon projects that I didn't do as many cartoons.
I mention all this to point out that while IMDB is a good resource, it's far from exact. They have me down as writing about a third of the episodes of The Garfield Show that I actually wrote. They have me writing three episodes of Channel Umptee-3. My pay stubs say eight. They have me doing 10 episodes of the Mother Goose and Grimm cartoon show but I did 13, and I did five episodes of CBS Storybreak, not four…and so on. I am way overcredited on Thundarr the Barbarian.
Please: Don't anyone take it as a personal crusade to try and correct all this stuff. They'll never get it right and I don't care that much. But do fix the thing about Gordon Hunt. He was a much smarter guy than that anecdote makes him out to be.