Turner Classic Movies is devoting two nights this month to saluting Hanna-Barbera and one of them is tomorrow night. The following times may be different in your time zone of if your source for TCM likes to time-shift their feed…but at 8 PM, they're running Hey There, It's Yogi Bear, a 1964 feature that I loved a lot in 1964 and still find pleasant to watch.
At 9:45, they're running The Man Called Flintstone from 1964…and I was never too fond of this one or, for that matter, much that they did with The Flintstones after about its third season. And at 11:15 PM, there's A Christmas Story, an animated TV special from 1972. It was written by Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, who were practically running the studio in '72, and it features a lot of familiar Hanna-Barbera voices — Daws Butler, Paul Winchell, Janet Waldo, John Stephenson and Hal Smith.
Also in the cast was Walter Tetley, who you may know best as Sherman in the Mr. Peabody cartoons produced by Jay Ward. I believe this was his last performance. In '71, he was in a serious auto accident from which he never fully recovered and he died in 1975.
Speaking of voices, here's something super-ultra-trivial about Hey There, It's Yogi Bear. It's obvious to me that the voice track was recorded in three sessions. All three sessions involved Daws Butler (who played Yogi), Don Messick (who played Boo Boo and Mr. Ranger) and Julie Bennett (who played Cindy Bear) and for the first third (or so) of the film, all the voices are by the three of them plus Hal Smith. The second session had Daws, Don, Julie, Mel Blanc and J. Pat O'Malley doing all the voices and then in the last third of the film, they used Daws, Don, Julie, Howard Morris and Allan Melvin. All the voices in the last third of the film are by those five actors, and Howie and Allan are not credited in the film, nor are the actors who came in to do the singing. It bothered me when I was twelve and it bothers me (a little) to this day that the singing voices of Yogi, Boo Boo and Cindy weren't Daws, Don and Julie.
Hey, I warned you it was super-ultra-trivial.
Hosting this event and the presentation next week are Jacqueline Stewart, who hosts a lot of programming on TCM, and my pal Greg Ehrbar. That's a photo of one of them above, I forget which one. They'll be talking about the films and probably making a fine evening of it. Greg knows an awful lot about H-B and is the author of a fine book on the music you may know well and love from various Hanna-Barbera projects.
You can order a copy of it here and you might also want to tune in Greg's podcast all about Hanna-Barbera. You can find it here and somewhere in there, you might just find an episode with me on it.
The three features produced by Hanna-Barbera are followed on TCM tomorrow night by three musicals for which Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera produced animated sequences to intermingle with live-action footage: Anchors Away (1945), Dangerous When Wet (1953) and Invitation to the Dance (1956). And next week, they'll be showing Jack and the Beanstalk, Charlotte's Web and The Gathering.