Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Yogi Bear in “The Stout Trout” (1958)


Yogi Bear should have read my previous post and benefited from The Timeless Bass Secret, tantalizingly hinted to a breathless public in a number of 1980 era comic books.

But, in 1958, he could neither read the 2009 post nor the 1980 comics – so he had no choice but to go to watery war with Wily Willy the Wily Trout!

And so he did, in this entry from early in the First Season of THE HUCKLEBERRY HOUND SHOW, written by creator and producer Joe Barbera and performed by Daws Butler as Yogi and Don Messick as Our Narrator.

Note the unusual attention to detail not afforded to most “blackout gag” cartoons. Yogi ends one scene by falling into the lake – and begins the next scene still dripping wet!

He’s also injured by an errant spear gun projectile, and spends the REMAINDER OF THE CARTOON with a bandage on his rump!

Also note the unusual rendition of the Yogi Bear Theme. It’s a little higher and more energetic than the norm.

Beyond that, this is a cartoon I just like the look of! The backgrounds read well and are colorfully pleasing to the eye – and, frankly, don’t look much different from those of Hanna and Barbera’s later theatrical efforts for MGM. (Particularly the widescreen phase!) Watch a few of those and then some of these and you can see the evolution… taking the extreme budgetary limitations of television into consideration, of course.

Enjoy… and don’t swallow any wooden fishhooks!

1 comment:

Chris Barat said...

Joe,

Not to give HB TOO much credit, but... there are other scenes in which Yogi is bone dry after having just recently fallen into water. I give them points for trying, though.

I get the feeling that Yogi's personality was still being worked out at this point. He had virtually no dialogue and the short as a whole worked like a How-To GOOFY short.

Chris