Funtastic Flashback with Mark Evanier

A much-requested encore of our visit with writer/Director MARK EVANIER, in which he takes us through the day-to-day life of a Hanna-Barbera staff member, with first-hand stories about Daws Butler, June Foray, Howard Morris, Paul Winchell, Shep Menken, Doug Wildey, Tex Avery, and Herb Solow (Star Trek, The Man from Atlantis), as well as Bill Hanna & Joe Barbera themselves.

Episode Transcript

(00:10):
Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, we love Hanna
Barbera. Welcome to the fantastic world
of Hanna and Barbera, a celebration of Bill, Hannah,

(00:31):
Joe, Barbera and the thousands of people, past and present who
have shared in their entertainment tradition.
And now your host, Greg Garbar. Thank you, Chris Anthony, and
welcome to our fantastic world. We're going to replay a show for
you that is one of the most popular that we've ever run.

(00:52):
It is Mark Evanier, a writer, director and all around
Renaissance man who has known the biggest, the brightest and
the best in the business. He's going to tell you stories
about Daws Butler, Jonathan Winters, Howard Morris, June for
A, Paul Winchell, Tex Avery and many more as he tells what it
was like to work at the Hanna Barbera studio with Bill and Joe

(01:14):
themselves. And here he is now.
Mr. Mark Evanier. Hi, Mark.
Hello, I didn't know I'd done those things.
You did. Now let's start with like on
scooby-doo. We'll say you're the famous Mark
Evanier, and then you can slip into the script all the things
you do. Well, the the famous mark, as
opposed to all the unknown mark engineers out there.

(01:36):
Yes, I write all sorts of different things.
I grew up loving live action TV,animated TV, comic books,
cartoons, all sorts of things. And I spent my life doing the
things I liked when I was a kid,writing them instead of watching
them or reading them. And I've worked for almost every
big comic book company and I've worked for almost every big

(01:57):
animation firm as of, you know, maybe 1520 years ago.
It's really just this silly little idea of going around and
doing what you wanted to do whenyou were a kid.
I call it a career, but it's actually just a an indulgence of
a nine year old kid. Living the dream.
Oh well, you know it's possible to live a dream when you're

(02:19):
inept at everything else, when there's really no other
profession for you, when you can't do anything else in this
world, so you have to do something that you loved when
you were a child. I first became a fan of you with
the Marvel Hanna Barbera comics,which were flawless.
They were beautiful. Well, thank you.
I enjoyed that tremendously. And it was an odd job.

(02:41):
I, I think I probably at some point, I've told you the story
of how I got involved with those, but it came out of
nowhere. It was like one day I was
unemployed and all of a sudden Iwas employed.
And I owe that to a man named Chase Craig, who was the editor
when I wrote for Gold Key Comics.
And I wrote a lot of Disney and Warner Brothers and Hanna
Barbera comics for him when he was editor in chief of the West

(03:02):
Coast Gold Key office. And then he retired and I just
didn't quite get along with his replacement.
We just didn't click as a writerand an editor.
Nice man. But he had different ideas of
stories that I did. And I drifted away to other
things, including live action television.
And I did a year as a story editor.
Welcome back, Cotter on the TV show.

(03:24):
And the day after I left that job, I'm saying to my then
girlfriend, Gee, I gotta find something to do.
And she said, well, why don't you?
What's the best job you ever had?
And I said writing, you know, scooby-doo comments for Gold
Key, for Chase Craig. And they were drawn by a man
named Dan Spiegel. And she said, well, why don't
you get that job back? And I said, because Gold Key no

(03:46):
longer does scooby-doo. Dan Spiegel doesn't work for
them. Chase Craig is retired.
In other words, there's not a single element of that job I can
get back. And about 1/2 an hour later,
Chase Greg phoned me and he'd come out of retirement, added a
new line of Hanna Barbera comicsfor the studio and Dan Spiegel
was drawing the scooby-doo comicbook and he wanted me to write

(04:06):
it. So it was like out of nowhere,
this, this dream job that I thought I could never get back
was now back and better. And I did that for a number of
years and it was a lot of fun. And then Chase retired again and
I took over the whole operation.And I did that for years.
And when I started writing for Hanna Barbera cartoons, I

(04:26):
already had an office in the building because I was doing the
comic books out of there. Where was your office?
How many floors did they have there?
The building I was in had two floors and a weird penthouse
that was not quite, it was kind of a library attic.
There was a attempt to turn it into some sort of a Hanna

(04:48):
Barbera archive for a while, butit was I was on the I was on the
1st floor for part of the time. They kept moving me around.
They kept moving me to differentplaces in the building depending
on what I was working on and what happened.
And the thing was I was they kept giving me very good offices
and I only came in two or three days a week for a couple hours.
People who were there full time and much worse offices than I

(05:09):
did, which I've always felt guilty about.
I said put me in a smaller office and they they kept for
giving me a good office for somereason.
Did your office have that lattice design that I see when
Yogi is sitting at the desk withBill and Joe?
You know, 64 thing. At one point it did.
I probably had, I think I said six different offices in that
building. I shared one for a brief time

(05:32):
with Tex Avery, which is, you know, a pretty impressive name
drop to have as as And the best office I had for a while was, I
can't describe it to somebody that was never in the building.
And one of the strange things about Hanna Barbera was that
sometimes when they fired someone, they didn't just
replace somebody. They moved the hallways around
and the walls around and your office did not exist.

(05:54):
The first person I work for at Hanna Barbera, which is on a
live action project, was a man named Herb Solo SOLOW, whose
name everybody remembers from the end of Star Trek.
Well, he was working for Hanna Barbera at the time and he had
this lovely office and things. And when they did his division,
suddenly they rearranged the building and his office was now

(06:15):
the front entry hall where you physically he was now the
reception area. And they moved the reception
area to the other side of the building.
It was very strange. It's a strange to work for a
company where the walls move more than the cartoons.
That's an interesting area of the company history too, is that
the solo company was really Hanna Barbera, so Man from

(06:36):
Atlantis basically was their show.
But I guess like Disney with Touchstone, they felt like the
name meant cartoon so they used his name instead, am I correct?
Well, the Parrot Company was Taft Broadcasting at that time
and they hired Herb Solo becauseHanna Barbera had not made a lot
of inroads into live action. And Herb had impeccable

(06:58):
credentials as a as an executiveselling live action shows.
He had done that for Paramount for years.
So Taft hired him, installed himin an area, it was the
Hamburgera building, but he was kind of independent of the
cartoon part of it. I got hired for the first time
in the wrong part of the building.

(07:18):
This is before the comic books even.
So my then partner, I, Dennis wrote some stuff for Herb for
the Hanna Barbera that he was trying to sell shows.
And he got one of a a show we created optioned at CBS, but
they never produced it. They never never made the pilot.
And he just couldn't quite get anything on the air.

(07:39):
So finally he went to Taft and said the name Hanna Barbera is
killing me with the networks. So and they made it solo
productions for a while and I think we're Taft.
It had several different names, but none of them were Hanna
Barbera suddenly, and he sold the Man from Atlantis and one or
two other little things and thatthat didn't work out.
He finally left there. And by which time I was doing

(08:00):
the comic books. And then when Hannah Barbera
hired me the next time, it was not for cartoons.
It was hired for a live action pilot that Hannah Barbera was
producing because for a while Joe Barbera thought I was a live
action writer, which at the timeI was, but only because nobody
had to give me a cartoon job. And so I wrote a pilot for them

(08:21):
for a syndicated live action show.
Was that the beach girls? That was The Beach Girls, yes.
Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
That's a strange moment in my past.
And then I finally got into writing animation for Ruby
Spears, and Ruby Spears hired meto write animated shows for
them. And at one point this lady at

(08:43):
ABC, like my scripts, I was doing for them by a Ruby Spear
said to Joe Barbera, hey, you want to get this guy to write
for you with Mark Evanier, he goes, Mark Evanier, he's a live
action writer, work for us. And Joe Barbera called me up and
he said, why don't you tell me you could write cartoons?
And I said I only told you 14 times.
I bet he had that in his head because of the their early sort

(09:07):
of learning as they went with Flintstones and especially Top
Cat when they hired live action writers and they had difficulty
getting them to keep the storiesmoving and having motion in them
and there was dialogue heavy andthings like that.
Yeah. Well, I think what happened was
for some reason, and you have tokind of work in the TV business
for a while to understand that things sometimes happen like

(09:30):
this without a really intelligent reason behind them.
There had to be like a company wide policy.
They would say live action writers can't write cartoons and
sometimes that was true. Some of them couldn't, like
Turner could. Yeah, Jack.
Mendelssohn could There were There were a lot of guys who
wrote a lot of stuff of them whohad great live action

(09:52):
credentials and some of them couldn't.
So they'd have a policy for a while that we're not hiring live
action writers to write cartoons.
And then one day someone would say, hey, you know what would
jazz our shows up? And maybe we could sell some or
the network if we use some of those guys who are writing those
prime time hit shows. So suddenly they're hiring live
action writers and not hiring cartoon writers.

(10:12):
And again, some of them were good and some of them weren't.
Then at one point after Ren and Stimpy hit big, somebody said we
should have animators write all the scripts and that didn't work
either. You can't make a Bank of policy
that you know, oh, well, if he can draw, he can write.
No, some people can draw and notwrite.

(10:33):
Some people can write not draw, and some people can do both.
There's no one all-encompassing situation where everybody has
the same skill level. I was caught in the middle of
that for a little while. And then once I became known as
a live action and animation writer both, then people kept
offering me projects that combine live action and

(10:53):
animation. So or which, you know, we're on
the cusp. Like I worked on this thing
Carlton, your doorman for MTM, which was a cartoon show
produced by a sitcom company, very Tyler Morris company, and
written completely by live action writers and using the
kind of voice people would be hired for on camera.

(11:15):
They didn't hire Daws Butler andJune Ferreira and Frank Welker
for Carlson. They hired the people they would
have hired if the show had been live.
Who at that point was Lorenzo Music, who was the producer of
the show, head writer of it also.
So it though you just have theseblanket policies and they only
apply as far as they apply. They don't reply to everybody.

(11:36):
Yeah, there's a tendency to pigeonhole.
It happens in any kind of the creative works, too.
It was the same thing with performers when you see somebody
who you wouldn't believe had a singing voice.
You know, here's one point. The best office I had was
located next to Amanda. I'm sure you do well of Doug
Wildy. Oh, boy.
Yeah, of course. Had produced Johnny Quest, and

(11:56):
he was in there doing the Godzilla show.
And Doug and I were old friends.We knew each other.
We were neighbors at Hanna Barbera.
And he comes in my office one day and he says, Mark, I need
you to write some Godzilla's forus.
I'm not happy with the scripts. You got to write some Godzilla's
for us. And I said, OK, sure.
How do we start? He said, OK, I got to call NBC
and just get you approved as a writer.
So start thinking of premises and as soon as you're approved

(12:18):
as a writer, we'll have a meeting and figure out what you
can write as the first script. So about an hour later, Doug
comes to my office and he says you won't believe this.
They don't want you writing Godzilla.
They say you're a humorous writer.
And they just said we'd really rather have them on the new
Flintstone show we're doing. So Bob Ogle is story and take.
Now go down to Bob Ogle, and he'll give you a Flintstones
assignment. I went, OK, thanks, Doug.

(12:39):
So I went down to Bob Ogle's office and he said, yeah, Mark,
we're dying to have you write the Flintstones show.
I got a call over to NBC and just verify that you're approved
and just start working up some premises.
And we'll talk about that later today.
And an hour later, Bob Ogle comes to my office and he says,
they said that you're really a superhero adventure writer and
they don't want you on The Flintstones.
And, and I ended up working on neither show.

(13:01):
Boy, that kind of thing happens a lot and you cannot let it
upset you because you just have to kind of laugh at how the
business is very strange and they're delightful things about
it being strange. And with the delightful thing
comes those kind of frustration.You can't love how weird it is
at times in certain aspects. And not you shouldn't get upset
with the bad parts that come with the good parts.

(13:23):
Yeah, it's like he's a floor wax.
He's a dessert topping. Wait a minute.
I actually at one point was bothof those, so that's it's very
simple. Wow.
And I guess your philosophy is just keep moving forward and
things just seem to come along. So instead of getting all upset
about it, just say I'll talk to people and see what's doing.

(13:44):
Is that kind of how you do it? I'll tell you how I do it is I
have been a professional writer since July of 1969, which is you
can. Do the moon landing.
That's right. Yes, yes, yes.
In fact, they decided man has landed on the moon.
Now it's concealable that NVIDIAcan have a writing career.
OK, yeah, we'll hire him when man walks on the moon, right?

(14:06):
Oh, we did it. OK, so during that time period,
whatever number of years that is, it's 50 something odd years.
I have never been exclusive to anyone job.
I have always worked for more than one company and and
frequently in one genre or I waswriting cartoons while I was
writing live action TV shows andI was writing comic books when I

(14:28):
was writing cartoons also. And if you don't do only one
thing, then you don't worry about losing anyone job and at
what point it was a period of mylife when I was simultaneously
writing the That's incredible TVshow for ABC, the Richie Rich
cartoon show for Hanna Barbera for ABC, which by the way, had

(14:49):
the same standards and practicesperson both shows.
I would argue with her. I would literally say to her, if
you will leave that joke at Richie Rich, I'll cut this other
thing out of that's incredible that.
Bothers and Iron Robot Maid wouldn't say that.
Yes, that's right. Anyway, so I was working for.
That's incredible. I was working for Hanna Barbera

(15:10):
on both Richie Rich and the comic book division, and I was
working for Sid and Marty Croft,and for one period there I was
also working for Dick Clark's company on a variety show.
So I had at that point, for somereason, every show you worked
on, every project you worked on gave you a company jacket.
I had the company jackets for all of those things.
So there would be days when I would just go from studio to

(15:32):
studio, work for two hours here,3 hours there, whatever.
And I would have all four jackets in my car.
And then each time I went to a place, I would put on the wrong
jacket. I would never wear my that's
incredible jacket and that's incredible.
I would never wear my Hannibarbera jacket and
Hannibarbera, you know, so on. Because I wanted to always kind
of announce those people. You know, I have other work.

(15:53):
You better treat me nice and when one job went away, fine, so
it's just one less jacket in thetrunk of my car.
So that was easy to do. I I tell people if you do enough
different things, you really don't have to any of them very
well. People think you're versatile
just by the sheer fact that you've got the jobs.
Did you ever have to apply for one, or was it basically you

(16:13):
were an affable, likable guy andpeople liked you and liked your
work? I rarely have ever applied for
work anywhere. My friend Mike Royer, like Bay.
People listening to this will know his name.
He used to say you get your first job in the business due to
your ability, all the rest due to your dependability.

(16:33):
What happened? It's just that I met people and
in show business, there is no more desirable quality you can
have than unavailability. They really want to hire the guy
they can't hire. They want to hire the guy
somebody else has hired. Yeah, So I would do work for
somebody and they'd say, hey, when you've got some time, come
over and work for us. And that's kinda how it works.

(16:55):
It still works that way at timesand at times it doesn't.
Everything I'm saying, which sounds like this would be a
great situation to have. There's a downside to it.
It's like not that you or I would ever be this the most
popular guy in class school. You're the guy that nobody ever
invites the things that they figure you're busy or you're you
know the girl well, she must have a date for Saturday night.
She's so pretty. So you don't get invited to

(17:17):
thing. And also there are people who
don't want to hire the guy who they can't own.
They don't want to hire someone who works for somebody.
There is also the downside of that.
There are producers who would never hire me because they could
never own me or owns too strong a word, but they don't want to
hire somebody who goes. If you're going to treat me
badly, I want to walk out of here.
For a while. There were a couple of animation

(17:38):
studios that would put the studio someplace outside of Los
Angeles and encourage you to move there.
Oh, you wanna work for us? Well, fine.
Move to this city. And people would literally do
that. They would up and move their
families and or their furniture and their lives, and they rent

(17:59):
an apartment or a house someplace in the other city.
Yeah. And once the company had them
there, they weren't worried about losing them.
Boy, you couldn't quit. Yeah, You know, I've heard of a
couple of them that are known for that.
They're not in the mainstream, so there was nowhere else to get
work. Yeah.
And well, when I worked on I KISS, I can say this now, when I

(18:20):
worked on That's incredible, it was for a company called Allen
Landsberg Productions. Allen Landsberg Productions
really did not like hiring people who worked anywhere else.
They didn't like the idea that you could quit their show and go
to another show. So a lot of the people I worked
alongside of it, I'm not talkingabout writers necessarily, but
more film editors and productionpeople and camera guys.

(18:42):
If you quit that company, you were basically out of show
business. You couldn't just go across the
street and work front of the TV show because you didn't have any
connections there. And the writers on that show,
when I was one, we were the onlypeople who really, well, the
director too, maybe one of the stars.
But most of the people were kindof prisoners of the company.

(19:04):
They didn't have other opportunities in show business
because what they did on that show was so specialized to that
show and nobody else knew them. They had no credentials anywhere
else. And I was, I was literally,
while I was working on that, it's incredible.
I was story editing the Richie Rich cartoons.
So if that's incredible and fired me, I would have lost, you
know, a lot of my income, but I would not have been without a

(19:24):
job anyway. And this is not the kind of
thing I think people want to hear about, but.
No, no, no, no. We want to walk around in the
building that's still sitting there, even though the inside is
different, the outside is. And contrary to what some people
say, oh, it's the LA Fitness. Well, that's just one wing of
it. I believe that was built later.

(19:44):
And then the right side with thesort of couple of the Jetsony
thing that was added on later on.
But all of that was Hanna Barbera at one time, that entire
complex. Yeah, and it was an enormously
fun place to work. There was always somebody fun
you could go to lunch with, you could wander around.
And I was there at a time when there were still people from the

(20:07):
earliest days of Hanna Barbera there.
There were people in Eros days of animation, Dave Tenderlar was
working in animation there. I mean, you know, guys who had
worked for Fleischer, guys wouldwork for Disney in the golden
era. And of course, like, I shattered
off the text Avery, and at one point, Fritz Freling had an
office across the hall for me for about two weeks.

(20:29):
And then you just walk through the halls and there's people
you'd run into who had animationhistory in their blood.
It was just an amazingly talented place.
I enjoyed tremendously the main office I had, the one I shared
with Tex at times. The story I'm going to tell you
was not when Tex was sharing an office with me.
The office I had was right across the hall from the
recording studio. And when a Smurfs session would

(20:50):
let out, Jonathan Winters would walk into my office.
Wow. And usually there'd be a couple
of other writers in there with me.
We didn't consider our typewriters all day.
We all socialized and talked a lot.
And Jonathan would poke his headin.
He's looking for an audience. Jonathan always liked to find an
audience to entertain. And he poke his head in the
office and I say, oh, you're here to read the gas meter.
And he'd go, yes, Sir. Had he become a gas meter

(21:12):
reader? And I'd interview him as a gas
meter reader. It was like, you know, ATV show
where Jonathan Winters is improvising live on the TV show.
I'm thinking to myself, I'm sitting here chatting with
Jonathan Winters. And it was just a fun, fun
thing. There were downsides working for
Hanna Barbera. There was a lot of angst the
time. And you know, this show is
behind schedule, this show is failing, this person has to be

(21:36):
fired, things like that. There were negative sides to it,
but I wonder. It was good.
It was a great place to work. Let me get to actually, since
we're talking about everyday life there, did you see Barbara
and Hannah running around? I mean, what was the atmosphere
like? Well, the atmosphere was that
the building was kind of bisected.
Bill Hanna was upstairs on the 2nd floor.

(21:56):
Joe Barbera was downstairs in the 1st floor.
Joe and Bill did not cross pathsvery much, which led to a lot of
rumors that they were not speaking to each other, which I
don't think were ever true. The idea was that Joe's job was
to go to the network, take the meetings and sell the shows.
And his department's jurisdiction over show pretty

(22:17):
much ended when the scripts weredone.
And once there were scripts, they went to a storyboard
artist. And now they're in Hannah's
jurisdiction. And Hannah was the guy who
worked in shirtsleeves. I have photos of the two of them
together. And Bill Hannah is in
shirtsleeves. And Joe Barbera is in a, you
know, very expensive Sport coat.And that's, that would tell you

(22:38):
a lot about the two things. Joe Barbera was a wonderful
salesman. He'd go to the meetings and he
would sell a show and he would make it up on the spot if he had
to. Or he would take in three or
four shows to pitch. And the networks would like this
element of this one and that element of that one.
They figure on the spot a way tocombine the two ideas and he'd

(22:59):
sell Casper and the Space Angelsor something else that was a
hybrid of two different things. He was pitching and he was a
wonderful sales guy. I could tell you 12 stories
about Joe Barbera the salesman, but I tell people that if Joe
Barbera had been a used car salesman, everyone in the city
would have owned a 10 year old Chevrolet.
He was great at this stuff and Bill Hanna was in charge of

(23:21):
production and he was sometimes not there because he was flying
to Hanna Barbera Australia or toTaiwan.
He was the one who dealt with the subcontracting studios
outside the building. He was the one who supervised
what was laid out in the building.
So there was a little line of demarcation there.
You you could be in the Bill Hanna section or you could be in

(23:41):
the Joe Barbera section and the location of your office kind of
told you which one you were responsible to.
Although when we started the comic books, I was in the Bill
Hanna wing and then later I was in the Joe Barbera when they
moved us around. It wasn't the neatest orderly
system, but you know, I'd run into one or the other
frequently, and Barbera liked the fact that I was one of a

(24:04):
half dozen people in the building who knew the history of
the studio like crazy. Barbera would stop me and say,
what's 1 of Flintstone's maiden name again, and I'd go slag
Hoopo, thank you. You know he didn't remember
that, but I did. You know, sometimes you'd be
caught between the two of them. Bill Hanna would say to me, go
tell Joe to do this. And I go to Joe and he'd say,

(24:25):
Bill, Bill, we're not doing that.
You know, I was between the two guys.
It was tough to argue. I was like the hyphen Hanna
Barbera. I was in the between the two
guys. Yeah.
I got along with both of them fine, even when I decided to
quit the building, when I decided to leave, Barbera was
very nice to me. And then when I ran into him
after that, he was very nice to me.
And late in his life, when he was, you know, kind of semi

(24:48):
retired, he was working for the Warner Animation.
There was no more Hanna Barbera really, except in name only.
He was working for the Warner Brothers animation division over
there. He would sometimes have one of
his assistants call me and say Joe would like to have lunch
with you. And I'd go to lunch with Joe and
he would tell me the same stories he told me before.

(25:09):
It was, you know, he was, I don't know how old he was, 9088.
Well into his 90s, yeah. Yeah, and he would start telling
stories and you couldn't stop him.
You can't interrupt him and say Mr. Barbera, I've heard that
story 4 times, but fine. And I, I loved him and on
certain levels, definitely he was, you know, it's again, it's
something like here I am 8 yearsold, nine years old, part in

(25:33):
front of the TV said watching Huckleberry Hound, watching
quick drama grow, loving what I'm seeing on the air.
And now I'm sitting and meeting with Joe Barbera.
It's very surreal. I left that company because I
just had trouble arguing with him.
He was Joe Barbera. His name was on the building,
and we had wonderful little adventures and things like that

(25:56):
and moments of real bonding. But there's also the fact that,
you know, the certain people in the world is hard to argue with
them who they were. Yeah.
And I got to know a lot of my heroes.
Joe Barbera is not the only person in that category because
I got to know Daws Butler and I got to know June Foray and I got
to know Stan Freeberg and I got to know Paul Winchell.

(26:18):
Paul Winchell was one of my heroes.
I've still got in my living room, Zach, replicas of Jerry
Mullally and Knucklehead Smith, and all of a sudden I'm having
lunch with Paul Winchell and thinking to myself, I was used
to watch this guy on Hearts Mountain Circus Show or whatever
it was a cartoon, Rooney or whatever it was cartoonies.
And now I'm sitting in his living room.

(26:38):
You know, it's just very strangeto deal with that.
We are now to the point where all my heroes, my childhood
pretty much are gone. It's kind of sad to realize that
we just lost Jimmy Weldon. He was the oldest guy I ever
worked with and knew who had done cartoons that I watched as
a kid. I loved watching yucky doodle
cartoons and I loved panging around Jimmy Weldon or talking

(27:00):
to Doug Young or Don Messick or any of those people.
And the same thing was true withMichael Maltese and some of the
artists and and such. And then we're down now to very
few people from that era. Yeah, it's did span year.
Wasn't Irv Spence somebody who went to school with Barbera and
worked for him like for life? Was that?
Well, you know, who did was Harvey Eisenberg.

(27:23):
They were long time associates. They work together all the time,
you know, and I worked with DickBickenbach a while on the Hanna
Barbera comics and again with the comic books.
I wrote Hanna Barbera comics that were drawn by Pete
Alvarado. Wow.
And Tony Strobel and Kay Wright,the same guys who drew them when
I was reading them when I was 8.Yeah, yeah.
And Chase Craig was the editor there.

(27:44):
I mean, it's it's I must have told you this story.
But Dawes Butler and I would go to lunch.
And one time we were standing ata restaurant waiting to be
seated. And, you know, nobody else
around us knew who I was with. Dawes didn't look like anybody
special when he in in real life.And the guy ahead of us waiting
for a table, the lady seeing people says to them, oh come

(28:06):
this way gentlemen. And the guy does this bad
Snagglepuss impression and goes exit stage right into the dining
room. And Dog looks at me and outcomes
the authentic voice of Snagglepuss saying, heaven's the
plagiarism, you know, it was just a dream type in that sense.

(28:27):
I used to have Daws on my answering machine.
He recorded one for me as Yogi and one for me as Huckleberry
Hound. And I check my messages and
people would say, Evan here, that's the lousiest impression
of Yogi Bear I've ever heard in my life.
I don't you give a You can't do Yogi Bear very well.
But I got to work with a lot of those guys, and I loved them.
I loved being with them. And they loved the fact that I

(28:48):
respected their work and knew what it was.
Yeah. When I was doing the Garfield
and French Show, I hired a lot the guys.
I just wanted to work with voiceactors.
I hired Shepard Mankin. You know who that is?
Mike Grasscott. That's right.
And he comes in and he had not done a cartoon in several years.
Nobody was hiring him lately forcartoons.
Shepard Mankin, great cartoon voice actor, but I suspected his

(29:11):
career cartoons were like 5% of his income.
He was an announcer. He was a voice over specialist.
He did commercials. He was the spokesman for
jack-in-the-box restaurants for 20 years and things like that
and all sorts of places. And, and he comes in and he's
surprised that anybody knows whohe is.
And he sees me who's, you know, I was probably in my late 30s,

(29:31):
but I probably looked to him like I was 12.
And he says, what am I doing here?
And I said, well, I wanted to hire you.
I've got this character. And I think you could maybe, you
know, give me what I want. And he said, well, what do you
want? I said, well, is there any way
you could sound like that old cartoon character Clyde Crash
Cup? And he looks at me like, well, I
was the voice of Clyde crashed up and I go, I know that he

(29:51):
laughed. He go, oh, OK.
And he's delighted that somebodyasked for him.
And we had a lot of those peoplein.
I hired a lot of people for voices because they were in my
favorite movie. It's a mad, mad, mad, mad World.
We had Buddy Hackett in and Jonathan Winters and Don Knotts
had Arnold Stang and Marvin Kaplan, other people who are in
Mad World. But I also hired some voice

(30:13):
people who hadn't worked lately.Marvin was one of those Dick
Beals and yeah, and Julie Bennett, people like that who
had not done voice work in quitesome time or done cartoons.
They were still active in the business, but they just had, you
know, Frank Nelson and people like that.
It was just neat to have that connection with them.
And they were pleased that someone in my age bracket knew

(30:35):
who they were. Because if you're a 6570 year
old, 80 year old actor, you spend an awful lot of your life
auditioning for people that looklike teenagers to you and don't
know who you are. And one of the most joyous
experiences I had in cartoons was working with Howard Morris,
who had a big chip on his shoulder about that.
Howie Morris was very angry about the fact that he would go

(30:58):
into auditions and the people doing the hiring didn't really
know who he was. And he when he understood that I
do everything he'd ever done andthat I had asked for him, I'd
written the part for him, he wasdelighted.
Because you know how he was at times felt forgotten by his own
business. He loved to work.
He loved working with younger actors, which most of them were,

(31:21):
and he loved the fact that I took care of some of the older
actors. You know, and one of the
downsides of show business, which seems glamorous, is that
you can have tons and tons of work January through June, and
nobody wants you for the rest ofthe year.
My friend Lorraine Newman used to say you can see them walking
around LA with the Where Did My series Go look on their faces.

(31:43):
Yeah, yeah. It is quite a come down if
you're on a regular TV series that all of a sudden people
don't know who you are. The series ends and all of a
sudden you have to wait in line longer at a restaurant.
Or you're unsure if people know who you are when they're talking
to you, and if they do notice you are, then they say, So what
do you work on these days? And you don't have an answer.

(32:04):
It's embarrassing to not have ananswer to that question,
especially if you're an actor who's worked most of their
lives. So that's always a problem.
And you know, a lot of these people are very happy that they
get remembered. I mean, you can see them at
autograph shows sometimes. These autograph shows are people
there who haven't been asked fortheir autograph in quite a
while. And now all of a sudden there's

(32:25):
a situation where people who remember their work come up
there and talk to them and get an autograph photo and pay for a
photo with them and they're stars again for the the duration
of the show. It's a good bad.
There's a good part of this and a bad part of this.
You know, the cartoon voice actors, There's a little ageism
in the hiring there. But you know, Janet Waldo was

(32:46):
playing teenagers into her 90s. That's.
True. And June Foray literally did her
last cartoon voice job as Rocky.I think she was 99 or 98 or 99.
She didn't work as much as she wanted to in later years, but
she was still June Foray. And, and when she won her first
Emmy, I took her to the Daytime Emmy Awards and walked her up on

(33:09):
stage and, you know, held on to her my whole mission.
Life was for a not to fall because June had fallen a lot.
She was a little stubborn about using a cane or a Walker,
certainly, and she wanted to show everybody she wasn't an old
lady, even though she was in her90s.
And so I held on to that woman'sarm with a vice grip the entire

(33:29):
evening. I would not let her fall no
matter what. When she had to go to the ladies
room, I found a woman to take her in.
I wouldn't let her go to the ladies room by herself.
And just before we got to her category, she said, what do I
say? If we want?
I said, tell them how old you are.
And she said, I don't want to dothat.
I said they will be thrilled that someone your age is getting

(33:51):
an Emmy. You are striking a blow for
ageism. And she said you're right.
And she got up there and she told them she was 91, I think,
at the time, or 92. And the audience went nuts.
Yes. Yeah.
Here's some proof that your career doesn't have to end when
you're old. That's right.
And she thanked me for making her say that because she was
afraid it would cost her work. I said, June, you're getting an

(34:12):
Emmy, you know, and I'm standingnext to you, and I'm the main
guy who hires you. Come on.
And then the whole evening was fascinating because there's this
reception afterwards. And June and I were sitting at a
table, and there's people were lining up to meet her.
The whole daytime television industry, and not just cartoon

(34:32):
people, just civilians. Were you at the memorial we did
for her at the Academy? I told the story there about
taking her that evening and how wonderful it was for her.
It was like one of the greatest evenings of her life because she
was being honored while she was still alive to enjoy it.
People were bowing to her and getting excited, and it was

(34:53):
teenagers who were waiting in line to get the autographs of
soap opera stars who were there.And they treated June like the
biggest star of the evening. They knew who she was.
They had to know who she was. And I'm walking her through this
gauntlet of fans to get into ourcar to get her out of there.
And somebody else is carrying her Emmy for me because I've got
my vice grip on her hands. Yeah, those are heavy.

(35:16):
Those are. Yeah.
So somebody else is carrying theEmmy.
And there is a woman who will never forget.
This girl was like 17 years old.She's on her cell phone.
She was obviously on June's IMDbpage and she's going she's Cindy
Lou Ho. This is Cindy Lou Ho.
And and she's like as thrilled as you could be the be in the
presence of any star because Cindy Lou Who is part of their

(35:40):
lives, part of their childhood. That's right.
So, and you know, and Cindy Lou Who is a job that June did in
like 15 minutes. She it's, she's got like 4 lines
in the whole show. She's probably in and out of the
studio in half an hour that day.And yet here is now, you know,
decades later, and people are excited about it.

(36:00):
People who were not born when she did that are excited about
her. So it was wonderful evening.
I said on this panel we had in San Diego.
You were probably there for it. There are certain of us who are
fortunate enough to be in the business at a time when we could
work with the Dawes Butlers and the Mail Blanks and the Don
Messicks and the June Forays. And there are wonderful voice

(36:21):
actors of a later generation also who people will be excited
to meet or are excited to meet also.
But we worked with the ones who invented the business.
We worked with the ones who invented voice acting.
Yeah, lots of people can do a great bug's Money, but I got to
work with Mel Blank. You know, it's a little
different. They invented the business.

(36:43):
Yeah, that's right. They invented it.
Mel kind of invented the voice business from an actor Stand and
Dawes kind of perfected it. And it's just something that's
still I I feel like this podcastis being listened to by people
who love animation. I feel I want to share this joy
I have about these people with others.
I want to share this joy and andlet you live vicariously through

(37:05):
the experience that I got to, I got to direct Mel Blanc.
I got to direct Oz Butler and people like that.
It's still kind of amazes me. And Hanna Barbera was to get
back to HB. That was a place where a lot of
this happened and where you'd bebeating people whose work you
grow up on and you'd be working on characters.

(37:25):
Sometimes I had kind of staked out.
Everybody in the building knew that I was.
That's for the old Dawes Butler voice character.
So every time a project came up which might, you know, revive
them or put them in a new context, they would usually call
me and ask, do you want to do this?
That seems to be the common thread is that this was a place

(37:46):
where, you know, generations grew up watching all of their
work, but generations were working there.
They had people like Tex Avery come back and Fritz feeling who
they worked with in the 30s. And people would come back and
come back. And then there were young
animators and young people who were just starting.

(38:07):
That is an astonishing thing, the concentration of talent in
that bill. And we're talking about what,
1400 people, you know, this is not a boutique.
This was a huge enterprise. Yeah, you could never get a
sense of how big it was because so much of it was done off the
premises. That's.
True, yeah. And you know, the building
itself, I don't know how many people in hell.

(38:28):
And there were parts of the building where people were doing
stuff. I have no idea what they're
doing in those those offices. I didn't go that near the ink
and paint departments or the background departments.
I just didn't know anybody thereand had no business there.
But I I had a lot of friends whowere in layout and I'd go over
there all the time and the guys in the layout would spend half
their time drawing cartoons and half the time drawing insulting

(38:50):
caricatures of each other or of management.
There were an awful lot of Bill and Joe cartoons on the wall and
there was this wonderful creative thing and you find guys
who had worked in animation or in comic books over the years
and things like that. There was a period when I try to
go to lunch, If I was jumping around place, I try to get to

(39:11):
Hanna Barbera around 11. I go someplace else in the
morning, get there about 11:00. So I could go to lunch with Alex
Toth or Tex Avery or Chuck Couchor whoever else was in the
building at that moment, or my friend Scott Shaw or whatever.
Daws Butler sometimes would be there.
There was always somebody interesting to go to lunch with

(39:31):
and you just keep finding history around there.
And every so often Mr. Barbera would call me in and he'd start
talking about the old days on stuff.
And he called me at one time andhe said what would you do with
Rough and ready today? And we talked about Rough and
Ready for a while. Isn't that great just to do
that? I mean, here we.
Are talking about. You know, ready.

(39:51):
Yeah, yeah. You know, and I'm telling you,
the upsides, there were a lot ofdownsides.
I don't want to make people something bad.
But any job would be. I don't think people feel that
way. Like you said, you're sharing
it. It through your eyes so we can
kind of look through your eyes as if we're there and there's a
story that you told and this is a nice way to button this.
You know, they would sometimes strain themselves to the point

(40:12):
of how in the world they're going to get this volume of work
done and keep some level of quality and all of that.
And can you tell me the story about when you asked Bill Hannah
about maybe if he did one last project?
Oh, yeah? Well, Bill work insane hours.
I mean, I mean, you could make many criticism of Bill Hannah,
but goofing off was not one of them.

(40:34):
And I was in my office working on Richie Rich one evening about
7:00 PM. It was dark out.
Their janitors were coming around cleaning in the offices
and Bill comes in and it sits inmy guest chair of my office and
starts chatting with me saying hello.
And a lot of it is like, here's an employee I haven't talked to
lately. I need to and, and, and Bill and

(40:55):
Joe always assisted. You call the Bill and Joe.
A lot of people couldn't do that.
A lot of people would call Joe Barbera, Mr. B, because it was
just a little intimidating. That seemed wrong to call him
because he who he was. But Bill was Bill, and I had
complained a number of times about the schedule, which was a
killer schedule. You were always behind, no

(41:18):
matter when you started. I was started here, Richie Rich,
and I was being paid by the show, not by the week.
I think I was the only writer there who's being paid by the
episode, not by the week, because I was doing other jobs.
I wasn't coming into the building constantly.
The other people were coming in every day and I had more freedom
to come and go. I could skip coming to the

(41:38):
office for a couple days and nobody would say I was goofing
off because it didn't change my income to not come in as long as
they had the shows on time. And they would tell me you're 3
weeks behind and I'd quickly hurry and get 4 scripts done and
they tell me you're 5 weeks behind now.
You couldn't get ahead. They keep moving the schedule so
that you were always behind because they wanted as fast as
possible. And I would remind Bill that I

(42:01):
was being paid by the show. They weren't saving money by
having me work faster. I was going to pay me a flat fee
for the whole season, no matter how many weeks it took me.
But he wanted them faster because what would happen would
be that they had these people sitting in Taiwan or in the
Philippines or in Korea, whatever animation units, and

(42:22):
they had to pay those people whether they had work or not.
So they always had to have work for them.
The worst thing in the world, asfar as Bill is concerned, was
his people on the payroll who are not working.
They have nothing to do. So if let's say Super Friends
was running behind the network, wasn't approving scripts, art
wasn't getting done, whatever itwas, they're in a crisis and

(42:43):
they go. We don't have a Super Friends
for the people in Korea to work on next Monday.
And so they'd send them a RichieRich.
Some of the weirder looking episodes came when the guys who
had learned perfection of drawing super friends were
suddenly told to draw Richie Rich.
Not every artist could make thattransition easily, but it
happened. So I was saving the money even

(43:06):
though Richie Rich was on time and schedule.
I keep getting behind because they give a Richie Rich show to
some other unit to keep it busy.So I was complaining about that.
And Bill said, look, Mark, we'vegot to, you got to play the game
here. You've got to work with our
schedules. I know you don't like it.
And I said to him, I just alwaysfeel that you always sell one
more show that you've got the people for.

(43:28):
If you've got enough people in this building to do 7 shows, you
sell 8. If you got enough to do 5 shows,
you sell 6. What would be wrong with selling
1 less show one season? And the answer, he said, was,
you know, go over to the layout department, You, you pick the
people to lay off. And you have to remember that
Bill and Joe were guys who grew up in the Depression and all

(43:51):
their constituents in the 40s and, and wherever they worked at
MGM, these were guys who grew upin the Depression.
And a lot of the comic book artists I worked with, like Jack
Kirby at that time, were guys who grew up in the Depression.
And for the people who grew up in the Depression, the worst sin
in the world was not to have a job, not to have a paycheck, not

(44:11):
to be able to bring home a paycheck every Friday or every
Monday, whatever day they paid to your family to pay for the
rent and the groceries. And Bill and Joe were very proud
of many things, and justifiably so.
But one of the things I learned they were both so proud of was
the fact that, look how many people put their kids through
college and build homes and families working for Hanna

(44:32):
Barbera. How many of those guys would not
have had a place to go or would have not have been able to do
animation? They would have.
Tex Avery might have had to be aWalmart greeter or something
like that if no animation would hire him.
But he got to be Tex Avery. And maybe he didn't love the
cartoons he was doing for HannahBarbera, but he preferred that
to not doing cartoons at all. And in Texas case, he'd had some

(44:54):
family problems, some dark things that happened to him,
tragedies. And he wanted to work.
He had been told many times by Bill and Joe, if you ever need a
job, come on over. And they've said that to lots of
people and not just people whosenames you recognize to it can
paint people and background painters, people like that.
We will have a job for you always.
We will find a place for you. And usually they could.

(45:17):
There were layoffs. There were times when they just
couldn't take anybody on becausethere's an economics to this
business. You can't spend money on people
who are not contributing to the product that pays the bills.
Nevertheless, it was preferable to sell that one more show than
to go tell, you know, name of six layout guys, we have no work

(45:38):
for you. And obviously there's a profit
motive here. Obviously, Taft was always
tagging them to sell more shows to as much as possible.
And of course, also, by selling one more show, they might have
kept somebody else out of the marketplace.
You know, stop another studio from getting launched, stop
another studio from taking work away from the next season.
Yeah, it was a tough business. Very tough, yes.

(46:01):
But it's quite a history and there's so much more.
I want to talk to you about eachone of these people you
mentioned. I think there's so many stories.
So thanks so much Mark, for taking the.
Anytime, anytime, Greg. Thanks for having me.
Thanks for listening to the fantastic world of Hannah and
Barbara. If you enjoyed this episode and
want to help me make more of them, please click subscribe and

(46:22):
tell your friends. I hope you enjoyed the fantastic
world of Hannah and Barbera withGreg Airborne.
Please join us again and Many thanks for listening.