Huckleberry Hound in "Hoo-ray for Blu-ray" with George Feltenstein

Why did it take twenty years for THE HUCKLEBERRY HOUND SHOW to be released in its entirety? How will it be even better now than it would have been back then? GEORGE FELTENSTEIN of Warner Archive reveals the challenges and triumphs of restoring and reassembling an entertainment landmark.

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, Joe

(00:31):
Barbera and the thousands of people, past and present who
have shared in their entertainment tradition.
And now your host, Greg Gerbar. Thank you, Chris Anthony,
Welcome everyone to the fantastic world of Hanna and
Barbera. I'm Greg Gerbar.
I wrote a little book called Hanna Barbera, the Recorded

(00:52):
History. And once again, we're going to
have a very good friend of the podcast and a good friend to us
all who love the classic material, the good stuff, as I
used to call it as a kid, but I still call it the good stuff.
He is the Warner Brothers Discovery Library historian.

(01:12):
Mr. George Feltenstein, welcome.Hello, Greg.
Great to be with you again, as always.
It is a banner year for a lot ofthese releases, particularly
this one. We're talking, of course, about
The Huckleberry Hound Show, the long-awaited classic.
You've made a lot of people happy.

(01:32):
I'd love to go into this whole saga with you because this is
really something that started back in the 90s really.
This is trying to right the wrongs of various owners of
Hanna Barbera after they had to sell the company and before
Turner bought it. Turner bought Hanna Barbera in

(01:55):
1992, I believe, and it was really, I think in 1967 that
Hannah and Barbera sold to theirfirst buyer.
It was December 1966. I was close.
I'm not that's only from, you know, osmosis that that I know

(02:16):
that not that I never did a historical research.
It's close. I always say it can get it
within a year, but during that time there was enormous
disregard for thinking about thelong term preservation and care
of Hanna Barbera's works. Basically they were looking at

(02:41):
older work. All if we have a 16mm picture
and if we have a 16mm track, we can make more prints.
For syndication, we're fine. No one ever anticipated home
video, no less high definition cable channels that popped up
like Cartoon Network did. Or before that USA Network,

(03:04):
which was a home for Hannah Barbera content.
You know, I have very vague memories, if at all, because the
tail end of Huckleberry Hounds initial being on TV was my
infancy. So my memory of Huckleberry
Hound starts with the second syndication round where you

(03:28):
didn't see Kellogg's and everything had been changed.
The intros and the interstitialswere gone, and then cartoons
were moved around from series toseries.
We just did. As you know, the Magilla Gorilla
Show, there was no complete headto tail negative of each half

(03:53):
hour of the Magilla Gorilla Show.
There were the Magilla Gorilla segments, the pumpkin, puss and
mush mouse segments, and the Ricochet rabbit and Drew Belong
segments. Each one of those little
segments was inventoried under that character.
And then if you're looking for the main titles and the end

(04:13):
titles, we have an inventory notation for every television
series here that says generic material.
And you have to go into those places and hope that maybe the
main titles and end titles mightbe there.
But because there was so much ownership before, it got to
Turner, who tried to make some sense out of the inventory, and

(04:38):
then here at Warner Brothers, where there was even more
attempt, more of a serious attempt to do right by this.
It really is only in the last, I'd say probably decade that it
started with things we were doing with the Warner Archive
Collection in bringing out so much of that Hanna Barbara shows

(05:00):
that weren't the top of the tier, that weren't The
Flintstones, the Jetsons, thingsthey were doing for DVD.
And when we did the Peter Potamus show, which I guess was
I'm going to say 2013, 2014, 2015, somewhere in there, we
reconstructed the original half hours with the Ideal Toys

(05:25):
mentions with the pieces that wecould find the curtain call, the
end. It was basically you're like
within a computerized inventory,you're dumpster diving.
There is a mass computerized grave in our inventory system
called HB Bits and Pieces. And in HB bits and pieces, there

(05:50):
are probably thousands of inventory entries.
Some are listed as multiple, meaning that this is box 622 and
it has 34 rolls of unidentified film or magnetic tape or quarter
inch tape or 35mm magnetic full code.

(06:11):
And someone has to go through and literally open up those
cartoons and see what's actuallyin there.
Fortunately, the work that we did in a preliminary basis for
DVD kind of opened the door of letting us know what we were in
for when we wanted to go whole hog on some of these shows.

(06:35):
Restoring Johnny Quest for Blu-ray was relatively easy
compared to what we're doing with, let's say, Huckleberry
Hound is the worst case scenario.
Jonny Quest is the best case scenario.
Why? Because the Jonny Quest episodes
were complete camera negatives, just like a live action show.

(06:57):
The titles, everything was episode 1, episode 2, exactly as
it should be. That was relatively easy.
We wanted to make sure it lookedgreat for Blu-ray.
We wanted to make sure also thatthe audio wasn't censored.
And we achieved that goal. And then the next series we

(07:18):
attempted was The Jetsons, and that also was not too
problematic. And we were able to restore the
Scotch tape and Colgate bumpers to that, which I thought was
super cool. And at one time in its earliest
beginning, Hanna Barbera was, I believe, 25% owned by Columbia

(07:43):
Pictures. And built into that was that
Columbia Pictures and their television distribution and
production division, Screen Gemswould be the distributor of
Hanna Barbera programs. And I believe that Screen Gems
continued to do that even after they sold their interest in the

(08:06):
company. The distribution remained with
them for quite some time thereafter, but it was in the
contract when there was a formaldivorce that no mention of
Screen Gems could be used by Hanna Barbera and future
distribution. That also ruined one of the

(08:27):
greatest gags in film history tome, which still hasn't been
remedied, which is Wilma Flintstone, the torch lady at
the Columbia Pictures logo at the head of the feature of The
Man Called Flintstone. If we got the opportunity to
remaster that now, we could restore that opening because we

(08:48):
received basically an OK from anexecutive at Sony that allowed
us to restore Screen Jem's role in the early part of the lives
of these programs. So we didn't have to remove
Screen Jem's names when we did Top Cat and we didn't have to

(09:09):
remove it John Jetsons. And when there's a logo
particularly, people saw this onMagilla Gorilla, the dancing
Sticks, which is I think the 1963 for logo for screen Jams
before they did the film, you know, So we can do that now if
it's there. Now, the painful thing about

(09:31):
Huckleberry Hound is I know thatthe 16mm black and white
syndication prints had the Screen Gems lady at the end, but
we do not have any film whatsoever of that.
We don't have the ability to usethat because that was not saved.
You know, Again, if it had been a complete negative, that would

(09:55):
be different. But because everything was
segmented, we found end titles for the Huckleberry Hound show,
as it was originally shown with the Kellogg's ending before Huck
was there. And instead the Kellogg's
rooster, you know, was there. And then they changed the
animation. But that black and white 35mm

(10:17):
film that we have for the end credits has no Screen Gems logo
on it. So we're not about to go to
Columbia and say, hey, can we have your logo?
You know, that's pushing it a little bit because they were
kind enough to allow us to honorwhat we had on our film
elements. But we did find for the
Huckleberry Hound show the colorcamera negative for the opening

(10:40):
titles, which we didn't think existed since the original
broadcasts were in black and white.
So I'm getting a little ahead ofmyself here.
But the point is, is that this is like an archaeology dig.
It requires an enormous amount of research, and the
documentation of what went where, how to reconstruct these

(11:05):
shows as they were broadcast, was enormous.
We have some reference documents.
We have documents that take us through seasons one through 3 of
Huckleberry Hound, as prepared by the Leo Burnett ad agency
that packaged the original syndication of the Huckleberry

(11:27):
Hound Show, and it shows us whatwent where in terms of
billboards and bridges and bumpers.
It doesn't specify anything about commercials, but we were
able to locate a lot of black and white Kellogg's commercials
with the characters in there. We weren't able to locate

(11:48):
everything and we were not able to locate every bridge and
bumper. But in order to recreate the
experience of watching 1 show asit was presented from the first
season to the fourth season in our presentation, we have 68

(12:09):
half hours that are actually usually when you're talking
about TV half hour, you're talking about 2526 minutes.
These episodes actually run 313233 minutes because of all
the things we're putting in to have bumpers, bridges,
commercials, maybe when commercials were running in a

(12:30):
longer place where they were shorter.
But we wanted this to be as fulland rich as possible and follow
the chronology of how everythingwas syndicated from the
beginning of the first season tothe end of the fourth season.
As a result, it is very important that people know that
because we wanted this to be reference.

(12:52):
These have been meticulously chaptered.
If you were to binge a full disk, you may see the same
commercial 3 or 4 times or the same intro or bumper 3 or 4
times. And that's what the skip forward
function in chaptering allows. You may want to watch those
again because I mean, these are things that I never saw because

(13:15):
it was before my time. But I can understand the people
have a binge mentality. And usually when you put a disc
in of classic television, you want to watch it from beginning
to end. And so we thought it was best to
be faithful to, if you just likewant to watch one episode,
you'll get the commercials in the places where they belong.

(13:37):
And knowing that we were workingwith not complete access to
every single thing that was everdone, we did our best to
recreate the experience for every single episode.
So we have show 1 to show 20 to show 68 across 11 discs.
And it looks remarkable. I think 1 cartoon.

(14:02):
We didn't have an original 35mm negative out of, you know,
hundreds of segments. If you really think of all of it
together, we were in pretty goodshape and we were so fortunate
that we didn't fall shorter. So at least they were very
careful about preserving the segments and they only had one

(14:25):
where there wasn't an original negative to work from.
And in the past, you know, everything was 16mm.
And then when there was the Hanna Barbera Golden Collection
releases, I believe in the earlyaughts like 2000 and four, 2005,
I had very little involvement with those because at the time I

(14:48):
was strictly theatrical catalog.I was consulted on Looney Tunes
and consulted on Tom and Jerry because of prior work I had done
with them, but on these Hanna Barbera releases wasn't really
involved in the process at all. And they did hire as a

(15:09):
consultant Earl Kress, who was missed by many friends of Hanna
Barbera because he was the torchbearer for The Legacy in a
very major way. And one of the things he did
that made me seek him out on a friend basis.
It was the amazing series of soundtrack CDs he did with

(15:31):
Rhino, the Hanna Barbera Picnic Basket.
And I keep trying to get people around here to think that that's
something that needs to be available again.
Earl worked very closely with our kids marketing team, but
there was so much more work thatneeded to be done that there
wasn't as deep a dive into the inventory as needed to be to do

(15:55):
these things right. There's also been a situation
where people thought, and I think Earl was the person who
said this, that the reason why Huckleberry Hound only had its
first 26 episodes released on DVD and not the rest of the
episodes was that the release did not sell well and no one

(16:17):
wanted to support a further release.
That is completely untrue. The reason that there wasn't
anything done further with Huckleberry Hound was huge music
clearance costs. This was before Hanna Barbera,
as you know had its own genius Hoyt Curtain writing original

(16:40):
music. So they used what we called
needle drop cues from music libraries, all of which were
licensed for free television andnon theatrical, but were not
licensed for use on home video or digital distribution.
And as a result, all of those licenses needed to be upgraded

(17:03):
both for the source music and insome cases the source music and
publishing, which sometimes theywere owned by different people.
So that was an enormous time consuming process and very
expensive. I would not be releasing these
shows if the music was altered or changed because the home

(17:26):
entertainment consumer wants everything as close to original
as possible. Music replacement has often been
a necessary evil to some television programming.
But if it's something that I'm going to be involved with, if we
can't do it the right way, we'renot going to do it.

(17:47):
And that's held up a lot of likethe Warner Brothers detective
series, for example. All are filled with songs
written by Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter and Gershwin and all
the other people whose music waspublished by Harms, Wit, Marker,
Remic, the three big music publishing companies that Warner

(18:09):
Brothers owned at one time. Well, we haven't owned the music
publishing companies in over 20 years.
But even before that, there was like a split between the studio
and the music company so that Warner Chappell Music would need
a license from Warner Brothers Pictures to use one of those

(18:29):
songs through so many films in prior years.
That's why those detective showsaren't out, because they were
using those melodies freely. And some shows like Hawaii and I
always had Connie Stevens singing, so we're still trying
to wrap our arms around that. But for this animation, Rough

(18:50):
and Ready, the first Hannah Barbera series, Huckleberry
Hound, Yogi Bear Show and Quickdraw McGraw all have
licensed music that needs to be cleared.
So everybody got together and you had one team working on the
music clearance. Then you had another team
working on the inventory to findall the film elements and the

(19:14):
audio elements. In some cases, we found film for
pieces where the audio, the magnetic audio had gone vinegar
and would not play back. The oxide would literally flake
off as we tried to do an audio capture.
And it's heartbreaking because this stuff all should have been

(19:35):
properly cared for. And I think had Hanna Barbera
had their elements cared for allthe way along the way, a major
studio would, some of that stuffmight have been better cared
for. By the time it got to Turner, it
was really an overwhelming inventory challenge.

(20:01):
So we still hadn't answered a lot of those questions as a
company. When those initial releases
happened with Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear on DVD,
subsequently as we faced improving the quality and making
these available for what we callall media, which includes

(20:24):
digital streaming, downloads, soforth and so on, as well as the
most important thing in the world which is physical media.
We all banded together and this has been a project three years
in the making just with the renewed focus to do it right.
But as you well pointed out, there is really a presidential

(20:45):
decades before, like when Earl was working on Huckleberry Hound
for DVD and 2004 and working with our people, there was so
much stuff that was never found that we have subsequently found.
I'm very proud to be bringing this to the market because the
consumers, I'm one of the consumers, I know what I want.

(21:07):
I don't want to see changed thisor change that.
I want it as it was originally made.
So I'd say we're about probably 95% there.
And the only 5% that's missing is not having every commercial,

(21:28):
not having every bumper. The fact that we have what we
have at all is remarkable. And I cannot stress enough how
exhaustive the research was on the part of my colleagues in our
preservation and restoration department.
Just spectacular work. And then once it got to the

(21:49):
colorists, they did a beautiful job bringing out the color.
They look absolutely magnificent.
And just to see the show begin with the Kellogg's rooster is a
thrill to behold in beautiful color.
And to have Kellogg's involvement, Kellogg's, as you
probably know, was very supportive of allowing some of

(22:12):
their stuff to be on the DVD. And we really appreciated that.
When we were doing The Jetsons, we went to Colgate about their
toothpaste and we went to Scotchtape.
Just is it OK if we keep these things instead?
Of course, you know, it's free advertising basically.
And there isn't much difference between the Kellogg's Cornflakes

(22:33):
box today and what it was at thebeginning of the Huckleberry
Hutch show. Looks very similar so I'm hoping
this is going to increase the sale of Kellogg's cereals.
People are going to start watching these 11 Blu-ray discs
and just want to have cereal with it.
Just makes sense. You know, if anybody listening
feels like they're buying more Kellogg's from this, you know,

(22:57):
some people have made the wonderful idea of, and it is
kind of a beautiful dream. Why don't they put these
characters back on the boxes? I thought of that too, yeah.
And when you think about it, it's like, OK, well, you'll get
the pushback of while they're not the current characters and
all that, but neither are the Flintstones really.
And the Flintstones have been onCocoa Pebbles since I believe

(23:18):
73, may have been 68. And the vitamins Flintstones
characters have been on a nationally advertised national
product in major stores longer than any other characters.
So it stands to reason that YogiBear and Huckleberry Hound, you
know it's not out of the realm of possibility.

(23:38):
Well from my understanding I believe Kellogg's is being
bought by another company. So who knows, maybe the new
owner will take interest. Sometimes when a new leadership
comes in and sometimes they seemopen to well, what can we do and
what can we have? And especially if they see these
Blu rays and say, wow, I didn't know we did this.

(23:59):
So the commercials, just the commercials and just the end
credits are the only black and white segments of this.
The rest that's. Correct.
The commercials and the end credits are black and white, and
given that the opening credits were shot in color, I have to
believe that the end credits were as well shot in color, but

(24:21):
they did not survive. We looked everywhere.
I believe the commercials were probably made in black and white
because the original airings were in black and white.
No one aired this show in color until the second round of
syndication, which was after theKellogg's era.
I could tell you that when Quickdraw McGraw moved from

(24:44):
syndication to CBS Saturday mornings, CBS was still in their
moratorium on anything being in color except for The Wizard of
Oz as a result of William S Paley being infuriated by NBCRCA
and the tricks they pulled to get their color system approved

(25:04):
by the FCC. And Paley was so angry that he
said, I'm not going to allow anycolor television on the CBS
television network. You know, for 10 years, I
believe that was the quote. And it wasn't until the 196566
season that CBS finally made thechange to start showing most of

(25:26):
their programming and prime timein color.
You know, ABC was not part of that.
So Flintstones being in color onABC, I remember really, really
young, the first time I saw a color television set was at a
neighbour's apartment. They had won a color television

(25:47):
in a raffle. And I remember seeing a
Flintstones prime time episode is probably like the great Gazoo
era, but it was a color. And that was, I think the first
time I remember seeing color television, really ever since
the original run ended in the early to mid 60s.

(26:08):
That was the end of seeing theseshows as they were originally
constructed. And we're really bringing people
back to 1958, to the very end of61.
Will the individual cartoons have their individual credits or
will they be like they were later with a quicker open?
They all have their original credits.

(26:31):
I believe the exception to that is some of the Yogi Bear
segments. I think they just have a title
credit that goes into the cartoon, but everything else has
the full credits, the full copyright.
You know, acknowledging. It's interesting because they
acknowledged the people who worked on the shows, but they

(26:53):
didn't credit Daws Butler, Don Messick except at the end of the
half hour in the end credits. And I think they especially when
it comes to Doz Butler, there would be no Huckleberry Hound or
Yogi Bear without Doz Butler. I don't think that necessarily
was a a slight so much as it wasjust business as usual because

(27:15):
yeah, absolutely. Because voice over and almost
anything was not always done. I mean, Mel Blanc was an
exception. But most of the time, especially
in a live action show when June Foray or Mel Blanc are doing
something, they're not in the credits.
So voice, I think it's a different union even.
I completely concur. And of course that has always

(27:38):
LED people to say, you know, that wasn't Mel Blanc doing
Elmer Fudd. And I don't know how Arthur Q
Bryan felt about that because his contribution is Elmer is
very substantial and people likeJune Furay is witch Hazel or B
Benedarett. She was doing it and she's read

(28:01):
Riding Hood. I mean, just so many of the
cartoons Stan Friberg and you could just go on and on and on.
People did not get credit. And I'm glad that we have those
end credits on there to at leastacknowledge who gave
specifically, especially the characters that does Butler
voiced. He was the architect of the

(28:24):
essence of the character throughthe vocal performance.
We are fortunate that voice acting is not looked down upon
today, and very famous people contribute their voices to all
sorts of animation today. And it's not considered like
being a second class citizen. It's considered very reputable

(28:47):
work that generates a very impressive paycheck.
I would assume yeah, but that's a big difference from the days
when HP was starting for sure. Yeah, except for maybe Mel Blanc
occasionally on The Merv GriffinShow or The Tonight Show.
I remember June Frey and Oz Butler being on Truth or
Consequences, but in general they were not talk show guests

(29:11):
like they might be. Well, they're not even that.
Well, they're not with us now, but you don't see a very rarely
unless the host is really into something.
Tom Kenny was on the Craig Ferguson show because he was a
fan, but it's still pretty rare.The voice acting professionals
are still kind of in a differentcategory.
And then they weren't even really talked about unless you

(29:34):
knew who they were and were fanslike us.
Well, and you'll appreciate this, my Huckleberry Hound and
friends Cole picks LP. I had two of them actually,
because the first one fell out of a cardboard sleeve onto the

(29:54):
floor of my school bus and brokeand I was beside myself and my
mom got me another one which I still have it.
It's unplayable, but the point is, on the back of that jacket
was a picture of Daws Butler anda picture of Don Messick and a

(30:15):
description of who they were. And that was very unusual.
I know in your book you talk at length about Huckleberry Hunt
for President, the Golden Record.
I got that when I was a kid, andbecause I was a little bit
strange as a child, I wanted to understand like, why aren't the
voices the same? And who are those people?

(30:37):
And is this authorized by Huckleberry Hound and Hannah
Barbera? And then there had that little
teeny weeny piece of the theme song on that album.
I was like, you know, I couldn'thave been more than two or
three. Like, how'd they get the
permission to use that? I was thinking about those
things as a toddler. That's my clue that there's some

(30:58):
kind of reincarnation because it's just what, how in the world
would I have even come to think of such a thing?
I don't know, but I did. I think a lot of people
listening probably felt that way, and there's been many
discussions on various episodes and shows I've been on about the
Golden Records and the Peter PanRecords and why they didn't use

(31:19):
voices. And I really do feel like unlike
any cartoons that ever came before because the Hanna Barbera
cartoons were in your home. They were like best friends,
close neighbors. Whereas the theatrical cartoons
and the Disney cartoons were someone you went to visit or saw
holidays and you love them and you look forward to them.

(31:40):
But these were at constants withyou.
I mean, I know there were theatricals run on TV as well,
but every day or every week, youknew what this character sounded
like. Popeye's voice varied.
Mickey Mouse's voice varied. A lot of the famous voices,
Woody Woodpecker's voice changed, so it wasn't as much of
a thing. But when you had this character,

(32:02):
that's the way they sounded. And for the first time, that
became a major piece of importance to children and
suddenly doing a record without that voice, which years before
Disney did that capital, they didn't they.
Had those capital Bugs Bunny things they got re released in
the late 60s yeah and I had no idea like how old they were or

(32:25):
what their genesis was at the time being just a little kid,
but I knew I was like why aren'tthey using the music for Warner
Brothers cartoons right. You know, why is it like the
Looney Tunes theme sideways, Youknow, and I was thinking about
things like that. Just me too, and my brother too.
When I played Bugs Bunny and Storyland for him, he's like,

(32:47):
why aren't they? What is this?
It sounds like it but it's not and I didn't understand that.
Well, that's a purchase and theydon't own it.
And the same thing with HB themesongs.
It wasn't until the television'sgreatest hits album that most of
those were on vinyl. And.
CDI completely agree. And I think I I remember I was
working at MGM Way Home Video atthe time when the Picnic Basket

(33:10):
came out. So it was before my association
with Warner Brothers and Rhino and having done so many
soundtrack albums that I produced for our joint venture
with Rhino. Once I came to Warner Brothers,
what Earl did with The Picnic Basket and I remember reading
his liner notes the very first time.

(33:31):
This is the kind of album I dreamed of as a child.
I wanted to be able to have the real soundtracks and it was as
if he was speaking from my brain.
That was exactly my thought. I'm sure it was probably your
thought too. It was what we always hoped for.

(33:52):
And I think the Cold Pick soundtracks were so unique in
actually giving you the real voice and the real stories, and
I remember they suddenly became very hard to find very quickly.
Yes, I kept like asking my mother, you know, I want to get
this Mr. Ed record and I want toget this.

(34:13):
I see the pictures on the back, but they weren't available.
The only ones I had, I had Top Cat and I had Huckleberry Hound.
That was it. I memorized top cat.
I actually did speeches in school where I did like the
maternity ward scene. I know it by heart.
Because you you didn't have, we didn't have home video, we

(34:34):
didn't have endless reruns on cable.
That was your only way to keep the experience.
It's just like the 39 minute version of The Wizard of Oz that
was on The MGM soundtrack LP. I mean, that was a way you could
re experience the movie in the middle of the year.
You waited for it to be on TV again.

(34:55):
Also hearing it as pure audio, even if it is the exact like the
Jetsons Skull Picks, which is not just a pickup but a high
fidelity pickup of two great sound episodes, Rosie the Robot
and the Date with Jet Screamer. Those are exact soundtracks.
They hold up as strong recordings and when you listen

(35:17):
to them as pure recording without the picture, you gain a
lot of appreciation for the music, for the way the voice
acting is done, the timing of everything, the sound effects.
So I still enjoy listening to just the audio of things.
Was there a question? And I'm not the only person that

(35:37):
did this, I'm sure. I used to hold my little tape
recorder up to the TV speaker sothat I could listen to sounds of
TV shows and movies, not knowingwhat the future would hold.
It's a wonderful, wonderful thing.
But that all the more underscores my enthusiasm for

(35:57):
having been able to work with somany people here to make what I,
I hope our many fans dreams cometrue.
Having Huckleberry Hound becausereally he's the first big Hanna
Barbera star. And I know Yogi became a star on
Huck show and some people say heclips them.

(36:19):
For me, Huck was always #1. It is a a landmark television
history item, too, because Huckleberry Hound was the first
cartoon character to address theaudience as the host, Gerald Mac
Boing. Boing sort of was the host, but
it was the announcer talking sort of like the Pink Panther,

(36:40):
Huck and his friends. And in the commercials, I think
that was part of the magnetism of those early shows.
In the commercials and all, they're looking at you talking
to you. It was the first animated series
to win an Emmy, and it was a sophisticated kind of comedy,
gentler than Jay Ward. But what opened the door for

(37:01):
getting Rocky and his friends on?
Because at the time, before there was the Jay Ward stuff,
Huckleberry Hound was like Beanie and Cecil.
Praised by the literati as beingbeautifully written, aimed at
adults and children. Played in bar on the Huckleberry
Hound for President album. In the bar watching the show.

(37:23):
He was a mascot on college campuses.
They named an island after him. I mean, Huckleberry Hound was,
and it's forgotten now, but it'simportant to know what a
groundbreaking thing this was. Also, it was the first package
cartoon made for television because before that it was a
cluster of cartoons. You know, Crusader Rabbit or

(37:46):
whatever. What existed before was added to
shows, but it wasn't necessarilypackaged as a show.
This was 3 cartoons plus interstitials with a beginning,
a middle and an end and that hadnever really been done.
And I'm guessing, by the way I've been seeing it on ME TV
tunes is it was so experimental they weren't quite sure how to

(38:09):
order the segments every week because they rotate them.
Right. And The thing is, with the
repetition, people have to remember that it wasn't like
what happened like with first run syndication in the 80s where
you'd have a new episode every day for 12 weeks and 60

(38:29):
episodes. Huckabay Hound, My memory of it
was once a week, Thursday nights, you know, the next night
would be Adventures of Superman,which was also sponsored by
Kellogg's. And, you know, I've gone back
into my TV Guide collection, which I have a very substantial

(38:49):
New York metropolitan area TV Guide collection to supplement
when I started saving them myself.
So I have the years that precedeme, and I see the way it was
scheduled. You know, it was an event you'd
have to wake a whole week to seeanother Huckleberry Hound
cartoon. And I also think the repetition

(39:11):
of certain bumpers and sequencesand commercials were all part of
children learning things and repeating them and memorizing
them and memorizing the songs. And what's kind of cool is some
of the commercials we have are, you know, joining the Huck Hound

(39:32):
Club and sending in your box topand getting a little toy or
stamp kit or whatever, you know,But at the same time, another
one of the commercials we have has a spoof of the What's My
line? Sign in, please.
I mean, that is the indication that they were looking to make

(39:54):
adults laugh, not just kids. Kids weren't watching What's My
Line at that time. Young children certainly
weren't. They weren't up at 10:30 on a
Sunday night. But the parents that were
watching with the kids this way,it was entertainment that could
be for the whole family. It was like The Muppet Show in

(40:15):
the 70s. It was on once a week.
You couldn't wait to see it, andThe Muppets had an edge to it.
But it was always gentle. But it was always very funny and
you really grew to love those characters for sure.
And I mean, like, that was my first favorite thing as a young
child, The Huckleberry Hound show.

(40:38):
And because we saw Huckleberry Hound in black and white, I
didn't realize that my stuffed Huckleberry Hound, which was
improperly colored red by Knickerbocker toys, I didn't
know there was anything wrong with that because I didn't
necessarily associate the huckleberry and what a

(40:58):
huckleberry was. I didn't know that when I was
two or three, you know, but I knew that my Huckleberry Hound
stuffed animal was like what I saw on television with the
little hat and everything like that.
And I still have them. They are falling apart.
My father put masking tape on the feet in the mid 60s and it's

(41:20):
still there. I mean, those are collectibles
from my childhood. They will not go away.
But before I became, you know, enmeshed in Classic Cinema or
even classic theatrical animation, certainly my first
real passion for entertainment was Huckleberry Hound and the
world of Hanna Barbera, The Flintstones and Quick Draw

(41:44):
Everything. All those early shows and
Magilla. I mean, as Hanna Barbera evolved
in later years into the more action oriented cartoons and the
influence of Alex Toth and thosecartoons didn't interest me as
much. And then, of course, I started
getting more involved in watching Casablanca, you know?

(42:08):
It also goes with a generationalthing because you get to a
certain age where you're watching or doing other things.
In my case, it didn't change because I have the same records
and kept collecting the records and watch the shows.
But Hanna Barbera had such a long history that each
generation holds a certain groupof cartoons to its heart.
But it really started with this series.

(42:30):
One of the things I noticed I'm seeing, one of the interstitials
was Pixie and Dixie were fencingwith Jinx and that's the front
cover of the Coal Picks album. And I always wondered, I don't
remember that happening on the show.
And there it is. They adapted the art for the
album cover. That was very exciting to me.
And when this work we started onHuck was beginning, there was

(42:55):
number thought that oh, there's going to be a 24 hour cartoon
channel that's just filled with great television and theatrical
animation from the 30s up through the 80s.
It makes me so happy that our company entered into a joint
venture with Live O Broadcastingto make me TV tunes happen.

(43:19):
The quality obviously of what wehave on Blu-ray.
It's a very different experienceand owning it as one.
I mean, if something like this had come out, you know, on a
laserdisc or something 25 years ago and I had nothing to do with
it, I would have been the first person to buy it.
I think there are a lot of people who are very excited

(43:41):
about this. I'm feeling it.
I'm seeing it in the notes we get for social media.
You know, I read through all these various forums and I
really like to know what the people think because I think
that will always keep me effective in my job by knowing
what people want and being able to balance that out by what's

(44:01):
going to be profitable for the company.
But there's there's one or two people that have been pleading
for decades for the rest of Huckleberry Hound to be
released. And I'm sure they are the nicest
people in the world because theynever ever said any.
You know, people can get really nasty on the Internet, you may

(44:22):
have noticed. I might have.
Yeah, these. People only said the nicest
things and I saw their responsesonce it was announced, and it
just was so fulfilling. And I'm particularly excited for
the Deep fans, especially you, my friend, to actually see this

(44:42):
in their hands and watch the shows because so much living
care has gone into this. And to have it all really as a
almost like a Hanna Barbera encyclopedia of their origin
story. It's a tremendous chapter in the
history of that company. We we want to emphasize, please

(45:03):
send that message to finance. They like if something makes
money please pre-order it or buyit.
What within a week or two? Just like a movie, because if
you wait too long it falls off their radar, correct?
Yes, absolutely. And the more successful this is,

(45:24):
it will pave the way for more projects of this nature that are
comprehensive and put together with such love and care.
There is big new stuff coming. I mean, you're working on it as
we. Speak right?
Oh yeah. And I always have to, you know,
beg and plead to get my budgets approved.

(45:46):
I just got 47 features approved for restoration and remastering,
but I've also put in my animation and television
requests for next year and I'm waiting to see if they will get
greenlit because there's so muchwe need to bring out to the
people. And that's been my life's work

(46:08):
and I'm excited at the prospectsof what's to come.
I wanted to finish Huckleberry Hound on DVD when we started the
Warner Archive in 2009, and whenI found out what the music costs
were, it was just impossible. But thankfully everybody got
together and said we need to prioritize these things, we need

(46:30):
to get them off the shelf and into people's homes, and that
has happened. Well, Warner is lucky to have
you, and we're even luckier thatWarner has you.
George, thank you so much for all you do.
And we'll all be watching Huck and thinking of you and thinking
of those days and eating our corn flakes, our sugar frosted

(46:51):
cocoa Krispies. You know, it tastes like a
chocolate milkshake, only crunchy.
Thank you very, very much, George, for joining us again.
Oh, my pleasure. And all of you listening, thank
you once again. And until next time, bye bye.
We hope you enjoyed the fantastic world of Hannah and
Barbera with Greg Airborne. Please join us again and Many

(47:12):
thanks for listening.