September 26, 2025 • 50 mins
The inside story of how Hanna-Barbera's classic cartoon, Touché Turtle and Dum-Dum, was curated and restored for Blu is shared Warner Brothers/Discovery Library Historian GEORGE FELTENSTEIN, along with updates on releases in progress from the legendary productions of Hanna-Barbera.
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Episode Transcript
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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,
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Joe, Barbera and the thousands of people, past and present who
have shared in their entertainment tradition.
And now your host, Greg Airbar. Thank you, Chris Anthony.
Welcome to the fantastic world of Hannah and Barbera.
This is Greg Airbar, author of Hannah Barbera, The Recorded
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History. And we are welcoming back the
wonderful George Feltenstein. Tell me your title again because
I want to make sure. My title currently is Warner
Brothers Discovery Library Historian.
But to us, he is a gift giver that keeps on giving and we have
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such cool stuff to talk about. This has been a banner year for
new releases from Warner Archive, especially for us who
have been craving. And before we begin, let's go
over the golden rules of physical media.
Be it DVD, Blu-ray or CD. If you want this stuff to keep
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on coming, it has to convince the front office, as we say, to
know that it's selling and they only look at pre-orders as soon
as you can pre-order and the first couple of weeks of sales,
just like with films and theaters, if you wait, and of
course you know, everybody's gotbudgets, if you wait for sale
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prices, that's probably not going to have an impact, but you
have no idea how much you matterto further sales.
That can't be underscored enough.
And I really appreciate your saying that.
I mean, as we record this, we'rein a golden position with the
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Tom and Jerry Golden Era anthology, which we just
announced and which will be arriving December 2nd.
This is something that's going to be really, really popular
based on 85 years of those two characters being at the
forefront globally of animation fans of all ages.
But the fact that they're all together and that they're uncut,
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this is a big, big thing for us.It's been in the top 10 on
Amazon site, which represents a great deal of total sales.
It hit #1 two or three times in the last few days.
So that is immediately somethingthat I can go to management with
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and say, look, people are buyingthis, there's interest.
But yes, absolutely the initial performance dictates what will
be greenlit to follow. And in defense of the front
office, they have to report to people and they have to say the
same thing. Look at how this performed.
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This is why we want to do this, because they're going to their
superiors and they're saying, well, why do we want to do this?
Well, let me show you what George showed me.
Here are the results. So honestly, it really does
matter. The other thing is we want to
just talk a little bit about, you know, sometimes there are
comments about I they move theirdates.
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Sometimes it's technical, but sometimes when you get a
shipping date, you know, you seetrucks on the highways, they've
got Huckleberry Hound in them, you know they're trying to get
things to where they want to go,but there are all kinds of
complications that arise. Be assured that we want to get
them to you. Priority number one, sometimes
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it falls out of our control and that's really, really
frustrating. Can you offer some retail
options? You know, of course, as Amazon.
Can you order online through Barnes and Noble and Target and
Walmart too you? Can order from Barnes and Noble.
Most of our stuff shows up on walmart.com.
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I can't say 100% of it does, andthat's out of our control.
Of course, we offer everything to everyone.
The one place I can send people to and guarantee that their
order will process as soon as possible is Movie Zing MOVIEZYN,
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g.com. Moviezing.com is the retail
storefront of our manufacturing and distribution partner, Allied
Vaughn Entertainment. People are really starting to
learn about movies saying and how it's very dependable as a
company to getting product to the consumer quickly.
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There are also many other onlinecompanies like
moviesunlimited.com, deepdiscount.com.
Our stuff is on all of those sites.
And I urge people, if you know, if they're concerned about not
getting their titles on time, that they look around at the
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various options. One of the big problems that the
industry is facing right now, and this is not just Warner
Brothers, this is everybody, There is only one manufacturing
plant for 4K discs, Blu-ray discs and DVD discs in all of
North America. One plant.
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And that plant is in Mexico. There is no plant in the
continental United States. The ones that were operative
shut down. So it all comes into this
bottleneck of this one facility,of this one company and all the
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studios use this one company andthe small companies as well.
So it does make things very, very difficult.
My understanding, I don't have direct communications with the
plant and the, you know, we haveoperations divisions that take
care of that. But my understanding is that
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this plant is very cognizant of their responsibility and they're
doing the best they can despite all of these doom and gloom
rumors. People who want clicks on
YouTube, you know, physical media is dying and everything.
I think we're actually in a renaissance period because not
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only are diehard film fans and television fans wanting to own
physical media, but the generation that grew up with
streaming services as what they thought was the only option are
suddenly discovering, hey, you can buy a Blu-ray player for
very little money and have better quality and not have to
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worry if your Internet is down. Not have to worry.
There's too many people using the Internet not having to worry
about files being incredibly compressed to a tiny size.
For some people, it's fine, Theylike the convenience, but you're
not going to have the selection and more importantly, you won't
get the quality and to hold something tactile in your hand.
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Especially when I look at our Huckleberry Hound set, you know,
I was very insistent that the packaging be sturdy.
I didn't want it to be one of these big plastic honking cases
where you open it up and the discs fall out on the floor.
A Warner Archive release will not have that kind of packaging.
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And I I would rather we make a little more investment in the
sturdiness of the packaging thatequals the work we put into
making our masters look as good as they can.
So we want to deliver the best consumer experience and we're
grateful to be in that position.You know, one of the things that
also has become a habit of content watchers, myself
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included. But I think, like you said,
generations that grew up with streaming is depending on the
streaming service, you want to see all the episodes, especially
if you get hooked on a show, youwant to see all the episodes
almost at once or at least within a certain amount of time
because she's like, Oh my gosh, I can't wait to see what happens
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next. And actually, I used to do this
with certain TV series. I would wait the season came out
on DVD instead of waiting week to week because I just could not
enjoy it as much. I got so used to that.
And when you get an entire series, you have the ability to
binge exact. So there's another thing to
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enjoy about that. Huckleberry Hound is doing well.
I would assume Huckleberry. Hound is exploding and I, I
can't tell you how gratifying itis after basically close to
three years of work putting thattogether.
And so many people within our organization worked so hard to
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make that happen. All the different groups, the
preservation team, the masteringteam, the colorist set, Warner
Brothers Motion Picture Imaging,the audio department, and
archival mastering as they're called.
But they basically try to find the best audio source.
And then to put all that together and make sure that we
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were as close to what documentation we had in order to
get everything there as a reference anthology.
And we're really, really thrilled with the very positive
response we've gotten for the set.
And hopefully that will bode well for more of the characters
that people want to see in theiroriginal form.
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Can we assure that a lot of long-awaited and favorite titles
are in the hopper? Most definitely.
See, that's nice. So as I've always said, never
say never when it comes to thesethings.
Well, and The thing is, you haveto be very patient, and that's
been very frustrating for me. When we started Warner Archive,
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I was looking at all of the animated programming and
television programming and of course films that had never been
given a DVD. And with Huckleberry Hound, you
had season one that was releasedon DVD, albeit without the theme
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song. I will never understand that.
And the bumpers and bridges and,you know, doing it the right
way. And I immediately requested
season 2 and three and four for DVD release.
And this is 1415 years ago. And then I was told about all
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the clearance issues that had tobe addressed with the music
because as we've probably discussed you and I on your
podcast before, Hanna Barbera had their own music department.
They were using library license cues and all of those had to be
re cleared and paid for because they were only licensed for free
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television and non theatrical. The cost of music clearance is
enormous and we had to do this the right way.
And we still come across that ona lot of the early HP stuff.
We haven't yet opened the door to explore what would be
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involved with getting rough and ready cleared, but it would be
the same situation. The fact that it was produced in
16mm is not as frightening because we can make things look
better than we could even four or five years ago.
You can't change the diminished quality of a film element that
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is half the size, but you can make things better than we could
just a couple of years ago. So I can be clear in saying we
would like to do that series. We haven't even begun to explore
it because there are others of more popularity and importance.
I think everything is important,but specifically we want to
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attack the big guns 1st and thensee what follows.
What I find particularly interesting is that we did
release on DVD a myriad of HannaBarbera shows that had been
neglected and forgotten about initially, using masters that
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had been created in the mid 90s at the very end of Turner
Broadcasting's ownership of Hanna Barbera, before Time
Warner bought Turner Broadcasting.
So around 19951996 they had created new masters from
interpositives on several good shows.
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So we did put a lot of those out.
But then we moved into another phase where we were remastering
for DVD release and the source masters were high definition,
but they weren't cleaned and given the color correction, we
didn't have the budget for it. So they weren't given that kind
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of, you know, pristine perfection, which we now can do
for what we're releasing on Blu-ray because fortunately our
budgets have been increased so that we can address this higher
end market. It's also wonderful that it's
now not just that you have to buy a disc.
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The fact that Me TV Tunes is a thriving place where people can
watch cartoons on television just like we did when we were
growing up. It's wonderful and it's a joint
venture between our company and why go broadcasting.
So the fact that Me TV Tunes is so successful, I think that
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network and their programming isa wonderful advertisement for
people who want to own it to go and buy it.
So I don't look at it is anything that takes away from
what we're doing. It's additive, it's promotional.
And you know, for people who can't afford to buy these
things, at least they can get tosee them.
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They don't need cable or satellite or whatever.
You can get it over the air. So their success and the folks
who run that Channel, from what I understand, are as passionate
about these wonderful classic animated works as you and I are.
They're one of us, one of us. Google Gobble, You know, it's a
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wonderful thing. The cartoons are also streaming
on To Be, which is a free advertising service.
You've choices of where you can go and watch these things, which
people did not have until very, very recently.
And to put something together ina wonderful package where it's
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comprehensive and the best possible quality, that's the
goal. But having these alternative
methods just spreads the word. And I think it's it's really a
great time for those of us who are passionate about this kind
of historic filmmaking. Because that's the way I look at
it. I don't look at it as making
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cartoons. It's filmmaking.
They made individual films. They may have been shown on a
television screen. The work that went into
producing an episode of The Flintstones is just as important
as the work that went into producing an episode of The Dick
Van Dyke Show or I Love Lucy. This is part of our heritage and
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it's an honor to be in the position to help further the
availability of all of these great works.
The fact is that this wonderful,wonderful work, this world that
this company and group of peopleput together is out there again
for fans to see, for new audiences to discover.
I love seeing comments about. I had no idea this show was even
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made. It's really good.
Or I had no idea how sophisticated and funny the
Huckleberry Hounds and the Yogi Bears were because they weren't
around as much. That's a major thing to someone
like me who knows that, but it isn't that.
There is evidence. So it's all there for people to
enjoy. And in recent decades, if you're
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speaking specifically about the Hannah Barbera cartoons, they
were not given proper attention and care in the television
world. World, really, until me TV tunes
came along. Suddenly there was someone who
said, wait, this is not babysitter pablum to keep the
kids quiet. No, they're actually perfectly
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fine for kids. But they also thought about the
adults who were watching characters like Pixie and Dixie
and Mr. Jinx. They're really, really funny and
very much a product of that late50s, early 60s sensibility.
They referenced the time in which they were made.
That's what I find so refreshingabout them because as and I'd
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like your opinion on this. My belief is that as HB
continued into the 60s, they lost a little bit of that adult
edge in their humor. And I'm, when I say adult, I
mean not intended for little kids, but something adults could
enjoy as well. It's not to say the writers
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weren't smart, they were, but they kind of, I felt moved
towards a more childlike audience as opposed to like
adults and kids. Do you agree with that?
Oh, well, yeah. And one of the things that I
like to point out to people about Hanna Barbera in the late
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60s and then on to the 70s and 80s is that they were supplying
material for different things. And when they moved into
Saturday morning, their audiences were children.
And they were contending not only with networks and standards
and practices, but also sponsorsand then the rise of the
pressure groups. And so they had to figure out
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ways to make these like superheroes.
There was a big controversy about shows like Space Ghost,
Shazan and things like that. And scooby-doo actually brought
Batman and Robin to the point where they were convincing these
groups we could make these acceptable, have a lot of
action, but not have the degree of violence.
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And that's why we had super friends.
So Hanna Barbera, their artists and writers were always trying
to get the best stuff on the airunder excruciating
circumstances. Time, money, and everybody
looking at them. John Semper Junior, the
wonderful writer, was on the podcast, and I could identify
with him because I went through the same thing.
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He said, I know when I went intoa meeting with these folks that
the joke I love the most was going to be the one they zeroed
in on. He said I would sit there and
like, no, I love this joke. And it wasn't that the joke was
necessarily offensive. It's just that they may not have
gotten it or they didn't think. It worked or whatever, so a lot
of stuff never made it in because it went through so many
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hands. So I admire Hannah Barbera in
the later years for what they did get on the air.
Because if you look at the DaffyDucks of the later period, or
you know, who'd Klute and the Blue Racer that the Patty
Freeling did when they started to be under the same
restrictions, Hanna Barbera always seemed to be able to And
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filmation also, they were able to figure out ways too.
It's remarkable how entertaining.
And even if they're weird, like Yogi Space Race is insane, but I
watch it to be entertained by how nuts it is because you know,
it was like, put this in here, Joe, put that in here, Joe throw
disco into it. It's like, what am I looking at?
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But to me, that's part of the fun.
You know what I mean? Absolutely, and I'm glad you
brought up Hoot Clute. You know, it's that if you were
lucky enough to be in a boutiquein which some of these studios
were, the Patty Freling was whenThe Mirage Company and United
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Artists were funding them and they were making, you know, the
luxury of a cartoon every month,every two months.
And Chuck Jones was always a boutique.
He could do specials and a couple of features and stuff,
but he was in the unique position.
But the companies that had to get content out and had to
support thousands of people, I just look at the Hanna Barbera
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stuff and I marvel at how well and how they're still very
entertaining and how many peopleare extremely attached to the
ones they grew up with. Without question.
I mean, and if you think about it, the fact that people are
watching, I think a lot of people are watching the
Huckleberry Hound show as it wasoriginally conceived and
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constructed for the first time. Unless you're of a certain age
because the original shows vanished from the air.
I think sometimes you could tellme probably better than I would
know. I'm assuming sometime around
196465 they were gone. Yeah, and then they were spotty
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in the 70s once they'd start popping on a local station, but
almost always in a mix with other cartoons and completely at
random. Mcgilligorilla and Peter Potamus
individual cartoons just re emerged in like 197778 but they
were randomly distributed. So you're right.
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Being able to see these in the context, especially the
interstitials were Huck and the characters are together and
they're, you know, introducing the cartoons except for Gerald
Mcboing Boing and he didn't speak except in sound effects.
The announcer did the introducing.
Huck was the first cartoon character to really host a show,
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so that's kind of monumental too.
Absolutely. And that underscores what I
guess three years later or two years later, Warner Brothers did
with ABC and the Bugs Bunny Show.
That's true. That's absolutely true, and
because the Bugs Bunny show and some of those interstitials kept
getting shown and the hucks werenot, Huck kind of got pushed to
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the side. The gags in them are super funny
and highly rewatchable. I didn't realize for sure that
rough and readies were all done on 16.
Yep. All done on 16.
But you know, it makes my head spin actually to think how
quickly they went from getting pink slipped by MGM to having
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their own studio being up and running and you don't look it
rough and ready and say, oh, this is slack Dash put together
work for a quick buck. It's quality.
Well, I sometimes draw parallelsand I do this in the book
between Disney and Hannah Barbella.
Not line for line and putting one next to the other.
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But business wise in the 30s it was a depression and a lot of
really good artists from all over the world needed work and
many of them went to California to bring their portfolios to
Disney and that's why they had such incredible people.
It was a goldmine of talent, especially for the 1st 5
features. Hanna Barbera benefited from the
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fact that animation shorts were starting to dry up and that
Disney had just experienced a disappointment in the box office
was Sleeping Beauty. I mean, that's where you want
Takamoto worked on and a lot of those things in Willie Ito
worked on a lot of the 50s ones.Charles Nichols who became a
director there, right? And they went to Hanna Barbera.
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They really benefited. Then they created the foundation
with the crown jewels. With Disney it was Pinocchio,
Snow White, Fantasia, Bambi and Dumbo.
With Hanna Barbera, it was Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear,
Quick Draw, and then The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Top
Cat, Johnny Quest. So they had the crown jewels
too. And those are the foundation
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they built on. And that's perfectly great
because now, now we have access to most of them and God willing,
more of them. We shall see.
But Speaking of 16 and yes, 5. I was about to make that
connection because we were setting up.
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Yeah, we were. The next topic of discussion so
it there couldn't be a better Segway.
Well, touché away. Tell us about that.
Well I have a dim memory as a toddler of new Hanna Barbera
shows popping up on WPX channel 11 in the early more not early
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morning, the mid morning hours. And so this is before I, I was
in kindergarten, but I was a very strange kid.
And I was already aware of like,you know, I was fascinated by
like, I didn't know the word syndication, but you know, how
shows were on certain channels and I wanted to learn all about
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that. So it's kind of my clue that
maybe there is something about, you know, souls continuing or
something. I mean, well, how does a toddler
know or care? But I did, and I remember Touché
Turtle, Libby the Lion, Wally Gator suddenly being on WPIX,
and I guess that was late 1962. And I love those cartoons.
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They just were a continuation ofwhat I had loved about Yogi and
Huckleberry Hound and Quito McGraw and all the other Hanna
Barbera syndicated shows, not the network shows because of my
age, you know, I missed a lot ofthose early Flintstones, and I
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only saw a top cat on Saturday morning reruns years later.
But, you know, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Quickdro
McGraw, and then these three newcharacters, which were called, I
believe, the Hanna Barbera new cartoon shows or something like
that. There was a marketing name for
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them, right? It was a business.
They packaged these things for Syndicate vacation companies.
And like, there was a thing called Captain Inventory, which
was all superhero shows. And as far as I know, I've never
saw anything that was listed as the new Hanna Barbera cartoon
show. And when I was growing up, it
was the same thing. They were either inserted among,
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you know, cartoon carnival, cartoon Playhouse.
They were shown in the hosted kid shows.
And when a station had time after, like an Abbott and
Costello movie, they'd toss one.And you know, Channel 7 in
Miami, WCKT at the time, they would show one of these cartoons
when a movie ended early. And then when they were running
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out of time, they'd turn it off.And they had that lippy the
line. I'll never forget it with the
evil violin man of Melbourne. Yeah.
And that's a great cartoon. And we never saw how it ended.
And I remember my dad saying that's a pretty good story.
I wonder what happens and it so it was at the whim and at the
time. 5 minute cartoons stationslove them.
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That's why they took all the total televisions, they took the
Jay Wards, they had the Popeyes and then the King feature ones
out of the inkwell. At the time there were a great
length to put together and HannaBarbera made 52 of each.
I mean, that's a load of. It is, it is.
And so when it came to these cartoons, we wanted to release
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all three from this grouping, the syndication grouping on DVD,
through an archive. I would say probably less than
10 years ago. It was late in the game.
I had been hesitant about these because the film elements were a
mess and we couldn't remaster. The existing masters on Lippy
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the Lion and Wally Gator weren'ttoo bad, but the existing
masters on Touché Turtle were horrible and I just couldn't
justify releasing that with our name on it, even though our
quality standards were admittedly not the perfectionist
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standards we have now. You need money to have those
standards and the business had not grown to where it is now.
So we skipped over to shave, we released Lippy, we released
Wally Gator. They did nicely.
They didn't look great, but at least we were getting them out
there to the people, and that was very important.
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And with this new initiative to resurrect as much of the Hanna
Barbera library as we can, therewere plans afoot to really
tackle all three series. And the reason why Touché Turtle
is coming out first is because there was no DVDI find it really
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interesting based on input we get.
There are some people that are obsessed with Hanna Barbera
programming that never was released on DVD.
And the ones that weren't released on DVD with rare
exception like a Rough and Readywhere there's a music issue and
so forth and so on. Quick Draw McGraw, same thing.
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It was really the later cartoonsthat some of those haven't
gotten released yet or they werethese large 90 minute shows that
some of the content within the show was tied into a third party
character license. And so to try to reconstruct
those would be legally impossible or close to
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impossible. So Touché Turtles absence of not
being available at all was the reason why we did this first.
And Wally Gator and Lippy the Lion will follow at some point
fairly soon. But I wanted touché to kind of
have his own, you know, his own stage for release.
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And I think of those three, theywere all good shows.
They were all good characters, but I think the one people have
the most vivid memory of, because he was very distinctive,
is touché Turtle. More than Lippy the Lion and
Hardy RR or Wally Gator. Not dramatically more, but just
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a little bit more beloved, I think.
And I think some of that has to do with the fact that Bill
Thompson, the voice of Droopy, was the voice behind Touché and
he was a wonderful voice artist.Yeah, and that's part of the
appeal. I should have mentioned earlier,
too, that some local stations might have said Wally Gator and
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his friends or touché Turtle andhis friends, but I think that
was probably the station's option in the case.
Yeah, in the case of Touché Turtle, that is a goldmine of
voice acting by two actors that you didn't always hear doing
multiple voices unless you were,unless you go to old time radio
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and hear both Alan Reed and BillThompson doing a tremendous
amount of voices. Bill Thompson was not only
droopy, but he was for Disney was the White Rabbit and Ranger
Woodlore and King Hubert in The Sleeping Beauty and several Dogs
and Lady and Shrimp. So he he really was a fixture in
Hollywood voiceovers, but didn'tdo a whole lot of TV.
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So not only do you hear him do touché, but he also plays other
character along with Don Messickand Mel Blanc and Janet Waldo
and people like that. But you're hearing Bill Thompson
and how many voices he can do. And then Alan Reed is dumb dumb
and a lot of people I would think wouldn't have necessarily
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realized he was dumb dumb. And he's doing his life with
Luigi voice and his Frederick voice.
And he was very versatile as well.
So Alan Reed and 52 cartoons doing all these voices, just the
audio is gold. Yeah, absolutely.
And I I remember as a kid thinking Dum Dum sounded a lot
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like Fred Flintstone. You did see I catch it at first.
It took me a little while. Because, you know, there would
be sometimes where like Fred would get hit over the head or
something and go to go, you know, and it sounded like dum
dum. I remember, you know, you know,
because I could read at a very young age, so I could read the
credits and so forth and so on. So I knew was the same person
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after a while. But I loved all three of these
cartoons and the way they were presented in the New York area.
Initially they were on differentdays and they were not mixed
together at all. But I wondered why there wasn't
like a main theme song and the structure that had been put on
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Huck and Yogi and Quick Draw. But this is different, you know,
and I, I found that interesting.And my poor parents, I was
always asking them questions about these things and they were
civilians. They didn't know anything about
it. You know, my father tried to
solve the problem when I was a little older by bringing home a
copy of Weekly Variety from the Grand Central Newsstand.
(35:03):
Say, George, I think you might like reading this.
And of course, I've been addicted to trade publications
ever since. These cartoons are so
entertaining. And because they're only 5
minutes long, they just wet the pallet and you can watch all of
them or you can watch one of them.
It's going to be tremendously entertaining.
(35:23):
I like the fact that they have so much packed into a 5 minute.
Hanna Barbera really knew how towork a format.
They would do fives, they would do 6 or sevens, they would do 11
or 12 minutes and then they had the 30 minutes.
And with scooby-doo movies, theyhad the fill like 52 minutes.
And it's so cool to look at these 5 minutes and look at how
(35:45):
the stories go. It really is an art form to
structure stories to work in that format.
Plus everyone one of them had running gimmicks like touché had
the phone in his shell and the trusty Soward.
And I can't say sword without saying Soward.
Of course not. There was a lot of fun gags, a
(36:07):
lot of that sophisticated humor,but done very gently so
everybody could watch them. It's so true, but again, I don't
want to misuse the word adult, but there is an adult
sensibility, meaning not condescending in the writing.
It's really meant for a broad group of audience members.
(36:32):
I would say the same thing goes and then some with a lot of what
Jay Ward and Total Television were doing.
That was very refreshing for adults as well.
Yeah, they did put just enough to make, as the parents are
taking a glance at it, to chuckle over like the Kerrwood
Derby on Bullwinkle. And they would still laugh at
(36:55):
that. Yeah, yeah, that kind of thing.
So they were very flexible and who could watch them?
There were critics at the time who remarked that these early
Hanna Barberas did not talk downthe kids.
You know, dumb, dumb was dumb dumb.
But generally the characters were not, for lack of a better
word, stupid. You know, they may be clueless,
(37:17):
but not stupid, especially to and that kind of thing.
It wasn't, as I heard as a kid, sometimes babyish.
Without question. Can I ask you this?
And this is a question that has come up with the presentation of
the touché turtle package. Originally people were wondering
why it changed. I will explain why it changed.
(37:42):
We don't have a lot of. Artwork.
In our corporate archive for a lot of the early Hanna Barbera
works, you may know that when they shut down the Hanna Barbera
studios on Cuenga, there were a lot of very unhappy people that
(38:03):
were out of the job. They had to leave the building
and along with them may likely have gone a lot of pieces of
archival artwork as well as filmelements as well as all sorts of
things. So we had that piece of art that
we initially were going to use and too many people came to me
(38:25):
and said, you know, that looks an awful like the Bemelman S
artwork from Madeleine. And I said, well, I don't think
we should even waste a moment trying to trace it back to see
if it is or it isn't. It looked very much that way to
me. And I said, that's got to go.
(38:46):
We flipped the art I think the same day as we had announced it.
However, it's still around on various retail websites because
they haven't changed the cover. There have been people who come
to me and said, no, that is whatwas designed by Hanna Barbera.
And then there were other peoplewho came to me and said, no way.
(39:07):
Can you not see that? It's exactly the same thing.
So we are incredibly respectful of the rights and copyrights and
ownership of other people. And we're not about to breach
copyright. You know, if something is, let's
say it's a film or a television series or a cartoon where the
owner neglected to renew the copyright.
(39:29):
People say it's public domain. We would never if it belongs to
someone else. We would never go near doing
anything with something that belong to someone else,
copyright renewal or not. And we would hope other people
would show us the same respect. That's a long standing Warner
Brothers rule. Unless we make a deal with the
(39:50):
owner, we have no right to use something that we know isn't
ours. And based on all the
information, as soon as it came in, I was like, we got to flip
that right away. And fortunately, our creative
director and the gentleman who does a lot of our artwork, they
(40:10):
were very quick to find a solution that we felt was in
line with a lot of our other packaging.
And that's what would be on thispackaging.
And we're very happy about that.But that's what happened.
It was just too obviously something that might have been
Frankenstein together. By someone making a joke or
whatever. That's why it's not our
(40:31):
packaging and not anything we'regoing to distribute looking like
that. Well, you know, a lot of us have
been waiting for touché. Thank you for mentioning also
that we can have Wally and Lippyand Hardy maybe in the months
ahead so to. I would say in the months ahead,
yeah. Can I ask you about some titles?
Would that be OK? Well, let's try it and I'll let
(40:54):
you know. I'm very very hesitant to talk
about things that haven't been locked down and sealed because I
got bitten and. Yeah, I understand before.
OK, I'll do a disclaimer. You know, Walt Disney did that
in his famous Epcot film. He tapped on the blueprints and
(41:15):
he said all of this is probably going to change.
You know, that's the part that folks don't realize when they
say Epcot isn't at all what WaltDisney wanted.
You know, we don't know what Epcot might have been.
And he said, I'm not promising you this.
These are our plans and our projections.
So given that, I'm going to nameone that is obscure to an awful
(41:37):
lot of people. Catanooga Cats.
Probably at the top of my list of things we need to do.
To me, that's like, why didn't that happen 20 years ago when
the initial efforts were made tobring Hanna Barbera to DVD?
Those very nice packages. The packaging was nicer than the
(42:00):
content on the discs, frankly. Because, you know, how do you
put Magilla Gorilla out without the theme song?
There were no legal issues there.
I just was, I was, I had no involvement in those releases
and I was very disappointed. I hope we're correcting those
errors, but Cat Nooke Cats was more than just, it was an hour
(42:23):
show. It wasn't 1/2 hour show.
And I think it's up there with Banana Splits as something that
people really, really want to see.
Think Banana Splits is a bit higher and Banana Splits has
been distributed in those hybrid, you know, half hour cut
(42:43):
downs and whatnot. And that it's such a massive,
overwhelming initiative that hasto be undertaken that it's been
hard to get the financial support to do that.
But I'm pushing for that. I think we'll probably get to
cat nuke cats before we get to Banana Splits, but it's our
intention to do both. The cat Nuke cats have any
(43:05):
issues with the Mike Curb music?We haven't even been able to
locate all the queue sheets to determine that.
I don't think there is any problem there in terms of
limitations on certain pieces ofmusic.
I haven't completed all of my initial legal research yet to
(43:26):
determine that, but right now we're focusing on, yeah, other
characters, other shows, but those are probably the two that
I think warrant the most furtherinvestigation and work.
How about Alice in Wonderland? That is very clearly a clearance
issue that we have yet to been able to find a way to address.
(43:51):
That's the bad news. The good news is we just
completed creating new preservation elements on the
program. The program is protected.
Once we can clear it, it'll be out there.
I have very dim memories of seeing it as a child when it was
broadcast, so I'd like to see itagain.
Oh yeah, that's a favorite. And that'll be like a brand new
(44:14):
Fred and Barney appearance to a lot of and then maybe just and I
don't want to put you on the spot too much because it's not
really fair, as we said, becauseEpcot may change.
All these things will change. But as far as like non Hanna
Barberas, Rankin Bass made a fewspecials that never saw the
light of day on either DVD or Blu-ray.
(44:38):
One of them was a mouse on the Mayflower.
One of the most important thingsthey did The Hobbit, which was
on Warner, but it wasn't a really good version of it.
I'm well aware of those. Our rank and bass ownership
begins I think mid 1974 and we went quite aggressive in getting
(45:02):
a lot of their rarities out. Not just the animated ones
either. We did things like the Last
Dinosaur and the Bermuda Depths,and so this has been kind of a
very important thing to me to liberate that library.
So in the DVD world, we got a lot of those specials out, and
(45:24):
we also got a lot of the Hanna Barbera specials out, you know,
based on famous books and stuff like that.
There are so many tributaries, there are so many nooks and
crannies to hold the melted butter, as they'd say about an
English muffin. There is just so much in that
other tier. And I don't believe we own Mouse
(45:46):
on the Mayflower. I don't believe that's ours.
I think that's in the yeah, because what happened was Rankin
Bass, I believe was purchased byTelepictures and Telepictures
was purchased by Lorimar, which we purchased in the late 80s.
So it comes to us via this very complicated chain of title and
(46:10):
so forth and so on. And there were certain things
that Rankin Bass did as works for hire that we don't have
rights to from that later point.But we really made a concerted
effort to try and highlight all the different opportunities and
get these things out there. And on the hand of Barbaric
side, we looked at a lot of those after school specials and
(46:33):
you know, putting out the last of the curlews was like a really
important thing to do. That's another one that has just
gone through preservation, whichis really, really important
because it means that not only are we taking into consideration
what elements do we have, what can we do?
Is the camera negative intact, the audio elements intact, But
(46:57):
if someone isn't looking in on those things, something could
turn vinegar and we would have aproblem.
We want to protect everything. And so it is a company wide
edict to try and protect and preserve and make available as
much as we can from this amazinglibrary.
(47:17):
Yeah, that's it's a daunting task, but one that we take very
seriously and with deep. Dedication.
We are so grateful that you're doing this.
I've said this over and over, but I'm sure everybody's
listening, is also beaming with gratitude and is very excited
about the future releases. Can you come back and talk about
(47:38):
Tom and Jerry? Because that's a big deal.
It's a huge deal and it warrantsits own conversation.
All I will say about that is that one of my colleagues made
it an essential mission to open up the doors to get everyone in
the corporation to support doingthis complete, uncut,
(48:01):
uncensored, from beginning to end of the Hanna Barbera period
at MGM. And at the beginning of 2025
when we released the Tom and Jerry Cinemascope cartoons, I
think in February, it was an impossible dream.
We didn't know we were going to do this.
A lot of people are now saying, oh, that was a cash grab.
(48:23):
And of course, the people alwayswant to have something bad to
say. You know, it's just, it's how
you get noticed on the Internet.But no, we had no idea that such
a thing would be possible. After all that we went through
as a company pulling the second golden collection that never
happened and all the nasty comments and well, everybody got
(48:45):
together and looked at this and said this is a wonderful
opportunity. The characters are celebrating a
birthday. What can we do to get everybody
on board to bless this without concern?
And it happened. And it'll be under people's
Christmas trees this year because the release date is
December 2nd. And the Warner Archive version
(49:08):
of this comes with a bonus disc and a booklet and deluxe
packaging. And that's a big deal for us
because we usually don't have that opportunity.
The new documentaries have been made.
A half made documentary that wasnever finished was finished
thirteen years later. There will be commentaries,
(49:28):
there will be some bonus cartoons.
It's just going to be Tom and Jerry fans Uber delight and
we're very excited about it. So I would love to come back to
your podcast and talk about it. Well, that would be great and
we're looking forward to that. We always look forward to
talking to you on our happy little fantastic world.
I thank you again George Feltenstein, for being with us
(49:51):
so many times to share the excitement and some of the
backstage stories of the Warner Archive releases.
Well, thank you, Greg. It's always a pleasure.
We are kindred spirits, you and I, so it's wonderful to join
forces and get the word out about Bill and Joe and the
legacy they left by. Thank you and thank you all for
(50:12):
listening. Please subscribe and like and
all those podcast Y things 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
thanks for listening.
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 Airbar. Thank you, Chris Anthony.
Welcome to the fantastic world of Hannah and Barbera.
This is Greg Airbar, author of Hannah Barbera, The Recorded
(00:51):
History. And we are welcoming back the
wonderful George Feltenstein. Tell me your title again because
I want to make sure. My title currently is Warner
Brothers Discovery Library Historian.
But to us, he is a gift giver that keeps on giving and we have
(01:12):
such cool stuff to talk about. This has been a banner year for
new releases from Warner Archive, especially for us who
have been craving. And before we begin, let's go
over the golden rules of physical media.
Be it DVD, Blu-ray or CD. If you want this stuff to keep
(01:32):
on coming, it has to convince the front office, as we say, to
know that it's selling and they only look at pre-orders as soon
as you can pre-order and the first couple of weeks of sales,
just like with films and theaters, if you wait, and of
course you know, everybody's gotbudgets, if you wait for sale
(01:54):
prices, that's probably not going to have an impact, but you
have no idea how much you matterto further sales.
That can't be underscored enough.
And I really appreciate your saying that.
I mean, as we record this, we'rein a golden position with the
(02:15):
Tom and Jerry Golden Era anthology, which we just
announced and which will be arriving December 2nd.
This is something that's going to be really, really popular
based on 85 years of those two characters being at the
forefront globally of animation fans of all ages.
But the fact that they're all together and that they're uncut,
(02:38):
this is a big, big thing for us.It's been in the top 10 on
Amazon site, which represents a great deal of total sales.
It hit #1 two or three times in the last few days.
So that is immediately somethingthat I can go to management with
(02:59):
and say, look, people are buyingthis, there's interest.
But yes, absolutely the initial performance dictates what will
be greenlit to follow. And in defense of the front
office, they have to report to people and they have to say the
same thing. Look at how this performed.
(03:20):
This is why we want to do this, because they're going to their
superiors and they're saying, well, why do we want to do this?
Well, let me show you what George showed me.
Here are the results. So honestly, it really does
matter. The other thing is we want to
just talk a little bit about, you know, sometimes there are
comments about I they move theirdates.
(03:42):
Sometimes it's technical, but sometimes when you get a
shipping date, you know, you seetrucks on the highways, they've
got Huckleberry Hound in them, you know they're trying to get
things to where they want to go,but there are all kinds of
complications that arise. Be assured that we want to get
them to you. Priority number one, sometimes
(04:03):
it falls out of our control and that's really, really
frustrating. Can you offer some retail
options? You know, of course, as Amazon.
Can you order online through Barnes and Noble and Target and
Walmart too you? Can order from Barnes and Noble.
Most of our stuff shows up on walmart.com.
(04:27):
I can't say 100% of it does, andthat's out of our control.
Of course, we offer everything to everyone.
The one place I can send people to and guarantee that their
order will process as soon as possible is Movie Zing MOVIEZYN,
(04:48):
g.com. Moviezing.com is the retail
storefront of our manufacturing and distribution partner, Allied
Vaughn Entertainment. People are really starting to
learn about movies saying and how it's very dependable as a
company to getting product to the consumer quickly.
(05:11):
There are also many other onlinecompanies like
moviesunlimited.com, deepdiscount.com.
Our stuff is on all of those sites.
And I urge people, if you know, if they're concerned about not
getting their titles on time, that they look around at the
(05:32):
various options. One of the big problems that the
industry is facing right now, and this is not just Warner
Brothers, this is everybody, There is only one manufacturing
plant for 4K discs, Blu-ray discs and DVD discs in all of
North America. One plant.
(05:53):
And that plant is in Mexico. There is no plant in the
continental United States. The ones that were operative
shut down. So it all comes into this
bottleneck of this one facility,of this one company and all the
(06:13):
studios use this one company andthe small companies as well.
So it does make things very, very difficult.
My understanding, I don't have direct communications with the
plant and the, you know, we haveoperations divisions that take
care of that. But my understanding is that
(06:33):
this plant is very cognizant of their responsibility and they're
doing the best they can despite all of these doom and gloom
rumors. People who want clicks on
YouTube, you know, physical media is dying and everything.
I think we're actually in a renaissance period because not
(06:56):
only are diehard film fans and television fans wanting to own
physical media, but the generation that grew up with
streaming services as what they thought was the only option are
suddenly discovering, hey, you can buy a Blu-ray player for
very little money and have better quality and not have to
(07:21):
worry if your Internet is down. Not have to worry.
There's too many people using the Internet not having to worry
about files being incredibly compressed to a tiny size.
For some people, it's fine, Theylike the convenience, but you're
not going to have the selection and more importantly, you won't
get the quality and to hold something tactile in your hand.
(07:43):
Especially when I look at our Huckleberry Hound set, you know,
I was very insistent that the packaging be sturdy.
I didn't want it to be one of these big plastic honking cases
where you open it up and the discs fall out on the floor.
A Warner Archive release will not have that kind of packaging.
(08:05):
And I I would rather we make a little more investment in the
sturdiness of the packaging thatequals the work we put into
making our masters look as good as they can.
So we want to deliver the best consumer experience and we're
grateful to be in that position.You know, one of the things that
also has become a habit of content watchers, myself
(08:31):
included. But I think, like you said,
generations that grew up with streaming is depending on the
streaming service, you want to see all the episodes, especially
if you get hooked on a show, youwant to see all the episodes
almost at once or at least within a certain amount of time
because she's like, Oh my gosh, I can't wait to see what happens
(08:51):
next. And actually, I used to do this
with certain TV series. I would wait the season came out
on DVD instead of waiting week to week because I just could not
enjoy it as much. I got so used to that.
And when you get an entire series, you have the ability to
binge exact. So there's another thing to
(09:13):
enjoy about that. Huckleberry Hound is doing well.
I would assume Huckleberry. Hound is exploding and I, I
can't tell you how gratifying itis after basically close to
three years of work putting thattogether.
And so many people within our organization worked so hard to
(09:36):
make that happen. All the different groups, the
preservation team, the masteringteam, the colorist set, Warner
Brothers Motion Picture Imaging,the audio department, and
archival mastering as they're called.
But they basically try to find the best audio source.
And then to put all that together and make sure that we
(09:56):
were as close to what documentation we had in order to
get everything there as a reference anthology.
And we're really, really thrilled with the very positive
response we've gotten for the set.
And hopefully that will bode well for more of the characters
that people want to see in theiroriginal form.
(10:18):
Can we assure that a lot of long-awaited and favorite titles
are in the hopper? Most definitely.
See, that's nice. So as I've always said, never
say never when it comes to thesethings.
Well, and The thing is, you haveto be very patient, and that's
been very frustrating for me. When we started Warner Archive,
(10:40):
I was looking at all of the animated programming and
television programming and of course films that had never been
given a DVD. And with Huckleberry Hound, you
had season one that was releasedon DVD, albeit without the theme
(11:01):
song. I will never understand that.
And the bumpers and bridges and,you know, doing it the right
way. And I immediately requested
season 2 and three and four for DVD release.
And this is 1415 years ago. And then I was told about all
(11:21):
the clearance issues that had tobe addressed with the music
because as we've probably discussed you and I on your
podcast before, Hanna Barbera had their own music department.
They were using library license cues and all of those had to be
re cleared and paid for because they were only licensed for free
(11:44):
television and non theatrical. The cost of music clearance is
enormous and we had to do this the right way.
And we still come across that ona lot of the early HP stuff.
We haven't yet opened the door to explore what would be
(12:04):
involved with getting rough and ready cleared, but it would be
the same situation. The fact that it was produced in
16mm is not as frightening because we can make things look
better than we could even four or five years ago.
You can't change the diminished quality of a film element that
(12:30):
is half the size, but you can make things better than we could
just a couple of years ago. So I can be clear in saying we
would like to do that series. We haven't even begun to explore
it because there are others of more popularity and importance.
I think everything is important,but specifically we want to
(12:52):
attack the big guns 1st and thensee what follows.
What I find particularly interesting is that we did
release on DVD a myriad of HannaBarbera shows that had been
neglected and forgotten about initially, using masters that
(13:14):
had been created in the mid 90s at the very end of Turner
Broadcasting's ownership of Hanna Barbera, before Time
Warner bought Turner Broadcasting.
So around 19951996 they had created new masters from
interpositives on several good shows.
(13:37):
So we did put a lot of those out.
But then we moved into another phase where we were remastering
for DVD release and the source masters were high definition,
but they weren't cleaned and given the color correction, we
didn't have the budget for it. So they weren't given that kind
(13:58):
of, you know, pristine perfection, which we now can do
for what we're releasing on Blu-ray because fortunately our
budgets have been increased so that we can address this higher
end market. It's also wonderful that it's
now not just that you have to buy a disc.
(14:19):
The fact that Me TV Tunes is a thriving place where people can
watch cartoons on television just like we did when we were
growing up. It's wonderful and it's a joint
venture between our company and why go broadcasting.
So the fact that Me TV Tunes is so successful, I think that
(14:40):
network and their programming isa wonderful advertisement for
people who want to own it to go and buy it.
So I don't look at it is anything that takes away from
what we're doing. It's additive, it's promotional.
And you know, for people who can't afford to buy these
things, at least they can get tosee them.
(15:03):
They don't need cable or satellite or whatever.
You can get it over the air. So their success and the folks
who run that Channel, from what I understand, are as passionate
about these wonderful classic animated works as you and I are.
They're one of us, one of us. Google Gobble, You know, it's a
(15:24):
wonderful thing. The cartoons are also streaming
on To Be, which is a free advertising service.
You've choices of where you can go and watch these things, which
people did not have until very, very recently.
And to put something together ina wonderful package where it's
(15:46):
comprehensive and the best possible quality, that's the
goal. But having these alternative
methods just spreads the word. And I think it's it's really a
great time for those of us who are passionate about this kind
of historic filmmaking. Because that's the way I look at
it. I don't look at it as making
(16:07):
cartoons. It's filmmaking.
They made individual films. They may have been shown on a
television screen. The work that went into
producing an episode of The Flintstones is just as important
as the work that went into producing an episode of The Dick
Van Dyke Show or I Love Lucy. This is part of our heritage and
(16:30):
it's an honor to be in the position to help further the
availability of all of these great works.
The fact is that this wonderful,wonderful work, this world that
this company and group of peopleput together is out there again
for fans to see, for new audiences to discover.
I love seeing comments about. I had no idea this show was even
(16:53):
made. It's really good.
Or I had no idea how sophisticated and funny the
Huckleberry Hounds and the Yogi Bears were because they weren't
around as much. That's a major thing to someone
like me who knows that, but it isn't that.
There is evidence. So it's all there for people to
enjoy. And in recent decades, if you're
(17:17):
speaking specifically about the Hannah Barbera cartoons, they
were not given proper attention and care in the television
world. World, really, until me TV tunes
came along. Suddenly there was someone who
said, wait, this is not babysitter pablum to keep the
kids quiet. No, they're actually perfectly
(17:41):
fine for kids. But they also thought about the
adults who were watching characters like Pixie and Dixie
and Mr. Jinx. They're really, really funny and
very much a product of that late50s, early 60s sensibility.
They referenced the time in which they were made.
That's what I find so refreshingabout them because as and I'd
(18:04):
like your opinion on this. My belief is that as HB
continued into the 60s, they lost a little bit of that adult
edge in their humor. And I'm, when I say adult, I
mean not intended for little kids, but something adults could
enjoy as well. It's not to say the writers
(18:26):
weren't smart, they were, but they kind of, I felt moved
towards a more childlike audience as opposed to like
adults and kids. Do you agree with that?
Oh, well, yeah. And one of the things that I
like to point out to people about Hanna Barbera in the late
(18:46):
60s and then on to the 70s and 80s is that they were supplying
material for different things. And when they moved into
Saturday morning, their audiences were children.
And they were contending not only with networks and standards
and practices, but also sponsorsand then the rise of the
pressure groups. And so they had to figure out
(19:09):
ways to make these like superheroes.
There was a big controversy about shows like Space Ghost,
Shazan and things like that. And scooby-doo actually brought
Batman and Robin to the point where they were convincing these
groups we could make these acceptable, have a lot of
action, but not have the degree of violence.
(19:29):
And that's why we had super friends.
So Hanna Barbera, their artists and writers were always trying
to get the best stuff on the airunder excruciating
circumstances. Time, money, and everybody
looking at them. John Semper Junior, the
wonderful writer, was on the podcast, and I could identify
with him because I went through the same thing.
(19:49):
He said, I know when I went intoa meeting with these folks that
the joke I love the most was going to be the one they zeroed
in on. He said I would sit there and
like, no, I love this joke. And it wasn't that the joke was
necessarily offensive. It's just that they may not have
gotten it or they didn't think. It worked or whatever, so a lot
of stuff never made it in because it went through so many
(20:13):
hands. So I admire Hannah Barbera in
the later years for what they did get on the air.
Because if you look at the DaffyDucks of the later period, or
you know, who'd Klute and the Blue Racer that the Patty
Freeling did when they started to be under the same
restrictions, Hanna Barbera always seemed to be able to And
(20:35):
filmation also, they were able to figure out ways too.
It's remarkable how entertaining.
And even if they're weird, like Yogi Space Race is insane, but I
watch it to be entertained by how nuts it is because you know,
it was like, put this in here, Joe, put that in here, Joe throw
disco into it. It's like, what am I looking at?
(20:55):
But to me, that's part of the fun.
You know what I mean? Absolutely, and I'm glad you
brought up Hoot Clute. You know, it's that if you were
lucky enough to be in a boutiquein which some of these studios
were, the Patty Freling was whenThe Mirage Company and United
(21:16):
Artists were funding them and they were making, you know, the
luxury of a cartoon every month,every two months.
And Chuck Jones was always a boutique.
He could do specials and a couple of features and stuff,
but he was in the unique position.
But the companies that had to get content out and had to
support thousands of people, I just look at the Hanna Barbera
(21:38):
stuff and I marvel at how well and how they're still very
entertaining and how many peopleare extremely attached to the
ones they grew up with. Without question.
I mean, and if you think about it, the fact that people are
watching, I think a lot of people are watching the
Huckleberry Hound show as it wasoriginally conceived and
(22:01):
constructed for the first time. Unless you're of a certain age
because the original shows vanished from the air.
I think sometimes you could tellme probably better than I would
know. I'm assuming sometime around
196465 they were gone. Yeah, and then they were spotty
(22:22):
in the 70s once they'd start popping on a local station, but
almost always in a mix with other cartoons and completely at
random. Mcgilligorilla and Peter Potamus
individual cartoons just re emerged in like 197778 but they
were randomly distributed. So you're right.
(22:42):
Being able to see these in the context, especially the
interstitials were Huck and the characters are together and
they're, you know, introducing the cartoons except for Gerald
Mcboing Boing and he didn't speak except in sound effects.
The announcer did the introducing.
Huck was the first cartoon character to really host a show,
(23:04):
so that's kind of monumental too.
Absolutely. And that underscores what I
guess three years later or two years later, Warner Brothers did
with ABC and the Bugs Bunny Show.
That's true. That's absolutely true, and
because the Bugs Bunny show and some of those interstitials kept
getting shown and the hucks werenot, Huck kind of got pushed to
(23:28):
the side. The gags in them are super funny
and highly rewatchable. I didn't realize for sure that
rough and readies were all done on 16.
Yep. All done on 16.
But you know, it makes my head spin actually to think how
quickly they went from getting pink slipped by MGM to having
(23:50):
their own studio being up and running and you don't look it
rough and ready and say, oh, this is slack Dash put together
work for a quick buck. It's quality.
Well, I sometimes draw parallelsand I do this in the book
between Disney and Hannah Barbella.
Not line for line and putting one next to the other.
(24:11):
But business wise in the 30s it was a depression and a lot of
really good artists from all over the world needed work and
many of them went to California to bring their portfolios to
Disney and that's why they had such incredible people.
It was a goldmine of talent, especially for the 1st 5
features. Hanna Barbera benefited from the
(24:33):
fact that animation shorts were starting to dry up and that
Disney had just experienced a disappointment in the box office
was Sleeping Beauty. I mean, that's where you want
Takamoto worked on and a lot of those things in Willie Ito
worked on a lot of the 50s ones.Charles Nichols who became a
director there, right? And they went to Hanna Barbera.
(24:55):
They really benefited. Then they created the foundation
with the crown jewels. With Disney it was Pinocchio,
Snow White, Fantasia, Bambi and Dumbo.
With Hanna Barbera, it was Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear,
Quick Draw, and then The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Top
Cat, Johnny Quest. So they had the crown jewels
too. And those are the foundation
(25:15):
they built on. And that's perfectly great
because now, now we have access to most of them and God willing,
more of them. We shall see.
But Speaking of 16 and yes, 5. I was about to make that
connection because we were setting up.
(25:37):
Yeah, we were. The next topic of discussion so
it there couldn't be a better Segway.
Well, touché away. Tell us about that.
Well I have a dim memory as a toddler of new Hanna Barbera
shows popping up on WPX channel 11 in the early more not early
(26:01):
morning, the mid morning hours. And so this is before I, I was
in kindergarten, but I was a very strange kid.
And I was already aware of like,you know, I was fascinated by
like, I didn't know the word syndication, but you know, how
shows were on certain channels and I wanted to learn all about
(26:22):
that. So it's kind of my clue that
maybe there is something about, you know, souls continuing or
something. I mean, well, how does a toddler
know or care? But I did, and I remember Touché
Turtle, Libby the Lion, Wally Gator suddenly being on WPIX,
and I guess that was late 1962. And I love those cartoons.
(26:48):
They just were a continuation ofwhat I had loved about Yogi and
Huckleberry Hound and Quito McGraw and all the other Hanna
Barbera syndicated shows, not the network shows because of my
age, you know, I missed a lot ofthose early Flintstones, and I
(27:09):
only saw a top cat on Saturday morning reruns years later.
But, you know, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Quickdro
McGraw, and then these three newcharacters, which were called, I
believe, the Hanna Barbera new cartoon shows or something like
that. There was a marketing name for
(27:30):
them, right? It was a business.
They packaged these things for Syndicate vacation companies.
And like, there was a thing called Captain Inventory, which
was all superhero shows. And as far as I know, I've never
saw anything that was listed as the new Hanna Barbera cartoon
show. And when I was growing up, it
was the same thing. They were either inserted among,
(27:52):
you know, cartoon carnival, cartoon Playhouse.
They were shown in the hosted kid shows.
And when a station had time after, like an Abbott and
Costello movie, they'd toss one.And you know, Channel 7 in
Miami, WCKT at the time, they would show one of these cartoons
when a movie ended early. And then when they were running
(28:14):
out of time, they'd turn it off.And they had that lippy the
line. I'll never forget it with the
evil violin man of Melbourne. Yeah.
And that's a great cartoon. And we never saw how it ended.
And I remember my dad saying that's a pretty good story.
I wonder what happens and it so it was at the whim and at the
time. 5 minute cartoons stationslove them.
(28:36):
That's why they took all the total televisions, they took the
Jay Wards, they had the Popeyes and then the King feature ones
out of the inkwell. At the time there were a great
length to put together and HannaBarbera made 52 of each.
I mean, that's a load of. It is, it is.
And so when it came to these cartoons, we wanted to release
(29:01):
all three from this grouping, the syndication grouping on DVD,
through an archive. I would say probably less than
10 years ago. It was late in the game.
I had been hesitant about these because the film elements were a
mess and we couldn't remaster. The existing masters on Lippy
(29:27):
the Lion and Wally Gator weren'ttoo bad, but the existing
masters on Touché Turtle were horrible and I just couldn't
justify releasing that with our name on it, even though our
quality standards were admittedly not the perfectionist
(29:49):
standards we have now. You need money to have those
standards and the business had not grown to where it is now.
So we skipped over to shave, we released Lippy, we released
Wally Gator. They did nicely.
They didn't look great, but at least we were getting them out
there to the people, and that was very important.
(30:10):
And with this new initiative to resurrect as much of the Hanna
Barbera library as we can, therewere plans afoot to really
tackle all three series. And the reason why Touché Turtle
is coming out first is because there was no DVDI find it really
(30:35):
interesting based on input we get.
There are some people that are obsessed with Hanna Barbera
programming that never was released on DVD.
And the ones that weren't released on DVD with rare
exception like a Rough and Readywhere there's a music issue and
so forth and so on. Quick Draw McGraw, same thing.
(30:59):
It was really the later cartoonsthat some of those haven't
gotten released yet or they werethese large 90 minute shows that
some of the content within the show was tied into a third party
character license. And so to try to reconstruct
those would be legally impossible or close to
(31:22):
impossible. So Touché Turtles absence of not
being available at all was the reason why we did this first.
And Wally Gator and Lippy the Lion will follow at some point
fairly soon. But I wanted touché to kind of
have his own, you know, his own stage for release.
(31:44):
And I think of those three, theywere all good shows.
They were all good characters, but I think the one people have
the most vivid memory of, because he was very distinctive,
is touché Turtle. More than Lippy the Lion and
Hardy RR or Wally Gator. Not dramatically more, but just
(32:06):
a little bit more beloved, I think.
And I think some of that has to do with the fact that Bill
Thompson, the voice of Droopy, was the voice behind Touché and
he was a wonderful voice artist.Yeah, and that's part of the
appeal. I should have mentioned earlier,
too, that some local stations might have said Wally Gator and
(32:27):
his friends or touché Turtle andhis friends, but I think that
was probably the station's option in the case.
Yeah, in the case of Touché Turtle, that is a goldmine of
voice acting by two actors that you didn't always hear doing
multiple voices unless you were,unless you go to old time radio
(32:48):
and hear both Alan Reed and BillThompson doing a tremendous
amount of voices. Bill Thompson was not only
droopy, but he was for Disney was the White Rabbit and Ranger
Woodlore and King Hubert in The Sleeping Beauty and several Dogs
and Lady and Shrimp. So he he really was a fixture in
Hollywood voiceovers, but didn'tdo a whole lot of TV.
(33:11):
So not only do you hear him do touché, but he also plays other
character along with Don Messickand Mel Blanc and Janet Waldo
and people like that. But you're hearing Bill Thompson
and how many voices he can do. And then Alan Reed is dumb dumb
and a lot of people I would think wouldn't have necessarily
(33:32):
realized he was dumb dumb. And he's doing his life with
Luigi voice and his Frederick voice.
And he was very versatile as well.
So Alan Reed and 52 cartoons doing all these voices, just the
audio is gold. Yeah, absolutely.
And I I remember as a kid thinking Dum Dum sounded a lot
(33:56):
like Fred Flintstone. You did see I catch it at first.
It took me a little while. Because, you know, there would
be sometimes where like Fred would get hit over the head or
something and go to go, you know, and it sounded like dum
dum. I remember, you know, you know,
because I could read at a very young age, so I could read the
credits and so forth and so on. So I knew was the same person
(34:20):
after a while. But I loved all three of these
cartoons and the way they were presented in the New York area.
Initially they were on differentdays and they were not mixed
together at all. But I wondered why there wasn't
like a main theme song and the structure that had been put on
(34:42):
Huck and Yogi and Quick Draw. But this is different, you know,
and I, I found that interesting.And my poor parents, I was
always asking them questions about these things and they were
civilians. They didn't know anything about
it. You know, my father tried to
solve the problem when I was a little older by bringing home a
copy of Weekly Variety from the Grand Central Newsstand.
(35:03):
Say, George, I think you might like reading this.
And of course, I've been addicted to trade publications
ever since. These cartoons are so
entertaining. And because they're only 5
minutes long, they just wet the pallet and you can watch all of
them or you can watch one of them.
It's going to be tremendously entertaining.
(35:23):
I like the fact that they have so much packed into a 5 minute.
Hanna Barbera really knew how towork a format.
They would do fives, they would do 6 or sevens, they would do 11
or 12 minutes and then they had the 30 minutes.
And with scooby-doo movies, theyhad the fill like 52 minutes.
And it's so cool to look at these 5 minutes and look at how
(35:45):
the stories go. It really is an art form to
structure stories to work in that format.
Plus everyone one of them had running gimmicks like touché had
the phone in his shell and the trusty Soward.
And I can't say sword without saying Soward.
Of course not. There was a lot of fun gags, a
(36:07):
lot of that sophisticated humor,but done very gently so
everybody could watch them. It's so true, but again, I don't
want to misuse the word adult, but there is an adult
sensibility, meaning not condescending in the writing.
It's really meant for a broad group of audience members.
(36:32):
I would say the same thing goes and then some with a lot of what
Jay Ward and Total Television were doing.
That was very refreshing for adults as well.
Yeah, they did put just enough to make, as the parents are
taking a glance at it, to chuckle over like the Kerrwood
Derby on Bullwinkle. And they would still laugh at
(36:55):
that. Yeah, yeah, that kind of thing.
So they were very flexible and who could watch them?
There were critics at the time who remarked that these early
Hanna Barberas did not talk downthe kids.
You know, dumb, dumb was dumb dumb.
But generally the characters were not, for lack of a better
word, stupid. You know, they may be clueless,
(37:17):
but not stupid, especially to and that kind of thing.
It wasn't, as I heard as a kid, sometimes babyish.
Without question. Can I ask you this?
And this is a question that has come up with the presentation of
the touché turtle package. Originally people were wondering
why it changed. I will explain why it changed.
(37:42):
We don't have a lot of. Artwork.
In our corporate archive for a lot of the early Hanna Barbera
works, you may know that when they shut down the Hanna Barbera
studios on Cuenga, there were a lot of very unhappy people that
(38:03):
were out of the job. They had to leave the building
and along with them may likely have gone a lot of pieces of
archival artwork as well as filmelements as well as all sorts of
things. So we had that piece of art that
we initially were going to use and too many people came to me
(38:25):
and said, you know, that looks an awful like the Bemelman S
artwork from Madeleine. And I said, well, I don't think
we should even waste a moment trying to trace it back to see
if it is or it isn't. It looked very much that way to
me. And I said, that's got to go.
(38:46):
We flipped the art I think the same day as we had announced it.
However, it's still around on various retail websites because
they haven't changed the cover. There have been people who come
to me and said, no, that is whatwas designed by Hanna Barbera.
And then there were other peoplewho came to me and said, no way.
(39:07):
Can you not see that? It's exactly the same thing.
So we are incredibly respectful of the rights and copyrights and
ownership of other people. And we're not about to breach
copyright. You know, if something is, let's
say it's a film or a television series or a cartoon where the
owner neglected to renew the copyright.
(39:29):
People say it's public domain. We would never if it belongs to
someone else. We would never go near doing
anything with something that belong to someone else,
copyright renewal or not. And we would hope other people
would show us the same respect. That's a long standing Warner
Brothers rule. Unless we make a deal with the
(39:50):
owner, we have no right to use something that we know isn't
ours. And based on all the
information, as soon as it came in, I was like, we got to flip
that right away. And fortunately, our creative
director and the gentleman who does a lot of our artwork, they
(40:10):
were very quick to find a solution that we felt was in
line with a lot of our other packaging.
And that's what would be on thispackaging.
And we're very happy about that.But that's what happened.
It was just too obviously something that might have been
Frankenstein together. By someone making a joke or
whatever. That's why it's not our
(40:31):
packaging and not anything we'regoing to distribute looking like
that. Well, you know, a lot of us have
been waiting for touché. Thank you for mentioning also
that we can have Wally and Lippyand Hardy maybe in the months
ahead so to. I would say in the months ahead,
yeah. Can I ask you about some titles?
Would that be OK? Well, let's try it and I'll let
(40:54):
you know. I'm very very hesitant to talk
about things that haven't been locked down and sealed because I
got bitten and. Yeah, I understand before.
OK, I'll do a disclaimer. You know, Walt Disney did that
in his famous Epcot film. He tapped on the blueprints and
(41:15):
he said all of this is probably going to change.
You know, that's the part that folks don't realize when they
say Epcot isn't at all what WaltDisney wanted.
You know, we don't know what Epcot might have been.
And he said, I'm not promising you this.
These are our plans and our projections.
So given that, I'm going to nameone that is obscure to an awful
(41:37):
lot of people. Catanooga Cats.
Probably at the top of my list of things we need to do.
To me, that's like, why didn't that happen 20 years ago when
the initial efforts were made tobring Hanna Barbera to DVD?
Those very nice packages. The packaging was nicer than the
(42:00):
content on the discs, frankly. Because, you know, how do you
put Magilla Gorilla out without the theme song?
There were no legal issues there.
I just was, I was, I had no involvement in those releases
and I was very disappointed. I hope we're correcting those
errors, but Cat Nooke Cats was more than just, it was an hour
(42:23):
show. It wasn't 1/2 hour show.
And I think it's up there with Banana Splits as something that
people really, really want to see.
Think Banana Splits is a bit higher and Banana Splits has
been distributed in those hybrid, you know, half hour cut
(42:43):
downs and whatnot. And that it's such a massive,
overwhelming initiative that hasto be undertaken that it's been
hard to get the financial support to do that.
But I'm pushing for that. I think we'll probably get to
cat nuke cats before we get to Banana Splits, but it's our
intention to do both. The cat Nuke cats have any
(43:05):
issues with the Mike Curb music?We haven't even been able to
locate all the queue sheets to determine that.
I don't think there is any problem there in terms of
limitations on certain pieces ofmusic.
I haven't completed all of my initial legal research yet to
(43:26):
determine that, but right now we're focusing on, yeah, other
characters, other shows, but those are probably the two that
I think warrant the most furtherinvestigation and work.
How about Alice in Wonderland? That is very clearly a clearance
issue that we have yet to been able to find a way to address.
(43:51):
That's the bad news. The good news is we just
completed creating new preservation elements on the
program. The program is protected.
Once we can clear it, it'll be out there.
I have very dim memories of seeing it as a child when it was
broadcast, so I'd like to see itagain.
Oh yeah, that's a favorite. And that'll be like a brand new
(44:14):
Fred and Barney appearance to a lot of and then maybe just and I
don't want to put you on the spot too much because it's not
really fair, as we said, becauseEpcot may change.
All these things will change. But as far as like non Hanna
Barberas, Rankin Bass made a fewspecials that never saw the
light of day on either DVD or Blu-ray.
(44:38):
One of them was a mouse on the Mayflower.
One of the most important thingsthey did The Hobbit, which was
on Warner, but it wasn't a really good version of it.
I'm well aware of those. Our rank and bass ownership
begins I think mid 1974 and we went quite aggressive in getting
(45:02):
a lot of their rarities out. Not just the animated ones
either. We did things like the Last
Dinosaur and the Bermuda Depths,and so this has been kind of a
very important thing to me to liberate that library.
So in the DVD world, we got a lot of those specials out, and
(45:24):
we also got a lot of the Hanna Barbera specials out, you know,
based on famous books and stuff like that.
There are so many tributaries, there are so many nooks and
crannies to hold the melted butter, as they'd say about an
English muffin. There is just so much in that
other tier. And I don't believe we own Mouse
(45:46):
on the Mayflower. I don't believe that's ours.
I think that's in the yeah, because what happened was Rankin
Bass, I believe was purchased byTelepictures and Telepictures
was purchased by Lorimar, which we purchased in the late 80s.
So it comes to us via this very complicated chain of title and
(46:10):
so forth and so on. And there were certain things
that Rankin Bass did as works for hire that we don't have
rights to from that later point.But we really made a concerted
effort to try and highlight all the different opportunities and
get these things out there. And on the hand of Barbaric
side, we looked at a lot of those after school specials and
(46:33):
you know, putting out the last of the curlews was like a really
important thing to do. That's another one that has just
gone through preservation, whichis really, really important
because it means that not only are we taking into consideration
what elements do we have, what can we do?
Is the camera negative intact, the audio elements intact, But
(46:57):
if someone isn't looking in on those things, something could
turn vinegar and we would have aproblem.
We want to protect everything. And so it is a company wide
edict to try and protect and preserve and make available as
much as we can from this amazinglibrary.
(47:17):
Yeah, that's it's a daunting task, but one that we take very
seriously and with deep. Dedication.
We are so grateful that you're doing this.
I've said this over and over, but I'm sure everybody's
listening, is also beaming with gratitude and is very excited
about the future releases. Can you come back and talk about
(47:38):
Tom and Jerry? Because that's a big deal.
It's a huge deal and it warrantsits own conversation.
All I will say about that is that one of my colleagues made
it an essential mission to open up the doors to get everyone in
the corporation to support doingthis complete, uncut,
(48:01):
uncensored, from beginning to end of the Hanna Barbera period
at MGM. And at the beginning of 2025
when we released the Tom and Jerry Cinemascope cartoons, I
think in February, it was an impossible dream.
We didn't know we were going to do this.
A lot of people are now saying, oh, that was a cash grab.
(48:23):
And of course, the people alwayswant to have something bad to
say. You know, it's just, it's how
you get noticed on the Internet.But no, we had no idea that such
a thing would be possible. After all that we went through
as a company pulling the second golden collection that never
happened and all the nasty comments and well, everybody got
(48:45):
together and looked at this and said this is a wonderful
opportunity. The characters are celebrating a
birthday. What can we do to get everybody
on board to bless this without concern?
And it happened. And it'll be under people's
Christmas trees this year because the release date is
December 2nd. And the Warner Archive version
(49:08):
of this comes with a bonus disc and a booklet and deluxe
packaging. And that's a big deal for us
because we usually don't have that opportunity.
The new documentaries have been made.
A half made documentary that wasnever finished was finished
thirteen years later. There will be commentaries,
(49:28):
there will be some bonus cartoons.
It's just going to be Tom and Jerry fans Uber delight and
we're very excited about it. So I would love to come back to
your podcast and talk about it. Well, that would be great and
we're looking forward to that. We always look forward to
talking to you on our happy little fantastic world.
I thank you again George Feltenstein, for being with us
(49:51):
so many times to share the excitement and some of the
backstage stories of the Warner Archive releases.
Well, thank you, Greg. It's always a pleasure.
We are kindred spirits, you and I, so it's wonderful to join
forces and get the word out about Bill and Joe and the
legacy they left by. Thank you and thank you all for
(50:12):
listening. Please subscribe and like and
all those podcast Y things 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
thanks for listening.
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