Our video links here the next few days will be a tribute to Joe Barbera, and I'll try to tell you a few stories about this extraordinary man and perhaps explain what his work has meant to me. We kick off with the original opening to my first favorite cartoon show, Huckleberry Hound, which debuted in October of 1958. It was the second Hanna-Barbera series, following hot on the heels of Ruff & Reddy, which I liked but not as much as I liked Huckleberry Hound. Kellogg's funded this show and the opening titles featured the rooster from the Kellogg's Corn Flakes box dancing around a circus arena. Later, this opening was remade with Huck himself going through the same motions, and that's the one most of you probably recall.
The Huck Hound show featured clever scripts, wonderful voice work by Daws Butler and Don Messick, and resourceful animation…which is a way to saying that a lot of things didn't move very much on the screen but you hardly noticed. This footage was shot in color but I kind of like watching it here in black-and-white because that's the way I originally viewed it on the TV in my parents' living room. It ran Tuesday evenings at 7 PM on KTTV, Channel 11 in Los Angeles and I could hardly wait from one week to the next.
Shortly after the show debuted, my mother took me back East for a trip to New York and Hartford to see a little of America and to meet some of my relatives. I was reluctant to go because they might not have Huckleberry Hound back there and I couldn't miss an episode now, could I? My father, eager to please, phoned his brother Seymour in New York and his brother Irving in Connecticut and had them check their local TV Guides. Only when I was assured they had Huckleberry Hound in those remote locales did I consent to get on the plane.
After several days in Manhattan — where I watched Huck and his friends on the TV in our room at the Taft Hotel on Seventh Avenue at Fiftieth — we were going to take a train to Hartford. In a little newsstand in a snack bar in Penn Station, I found a comic book rack and on it was the first Huckleberry Hound comic book from Dell. This was a wonderful thing, of course, and it was promptly purchased and read over and over and over. It had superb art by a man I would later (much later) learn was named Harvey Eisenberg and it had stories adapted from episodes I had recently seen on TV. It was Heaven but I was worried: Was this something they only had in New York? And if it was, how could I get my parents to move there before I missed another issue? Happily, it turned out that no relocation was necessary. When we got back to Los Angeles, they had Huckleberry Hound comic books there, too.
So here's the opening to Huck's show. I love this bit of animation and every bit of the tune except for the part where they pretend "get yourselves all set" rhymes with "TV set." It bothered me when I was six, too. When I sang the song, I changed it to "It's a certain bet / You'll watch your TV set…" and I wondered why if I could think of that at my age, the guy who wrote the song couldn't. Twenty-some-odd years later when I worked for him, I asked Mr. Barbera about it. He laughed and said, "Bill wrote that line. Go upstairs and tell him we have to go back and fix it." I never did that but I should have.