Yesterday, we favored you with the opening to the Beetle Bailey cartoons that were produced for TV in the early sixties. Here's the opening of the Snuffy Smith cartoons that were produced by the same company at the same time. That's Paul Frees you'll hear providing the voice of the bodacious Mr. Smith…and if you look fast, you'll notice the name of the late Dennis Marks listed as writer.
Dave Mackey informs me that some of the Beetle Bailey cartoons weren't done by the Paramount Studio but by Gerry Ray's crew in the United Kingdom — the same outfit that did the Beatles cartoons and also worked on the Yellow Submarine feature. He adds…
I wouldn't call it "the remnants" of Paramount, though, because there was still a theatrical release schedule to fill in addition to these TV cartoons (starting with the new Popeye series in 1960), and everyone was working harder than normal to get all these cartoons out. IMHO, this grueling schedule may have contributed to Seymour Kneitel's weakening heart condition and subsequent death in 1964.
For some reason, all these cartoons — including the Krazy Kats (mostly Gene Deitch, with some Jack Kinney episodes and two made at Paramount) and the Snuffy Smiths (all Paramount) made concurrently, were recorded in Hollywood (which explains Morris, Melvin, Frees, etc.), and more of an effort was made to have more traditional sitcom-type writers on staff rather than just relying on the Paramount storymen (by that time, pretty much Burton Goodman, Jack Mercer and Howard Post). Many of the Krazys had been written by Eli Bauer, who worked quite often with Gene Deitch and his alternate director, Al Kouzel. There were even a few Beetle Baileys written by Morris and Melvin! Was Al Brodax supervising the stories from Hollywood? Who was running the recording sessions? I'd be interested in knowing how that worked.
Unfortunately, when I asked Howie Morris some of these questions, he had no memory of the show other than that he recalled getting hired for Beetle Bailey and recommending Allan Melvin. (Howie was teamed with Allan on Magilla Gorilla, Atom Ant and a few other Hanna-Barbera projects and they were good friends.) The writers seem to have come from both coasts but primarily from the East, and I have no idea why they did that or why the voices were done out here. Brodax was based in New York as far as I know.
Here's the opening to Snuffy Smith. And I'll just add that if I'd been casting these shows, Howie would have played Snuffy, probably sounding a lot like Ernest T. Bass.
