It's sadly a three-obit day here at newsfromme.com. Let me tell you about Tom Hatten and why he mattered to me…a lot.
I'm the right age to have grown up (sort of) on local kid show hosts — folks on local TV stations like KTLA, KHJ, KTTV and KCOP who hosted shows seen just in my city…live people who talked to me. They'd play games and talk about things that were of interest to kids and, of course, they showed cartoons. The kid show hosts of my childhood — the ones I watched when my age was in single digits and maybe a year or two after — were "Skipper Frank" Herman, Chucko the Birthday Clown, "Engineer Bill" Stulla, "Sheriff John" Rovick, Jimmy Weldon (and his puppet Webster Webfoot), Walker Edmiston, Vance Colvig (our local Bozo the Clown), Chuck Jones the Magic Man…and Tom Hatten.
Tom Hatten hosted the Popeye cartoons on Channel 5 from 1956 (when I was four) until 1964 (I was twelve) and he did this every afternoon, five days a week. A former announcer and newsman at the station, he dressed like a sailor and did his show from a cheap set that looked like an old ship. He was an actor who often appeared in local theatrical productions but he was also something of a cartoonist and on almost every show, he'd draw Popeye or Olive Oyl or Wimpy and he often gave little cartooning lessons.
He worked at an easel with a piece of charcoal. I'd sit at home with a pad of paper and a pencil and try to duplicate what he did. I think it actually helped me that he wasn't an incredibly good cartoonist. I'm serious about this. If they'd had someone like Sergio Aragonés drawing for us, I'd have given up drawing then and there. But Mr. Hatten made it look humanly possible and what I was able to reproduce on my pad didn't look that much worse than what he did on his easel.
So I kept at it. I never learned to draw as well as I would have liked but the fact that I could do it at all, I owe largely to Tom Hatten.
He'd often do things he called "Squiggles." A squiggle was a quick doodle — some lines that didn't look like anything in particular. The idea was to incorporate those lines into a drawing that did look like something. He had kids my age on his program and sometimes, they'd do a squiggle on his pad on his easel and he'd turn it into something. And sometimes, he'd replicate the same squiggle on three pads on three easels and each kid would have to turn it into a drawing of something with a prize going to the best squiggler. (We occasionally do this in the "Quick Draw" game I host at comic book conventions…a direct lift from my childhood watching Tom Hatten.)
He would even talk about the history of Popeye and of Elzie Segar and the Fleischer Brothers whose studio made the best Popeye cartoons. My interest in the background of such enterprises probably started with his little lessons. In 1960, his show began featuring some of the newer (cheaper) Popeye cartoons that were made expressly for television and released that year. I recall Hatten announcing the new Popeye adventures he was showing and, with great diplomacy and tact, explaining why they weren't quite as wonderful as the made-for-movie-theaters classics he also had on his show.
Hatten left KTLA in 1964 to pursue more acting and he always seemed to be doing something. There was one episode of the original Hawaii Five-O in which he played a comic strip artist whose strip was inspiring a serial killer. In the seventies, he returned to KTLA and, dressed more like a TV host and less like a sailor, revived his Popeye show. He also did something called the Family Film Festival — a weekly show where he'd host family-friendly films and discuss their history, often with in-studio guests who'd been involved with that week's film. He frequently turned up elsewhere on KTLA and/or on KNX radio as an entertainment reporter.
It was a big deal for me that I got to meet Tom Hatten on several occasions and repeatedly thank him for what his show meant to me. He was a charming gentleman who was always turning up at local animation-themed events…and yes, I have a Popeye that he drew for me. He probably tossed it out long ago but at one point, he had a Popeye that I drew for him, just to show what a mediocre student I'd been. Of the names on the above list, Chuck Jones (the magician, not the animation director) and Jimmy Weldon are now the only ones still with us. Losing Tom Hatten today at the age of 92 really feels like losing a big chunk of my childhood.
I wonder if a kid of six today can possibly feel the connection to anyone on TV that I once felt for Skipper Frank, Sheriff John all those others…and Tom Hatten. If not, I feel bad for them.