Every so often on animation forums, I see conversations that remind me to remind the animation community that credits on old TV cartoons are often inaccurate. In many cases, they were inaccurate when they first aired because the guy who made them up did a less-than-stellar job. (The name of Gary Owens was misspelled on the first season of Space Ghost, for example.)
Also, some artists and actors for various reasons asked that their names not be in the credits. Daws Butler, because he was so well-identified with his voicework for Hanna-Barbera, asked that his name not be on some of the shows he worked on for Jay Ward…and it's misspelled on others. I don't know the precise reason but Mel Blanc's name was not on several episodes of The Flintstones where it's clearly him doing Barney Rubble and others. Bill Scott was the voice of Bullwinkle, Mr. Peabody and Dudley Do-Right and others on the various shows that featured those characters and he wrote a lot of the scripts as well…but is only credited as a producer.
Also, on shows for Saturday morning, most studios including Hanna-Barbera, liked to make up one set of end credits for the entire season and use it (the same one) on every episode. They'd list all the writers, actors, artists (etc.) who'd worked on even one episode for that season as of the moment when those end credits were made up. That moment would be when the first episode had to air, which might be about the time Show #10 was being worked on.
So if they were doing, say, sixteen episodes that season, the names of folks who worked only on episodes #11-16 would not be included at all. And of course, an actor who did a small voice part on one of the first ten episodes would have the same credit as someone who did the lead character and had tons of dialogue in all sixteen.
Later on, when it became cheaper and easier to do end credits, most studios would make up the end credits individually for each episode. In some cases though, errors still occurred. And often when shows were syndicated, someone would start swapping around which cartoons appeared in which episodes without changing the end credits.
And sometimes, they just plain lost the end credits.
When the Hanna-Barbera series Top Cat was produced, it was a prime-time series and H-B remade the end credits each week to list the writers, artists and actors who worked on each particular episode. Those episodes were later rerun in syndication and on Saturday morning…and rerun and rerun and rerun. Eventually, the film prints wore out and there also came a day when they needed new transfers so the shows could look clean and perfect when released on home video or on the new, better-quality TV sets.
I'm a little unclear on the time sequence of all this and what was done for TV release and what was done for home video. My dear friend, the late Earl Kress, could have explained it all to me because he was deeply involved with a lot of the restorations. Earl spent a lot of time searching through film vaults that housed Hanna-Barbera's past, often spending days examining unlabeled and mislabeled cans. I'm pretty sure he was the one who found the original, lost-until-he-found-it opening from the first two seasons of The Flintstones with its original theme song.
I think (note italics) he was the one who found the negative to the closing of Top Cat but it was just the animation and music before the credits had been superimposed. As far as I know, prints with the credits in place have never been located. They had the episodes themselves but all they had of the credits sequence was what Earl found. What they then had to do was reconstruct the end credits.
They took the names off a print of one episode, had someone set them in a similar typeface and combined them with Earl's find to create one (1) end credits sequence which they tacked onto the new transfers of all 30 episodes.
Here's a frame grab from the credits for one episode as they all now exist. See where it says Kin Platt wrote the episode? Well, Mr. Platt wrote a few of them but he didn't write all of them even though his name is now on all of them and so listed in a couple of online episode guides. Same with Paul Sommer who is credited as "Story Editor." He was that on some episodes, not all.
On the card with the voice credits, it lists Paul Frees since he guested on one of two episodes, one of which was the one from which they took those credits. Frees is credited on all 30 now and there are no voice credits for Daws Butler, Don Messick, Walker Edmiston, Bea Benaderet, Sally Jones and several other folks who were heard on various episodes of Top Cat.
H-B didn't even have cast lists so the actors were identified for the studio's records by folks like Earl and me who could listen to a show and (usually) identify who did which voice. But we couldn't identify the writers or various artists…so the same guys get those credits on every episode. A similar problem seems to have happened with some (not all) episodes of The Flintstones and The Jetsons.
That's about all I have to say about this. Like I said, this kind of thing is a problem with a lot of cartoon shows, especially those made for television in the early days. So watch out. I will probably have to post this again in a few years.