"The Good, the Bad, and Huckleberry Hound" – Part 2

Longtime pal and comedy-writer extraordinaire John Ludin has been good enough to send along some of his vivid (and funny) memories of Joe Barbera, Bill Hanna and many others during the making of “The Good, the Bad and the Huckleberry” at Hanna-Barbera Productions back in 1988.   

And here they are:  

"I was just reading your blog - and laughing out loud.  I so remember Joe telling us about the kids singing, "Look at the bears, look at the bears, look at the bears." We smiled and nodded and went back to work, thinking he would forget it in a day or two. Every week we had to give Joe an update on the script and where we were going with it next. 

The following week, we returned to his office and he brought it up again, acting out the entire scene.   "So, this group of kids in a bus sees Yogi and Boo Boo and yells 'Look at the bears, look at the bears, look at the bears.'" Heading back to your office, we wondered why Joe was insistent on this, especially since Yogi wasn't even in the story, and opted to just leave it out, especially because it was so senseless. The next week Joe had read the latest draft and asked why the scene wasn't in the script. And I think he was kind of bugged that we didn't see how funny it was. One of us asked why the kids were there, and why they were in a bus. Joe said it could be a tour bus. He then, of course, reenacted the whole scene. I remember going back to your office and saying we should see what would happen if we left it out once again. You were smarter than that and advised we had better just put it in, so we could make it work. We wrote it in, then I recall, in an homage to Groucho, having Huck turn to camera and deadpan, "That was a strange interlude, twern't it?" or something like that. 

Joe was only outdone by Bill, who slapped in the Dalton's "Gold, Gold, Gold" song without us knowing anything about it. "Our swimming pools are filled with gold, by heck, We got so much gold, around our neck," or some equally lame lyric.    

 

Howie Morris as Ernest T. Bass

Do you remember Joe telling us how the crazed brave Chuckling Chipmunk (I think that was his name) would laugh? Joe did the silliest little giggle and wanted to make sure that the character sounded just like that.  Howie Morris had been cast to do the voice and did it his own way, which was pretty funny. When it came time for pick-ups, (voice director) Andrea Romano asked if we had anything. We were in the other room and I was explaining to her what Joe wanted for the laugh. The actors were on the other side of the glass, watching us talk to Andrea, but I know I was the one discussing the laugh, asking to get one take, just so we would have it, the way Joe had done it. And I had to do the laugh, so Andrea would know what to tell Howie. She then went back in and asked Howie to redo the laugh, recreating what I had done. He was visibly upset about this. He begrudgingly did it the way he was asked, and then was cut loose from the session.

As Howie left, he took the time to open the door to where we sat, looked at me, pointed and yelled almost to the point of being unintelligible, "My laugh was a whole lot funnier than that dumbshit giggle you wanted, because I know what's god damn funny because I've been doing this for a god damn long time with people like Caesar and Brooks and Reiner and you don't know what the fuck you're doing." Or words to that affect. Do you remember that? What a great moment. And all because of Joe.
 
Also, you might recall, we were trying to beat Glenn Leopold (who was writing one of the nine other cartoon movie scripts – “Scooby Doo and the Ghouls School,” I think) in terms of finishing ours first.  I think he beat us by a day - but we worked hard to make every joke count.  I remember throwing out all sorts of stuff.   If it wasn't a set-up or a punch line, we jettisoned it.  It was the most streamlining that I had ever done to that point.  We were always asking, "Can we cut this out and it still makes sense?"  If yes, then we cut it.  Look at the arc in that story.  It's huge. What a crazy idea to fill up that much time with one character.

I sure had a great time while we were there pounding it out every day. And I'll stack up the jokes in "The Good, the Bad and the Huckleberry" against anything.    

Pat Buttram, Tommy Lester, "Green Acres"

So here's one more memory about the show...

I was delighted to meet Pat Buttram in the recording session, being a fan of old westerns and especially Green Acres. Pat played the referee in the boxing match where Huck was up against this behemoth, sure to be pulverized. The line was, "Let the massacre begin." Pat said, in that perfect cracking voice, "Let the mass-uh-cree begin." I really laughed and later, I mentioned it to him. He said in some Autrey movie, he had said it that way and Gene laughed, so he's said it that way ever since. Classic. And that's why, if you're recording a western, you hire Pat Buttram."

  

John Ludin with Wayne Kaatz and me  (1988)

Thanks for the memories, John!  

And, before signing off, here's one last quick anecdote from John Ludin about Joe Barbera, when Joe was working on an ambitious animated home video series called “The Greatest Adventure Stories form the Bible.”

“I still laugh when I think about Joe telling us that nobody has ever told the story of Noah and the ark properly, regarding what it was like inside that arc:  'And then the boat rocks and this elephant comes sliding right at you and Jesus Christ it's a big damn elephant.'"

As Joe used to say, “It was a helluva deal!”  

"The Good, the Bad, and the Huckleberry" -- starring Daws Butler

In the late 1980's, Hanna-Barbera made a syndication deal to produce ten new animated TV movies for local stations around the country.  These movies, which would air in two-hour prime time blocks, were to star many of Hanna-Barbera's biggest cartoon stars.  One of the first of these feature-length TV movies was "Yogi and the Magical Flight of the Spruce Goose."  It premiered at Thanksgiving in 1987.   I recall watching it on TV with my kids...I think it was the longest two hours of their young lives.  It really did seem to go on forever, with the numerous and lengthy commercial breaks virtually destroying all tension and sense of continuity to the story.  

Others titles in this series included "Scooby Doo Meets the Boo Brothers," "The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones," and "Top Cat and the Beverly Hills Cats."  Many of them sounded promising, at least on paper.  But all of them seemed to collapsed under the weight of the interminable length of the time slot.  Two hours proved to be too much for a lot of these stories.  

Back then, John Ludin and I had been working together on "Yogi's Treasure Hunt" and we were both big fans of Quick Draw McGraw, so we tried to interest the powers that be in giving one of these movies to Quick Draw.  Joe Barbera, who was in charge of this movie package, wasn't keen on the Quick Draw concept, but he suggested we pursue a different title he had been considering:  "The Good, the Bad and the Huckleberry" --a western starring Huckleberry Hound.   John and I leapt at the chance to write this one.  We vowed to make it the best darned Huck cartoon ever.  

Well, it didn't quite work out the way we planned.   

We managed to tell part of the story we wanted to tell...but Mr. B had some thoughts on the subject, and he was quite insistent that we do what he requested.  We were surprised by this, because in our experience, this was not the normal procedure for Joe.  He usually let us do our own thing.  But these ten feature-length TV movies were important to him and the studio, so he took a personal interest in each one of them.  

Fortunately for John and me, Joe didn't micromanage our script, but he did insist on some moments that never quite made sense to us.  For instance, in the middle of an old western town in the 1880's, a bus containing kids would pull up, the kids would look out the bus windows, see Yogi and Boo Boo out on the street, and shout, "Look at the bears, look at the bears, look at the bears."  Yogi would find this annoying... while John and I just found it confusing.  This moment had absolutely nothing to do with  Huckleberry Hound's taming of the wild west, but Joe wanted it in there.  So it stayed in there.  

We learned later that Joe dictated the entire plot and virtually all of the dialog in almost every one of the other movies, so in the end, John and I felt fortunate that Joe trusted us enough to let us write most of the script on our own.  

But, ultimately, "The Good, the Bad, and the Huckleberry" was defeated by the same thing that brought down most of the other nine movies in this series:  they were just too dang long!  

Above is the cover page from the script, signed by the voice of Huck, Yogi, Quick Draw, Hokey Wolf and many others:  the great Daws Butler.