Quick! Name the Hanna-Barbera artist who won $327,094 in the lottery!

You can cheat. The answer is in the story to the right from the Signal of Santa Clarita, California published June 22, 1988.

Alex Lovy had been in animation for more than 25 years when he jumped over to the Hanna-Barbera studio in 1959. He started as a story director; he’d draw the finished, nine-panel storyboards with dialogue, camera instructions, scene numbers and so on marked on each story sheet. He moved upward for there.

He and Joe Barbera went back to the 1930s when they were both working for New York City’s B-list cartoon studio that wasn’t named Terrytoons. A man by the name of Paul Maher interviewed Lovy in 1988. The interview is on this page if you want to see it. I won’t transcribe the whole thing, but let me glean some facts from it.

Lovy was born in Passaic, New Jersey on September 2, 1913 to Igor and Charlotte Mohr Lovy. Where his father disappeared to, I don’t know, but his mother raised him herself. He got into animation quite by accident. After graduating from high school, he wanted to be a flyer. He enrolled in the Curtis-Wright Institute where he met a chap by the name of Bill Littlejohn. Lovy had a problem like many others in the Depression—no money. So someone got him and Littlejohn a job at the Van Beuren cartoon studio. That was in 1933.

Van Beuren was releasing its cartoons through RKO, which had a stake in the studio. Van Beuren died in 1936 when RKO decided to release cartoons made by Walt Disney instead. Lovy and Littlejohn, coincidentally, moved west to work at Disney before Lovy got a job at the Walter Lantz studio. Lovy’s first directorial credit was the final cartoon in the Oswald series, Feed the Kitty (1938). Lantz’ most successful character came along in 1940 in the Andy Panda cartoon Knock Knock. It really starred Woody Woodpecker and Lovy came up with Woody’s original stubby-legged, long-billed design.

Alex left the Lantz studio in November 1942 to serve in the Navy. He also had time for two marriages to fall apart, one to Monte Maxine Harwood in 1938 and another to Florence Dotzler Burslem in 1940; her sister married Lantz animator Frank Tipper.

He left the Navy by December 1945. It’s unclear when he arrived at the Columbia Screen Gems cartoon studio, but he directed five cartoons there before it shut down; the first was the Daffy Duck/Elmer Fudd knock-off Wacky Quacky.

It seems Lovy bounced around. A syndicated column in the Cincinnati Enquirer of July 1, 1948 talks of Lovy “heading a new outfit with a revolutionary pastel color process.” Another syndicated column, this one in the Battle Creek Enquirer of January 17, 1949, reveals Lovy was the artist for columnist and writer Leo Guild. The article says “He did some great war drawings and is considered by Disney and Metro to be an outstanding talent,” though I’ve seen no proof he ever worked for Fred Quimby at the MGM cartoon studio. Considering the arbitrary nature of cartoon screen credits and the short stops some people made at various studios, it is quite possible.

Lantz finally brought him back; he directed before and after Tex Avery’s brief time at the studio in 1953-54 before bolting to Hanna-Barbera in March 1959. The studio was working on The Huckleberry Hound Show and would soon have Quick Draw McGraw on the air. What was the transition from full animation (such as it was at Lantz) to the limited variety of television like?

“Oddly enough, I sort of had a warm feeling for it. It was very natural for me to go into their type of animation, which was trying to minimize moment as much as possible. We relied on dialogue rather than motion to make it funny.”

Did Daws Butler influence any of the writing because of the way his voiced the characters?

“Daws would come up with certain expressions which would lend itself to...an idea for writing something so we could utilise that particular attitude or particular expression. He was very helpful to us.”

What of Huck?

“Huckleberry Hound was a creation of Bill and Joe. The other characters developed from Mike Maltese, myself, Bill, Joe, and a few other fellows whose names I can’t think of right now. But the end result of refining of the characters was always Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna. They had the knack of really putting a personality into a character.”

Lovy had his own company, Alex Lovy Productions, on the side while he worked at Hanna-Barbera. He left in 1966 (or perhaps early 1967) to direct theatrical cartoons for Warner Bros., including the less-than-immortal Cool Cat and Merlin the Magic Mouse. By 1968, he was back at Hanna-Barbera.

What about a certain Great Dane? Lovy was the co-producer on the original series in 1968. Why was it so popular?

“I guess you’ll have to ask the kids. I don’t know...whereas my heart belongs to Yogi Bear.”

A wise answer, Mr. Lovy.

Lovy oversaw voice sessions during part of his career. Who was the most fun to work with? Sally Struthers as the teenaged Pebbles, was his surprise answer. What about Jack Mercer in the weak Popeye series that Hanna-Barbera inflicted on kids? What about Joe Besser?

“He was all right, but he took on a character, then when we stopped recording he was back to being Joe Besser, whereas Sally was constantly who she was. [Mercer] was very professional. I just let him do it because he knew the character better than I, as a matter of fact. All I did was listen for diction.”

One thing that has been mentioned by a number of people is that Lovy could draw with both hands. And both layout artist Jerry Eisenberg and writer Tony Benedict say that Lovy was an excellent storyboard man; Jerry says his boards could be funnier than the actual cartoons but the artists had to stick to the model sheets. (That’s Lovy and Jerry at Hanna-Barbera to the right from a grainy home movie. I wonder who owned the Buick in the background).

Lovy produced the revival of the Yogi Bear Show in 1988, and then came back to Hanna-Barbera in 1990 as a storyboard artist on the Jetsons movie and on some episodes of a series called The Adventures of Don Coyote. In the meantime, Lovy married and divorced Vivian Jean twice. He died on Valentine’s Day 1992 at the age of 78.

Alex Lovy wasn’t one of the originals at Hanna-Barbera, but he arrived at the studio in its first expansion in 1959 to get Quick Draw McGraw on the air. He seems to have been well-liked and respected, and contributed in his own way to some very enjoyable cartoons.

Recognise this scary face?



Why, of course you do. It’s Carlo Vinci, animator of some of the funniest drawings in the early days of the Hanna-Barbera studio. And you may recognise the picture as being similar to one which opened a story on the studio in Life Magazine published on November 21, 1960. You can read it HERE.

Amid over at Cartoon Brew was nice enough to point out that all the photos taken in the shoot by Allan Grant for that story are now on-line. Allow me post a few of them (for non-commercial purposes, naturally, as this is a fan site).

Fans of the Modern Stone Age family should recognise the drawing the anonymous inker is working on. Thanks to the DVD of “The Flintstones,” we’re able to see the original opening of the first two seasons of the show where Fred is driving through Bedrock, running errands and then going home. He is stopped by a cop for a fire truck, designed by the great Ed Benedict. The inker is working on a drawing of the “truck.” The dino’s legs would be on separate cels as the animal is running. I have no idea who animated the opening and would accept any and all educated guesses (several people have sent me the same answer; see Mike Kazaleh’s note in the comment section). You can spot a piece of the Flintstones’ size chart in the corner. Inkers and painters were the unsung heroes of old cartoons.



The brilliant Mel Blanc is at the centre of this photo of a break in (or just prior to the start of) a voice session for “The Flintstones.” Bea Benaderet has her back to the camera, and the others are Jean Vander Pyl, Joe Barbera, Alan Reed and associate producer Alan Dinehart. In the corner of the shot, that’s John Stephenson with the pencil; he appeared on several cartoons as early as the first season in 1960. I gather from Tony Benedict’s interview with Mark Evanier at this year’s Wonder Con that this session was recorded at the Columbia Pictures studio. Remember that the Hanna-Barbera studio at 3400 Cahuenga hadn’t been built yet; H-B started in the Kling studio on La Brea in 1957 and then moved to a building at 3501 Cahuenga (a block from their future home and a block and a half from Jack Kinney Productions) by August 1960. Incidentally, those Ampex tape machines in the booth were great. I imagine the studio recorded the reels at 15 ips and then cut reference discs for the animators to use when drawing mouth movements; there’s another picture in this set of Carlo at his drawing board with a turntable and record nearby.



Here’s Joe Barbera paying rapt attention to his secretary.

And here’s a gag picture of Joe Barbera after being kicked out of his office. Alan Dinehart is passing in the hallway. Life doesn’t have the pictures captioned so I don’t know exactly what's going on here.

You’ll notice in picture with the secretary (Scott Shaw! tells me she’s Maggie Roberts), the table has an Emmy (for The Huckleberry Hound Show), a wooden key and little models of Huck, Quick Draw and a wooly mammoth, as well as Tom and Jerry, who were still property of MGM. Someone, maybe it was Jerry Eisenberg, described the window-less studio where H-B was located when he arrived in 1961 as “the bunker.” Those painted brick walls sure leave you with that impression. The building is still there today. It’s still without windows and still has painted bricks.



Look at the talent in this room for what may have been a development meeting. The greatest cartoon writer in the world, Mike Maltese, is on the right side of the picture talking to Alex Lovy (the bald chick-magnet to the right). From left to right in the photo are: Arnie Carr (studio flack), Dan Gordon, Alan Dinehart, Joe Barbera, Bill Hanna and the marvellous Warren Foster to Hanna’s left. Maltese is blocking production supervisor Howard Hanson, who you can’t see. The drawings on the blackboard we’ll discuss in a post next week.



A recording session. No, that’s not Hoyt Curtin conducting. Curtin was a beefy guy with a rum nose; he looked like a character out of Guys and Dolls. Hanna has his foot up on the step. Listen to some of the orchestra’s work by clicking on the button.





“You must live in a hole if you don’t like to bowl! Hey, hey, hey, hey!” The studio had a bowling team. Could the third person in the shot be Tony Benedict? By the way, this building is still there but this side entrance is different today.



And here’s one more of the stars of “The Flintstones” and their cardboard cut-outs. You can see the old-time network radio influence as they’re all gathered around one mike. There must have been a lot of bobbing in and out to read lines but all of them worked in radio in the ‘40s, so they’d be used to it.

We’ve captioned more photos in this post. If you want to look at all the photos, click HERE. There are others of Carlo; one of them shows layout drawings for “The Golf Champion.” My thanks again to Amid for the link.

Mike Lah once said that if you were trained in Disney-style full animation, adjusting to Hanna-Barbera’s limited animation was fairly easy. But it was still a grind nonetheless. Ask Alex Lovy and Dan Gordon.

Lovy (in the centre of the photo) and Gordon (standing) both worked at the Van Beuren studio in New York in the mid-‘30s before ending up out West by the end of the decade. So they had plenty of experience working in full theatrical animation. Gordon was hired when Hanna-Barbera opened in 1957 to make story sketches (though story man Charlie Shows was quite capable of drawing). Lovy came aboard H-B in March 1959 as a story director, working on storyboards. Both talked about their jobs in this brief newspaper feature story that appeared in the Binghamton Press on September 30, 1961.

Monotony Is Biggest Peril to Cartoonists
By PEG STEVENS
It’s a well established fact that a daily comic strip artist leads a rugged life, but the daily hassle of turning out animated cartoons for television is equally as hectic.
Dan Gordon and Alex Lovy, story directors for Hanna-Barbera Productions, churn out close to 100 cartoons a day for The Flintstones.
“We get the rough story idea from the writer," explains Alex, “then it’s up to us to bring it to life with pen and ink. We average 500 cartoons a week, all with dialogue, in order to keep up with production schedules.”
The work demands precision and patience for one imperfect drawing can ruin an entire sequence and everyone down the line, from inkers to painters, gets thrown off their deadline.
The biggest occupational hazard in a cartoonery is monotony, according to Dan Gordon.
“It isn’t that you get bored,” Gordon points out, “but you can feel bogged down after a while when you’ve worked on one sequence too long.”
If this happens, the fellows switch jobs, completing what the others had started.
“Here’s an example of what we mean,” says Alex. “Imagine an artist having to sit at a desk and draw one figure on a celluoid [sic] plate. Then, when the basic picture is drawn, he has to draw a movement of an arm, leg or even the twitching of an eye. If a character points a pistol at an object, fires, then lowers his arm, an animator has to draw the various movements of the arm, which might be 25, 30 or even 40 frames. And the rub is that each movement has to be perfect. By the time you reach the 40th frame you’re a likely candidate for sillyville!” “What do you mean candidate?” injected Dan. “You have to live in sillyville to be a cartoonist!”

When Lovy says “cartoons,” I suspect he doesn’t mean a completed, 6½ minute cartoon. He must mean a story drawing. Still, if you have nine panels on a sheet and 16 sheets per cartoon, that’s a lot of drawing. And, of course, an awful lot more work is involved in a half-hour cartoon.

Lovy had a long career at H-B after spending time directing at Walter Lantz and Columbia in the ‘40s and ‘50s, as well as opening his own company with Sid Marcus in 1947 called Scientalks. After story directing at H-B, he was promoted to Associate Producer in August 1960 and retired in 1988. Lovy died February 14, 1992. Gordon, too, directed cartoons in the ‘30s at Van Beuren and the ‘40s at Paramount’s Famous Studios in New York. He spent some time drawing comic books. By November 1950, he was hired by John Sutherland to work in New York with agencies on prepping TV material. After a stay at Jack Zander’s Transfilm in New York, he ended up back at Sutherland in April 1954 dealing with commercial clients. In 1957, he was working for Bill and Joe. He left Hanna-Barbera around February 1961 to head the story department at Quartet Films but returned to the studio by the time Magilla Gorilla was in development in 1963. He provided story sketches for “Hey There, It's Yogi Bear” and his last job at the studio appears to have been on a 60-minute, Secret Squirrel/Atom Ant special that aired in September 1965. Gordon was born in Philadelphia in 1902 to John J. and Margaret Gordon but grew up in the Bronx. T.R. Adams’ book on the studio, quoting Bill Hanna, says Gordon died in 1969, other sources say 1970, but I’ve found no record of it.

During its short life, this blog has been blessed with the help of former artists of the Hanna-Barbera studio. They’re always friendly and willing to share their knowledge.

Mark Christiansen is one of them. He’s patiently answered my e-mails and, on one of his own blogs, has posted a few great, sometimes unique, things that I’ve been tempted to purloin. Today, I’ve given in to temptation because he’s posted a picture of my favourite cartoon writer, Mike Maltese. And, as Maltese might have Pepé Le Pew say, “Quel belle de bon-us!” Warren Foster is there, too.



The photos come from a 1961 article in the TV-Radio Mirror, yet another one of those We-Got-Kicked-Out-By-MGM-But-Had-The-Last-Laugh stories. But it’s got pictures of some of the staff, and I was quite happy to see some people I’d never seen before.



Fernando Montealegre and Art Lozzi both worked for Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera at the MGM studio and came along (Dan Bessie, an assistant at MGM, notes in his autobiography there were two Fernandos at MGM, both from Costa Rica). Art is still living in Greece as far as I know, and I would love to hear from him some time.



Roberta Greutert, the head of ink and paint, worked under Art Goble at MGM. I’ve presumed as her married name was Marshall, she married Lew Marshall.



Frank Paiker (his name is misspelled in the caption) goes back to the silent era. He worked for the Bray Studio, then as an inker at the Fleischer Studio in the 1930s before he rose into management. He was an MGM refugee as well.



Alex Lovy’s career is pretty known. He worked in New York, came west to work at the Lantz studio, stopped for a time at Columbia before UPA took over its release schedule, then left Lantz a second time around the end of 1958 for a story director’s job at Hanna-Barbera.

The reposting of the full article is HERE.

Alex Lovy was the first person to be given credit as ‘Story Director’ on Hanna-Barbera cartoons and it’s a little confusing for some of us not in the animation business to figure out what Lovy did. The cartoons also boasted a ‘Director’ credit (to Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera) and in the 1960s, they also listed an ‘Animation Director’ (Nick Nichols, ex Disney) and a ‘Story Supervision’ credit (to Art Pierson, a former actor and writer and director of Broadway musicals).

To try to clear things up a bit, I asked Tony Benedict about it. Tony was the studio’s third writer and was hired in 1961. He explains:

Story Directors would time out the action and voice over recordings on to exposures sheets for animators.

Mark Evanier, probably known to TV watchers for his work on Garfield, wrote for Hanna-Barbera after Bill and Joe sold the company. He elaborates:

Alex did storyboards and directing. Hanna and Barbera were still officially the directors...which meant that Hanna was supposed to be the director. But more and more, he had other guys assisting him to the point where they did a lot more of it than he did. I would assume Alex was doing most of the timing and a lot of the boarding.

I'm sure H-B paid better [than Walter Lantz, where Lovy was a director before going to Hanna-Barbera] ...and Lantz was going through a period then when he didn't have a lot of work and all his people were looking around for other employment to fill in gaps and such. I'm sure Alex thought he had a much rosier future with H-B and a better paycheck.

Alex was an incredible board guy. I don't recall if he got the credit on it but he did the storyboard on that Yogi Christmas Special I wrote. Another guy originally boarded it and used up all the time on the schedule that they had for boarding (about a month)...then handed in something completely unusable. Alex was called in and he had to board the thing in about four days.

It’s possible Alex was hired after production began on the 1959-60 season of cartoons (the second season of Huck, the first season of the Quick Draw McGraw Show and the Loopy De Loop theatricals). Some of the cartoons give a ‘Story Sketches’ credit to Dan Gordon. Lovy’s credit displaced Gordon’s, though Gordon was still at the studio.

Whether it’s a case of Lovy’s timing or the writing of Warren Foster and Mike Maltese, I don’t know, but the cartoons seemed to feature a lot of more dialogue about this time.

Lovy was the studio’s only story director until 1961 when others started getting credit, including former animator Lew Marshall, Paul Sommer (ex Columbia director) and Art Davis (ex Columbia and Warners director). A few years later, Art Scott’s name appears. By that time, Lovy had moved up to ‘Associate Producer.’

Lovy was born in Passaic, New Jersey on September 2, 1913. Available Census records suggest he was an only child and raised by his mother Charlotte. They were in New York City in 1930 where, three years later, Lovy went to work for the Van Beuren Studio, which also was the employer of one Joseph Roland Barbera (and Carlo Vinci and Dan Gordon). It closed in 1936 and Lovy began drawing comic books. Mike Barrier reveals Lovy migrated to California in 1937 when he was hired by Walter Lantz as a story sketch artist for writer Vic McLeod. He became a director the following year and not only directed the first Andy Panda cartoon but came up with the first, goofy-looking design for Woody Woodpecker. He was drafted into the Navy in 1942 and returned to cartoon directing at Columbia in 1947. He left the following year. Edith Gwynn’s syndicated Hollywood column of July 1, 1948 has this curious tidbit:

Walt Disney will soon have independent competition in the cartoon field. One Alex Lovy is heading a new outfit with a revolutionary pastel color process.

That’s going to remain a mystery for now. Lovy’s name doesn’t appear in theatrical cartoons again until 1955 when he returned to Walter Lantz to direct before being hired at Hanna-Barbera (his final cartoon for Lantz was released in 1960). H-B was his home until 1988, except for a year-and-a-bit-long period directing Warners cartoons (1967-68) and creating the forgettable Cool Cat and Merlin the Magic Mouse. He also set up his own company, filing for incorporation in California on December 17, 1962.

Lovy doesn’t strike one as a ladies man but it seems he had no problem attracting them. His first marriage—Lantz signed the marriage certificate as a witness—came to a somewhat unusual end. This is from the Los Angeles Times of April 4, 1939:

WIFE SEEKING DIVORCE GOES TO COURT IN WHEEL CHAIR
She had lots of signatures, but not the one she wanted.
This was the experience yesterday of Monte Maxine Lovy, 23-year-old auburn-haired waitress, when she appeared in a wheel chair in the court of Superior Judge J.T.B. Warne seeking a divorce from Alex Terry Lovy, cartoon animator, on the grounds of cruelty.
The signatures in possession of the young woman were on the plaster of Paris cast she wore on her left leg as the result of a break received about six weeks ago in an automobile accident. The signature she most wanted was that of the judge, who couldn’t grant the decree until there was corroborating testimony.
Through her attorney, F. Murray Keslar, Mrs. Lovy explained that her witness had failed to appear and the court continued the case until today. The couple were married last May 15 and separated one month and 15 days afterward when Lovy assertedly told her he was dissatisfied.

Lovy was married again by 1943. His wife’s maiden name was Dotzler and her sister had married Frank Tipper, an animator at the Lantz studio. California Voter Registrations don’t show a Mrs. Lovy in 1944 or ’46, but he remarried in July 1947 to Vivian Jean, who was also a cartoonist. Their daughter Nicki had a career, starting in 1966, at Hanna-Barbera and several other studios.

Both Lovy and Art Scott were story directors on shows like Peter Potamus and Secret Squirrel and both moved up to become associate producers (don’t ask me what it is an associate producer does). Scott’s animation history has been documented far better; you can read about him in THIS 2000 story from Animation World and especially in THIS great interview with John Culhane from 1978 (from Didier Ghez’ Walt’s People, Volume 9).

Scott was born in Astoria, Oregon on October 18, 1914. He grew up in Vancouver, B.C. and died in Los Angeles on May 19, 1999. In between, he provided Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee voices in 1930s Warners cartoons, spent time at Disney (originally as Dick Lundy’s assistant in 1940), produced and drew cartoons that accompanied Capitol kids record soundtracks, and attained immortality by singing the “ooo-OOOON” in the opening and closing of the Beany and Cecil cartoons; he was Bob Clampett’s animation director.

But Tony Benedict remembers him best as someone who traded a lot of good-natured barbs with Alex Lovy. Oh, and for aliens. The space kind. More on that in a moment. Here are some great drawings by Tony of Art and Alex in action. Click on them to enlarge.



Kids, if you’ve ever wanted to draw your own Art Scott, Tony shows you how. I can only presume the tea is a leftover habit from Canada.


Tony explains that Art took an immense interest in creatures from another world. Naturally, Tony had to satirise that.


The one thing I haven’t touched on is Alex Lovy’s special talent—his ambidexterity. He spoke to historian Joe Adamson about it and explained he could write with both hands at the same time, the writing of one hand being the mirror image of the other. How? “I don’t know,” he said to Adamson. “All I know is it sure makes a hit with girls.”

Maybe that’s why Lovy and Art Scott got along so well. Writing with both hands is a talent that, to most of us, is alien.