The saddening news has come in that Jerry Eisenberg has died. He was 87.

Jerry was one of the crew at MGM under Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. He was a second-generation animation artist as his dad Harvey had worked with Barbera at Van Beuren in New York. Harvey later laid out cartoons for the Hanna-Barbera unit at Metro (Harvey is on the right of the photo) and was also responsible for the storyboard for Yogi's Birthday Party and the Top Cat opening animation.

After leaving MGM, Jerry worked under Ken Harris in the Chuck Jones unit at Warner Bros.

His name first shows up on the Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw McGraw shows in the 1961-62 season, providing layouts for Magician Jinks, Chilly Chiller and Person to Prison (both with Snooper and Blabber). He laid out the half-hour prime time shows in the 1960s and there are other credits you can find on-line.

Our sympathies go to Jerry’s wife, who is from the Maillardville area near Vancouver.

Jerry was kind enough to spend two and a half hours with me on the phone some years back. The interview has been transcribed in six parts. You can read part one here. He has a lot of fun stories because he was a fun guy, liked by everyone in the animation business, as best as I can tell. I'm sorry we never got a chance (due to technical issues on my end) to do another interview as there was so much more of his career we never discussed.

No, a character from The Flintstones didn’t one day suddenly cross over into the world of Pixie and Dixie (though it would make more sense than some of the ridiculous “Hanna-Barbera” cross-overs of today). This monster has been conjured up by Mr. Jinks in Magician Jinks, one of the last cartoons with the meeces put into production on the Huckleberry Hound Show.

And who is responsible for this incidental character?

To the right, you see the credits for this particular cartoon. You will notice the name of one Jerry Eisenberg. Jerry was newly-landed at Hanna-Barbera, which was continuing to expand its operations. The studio had The Flintstones and Top Cat in prime time, was still producing cartoons for the Huck, Yogi and Quick Draw half-hour shows for Kellogg’s, churning out the disappointing Loopy De Loop series for Columbia Pictures and working on new concepts, such as Hairbrain Hare. Jerry had already rubbed elbows with some of the great Golden Age artists who didn’t work for Walt Disney. He came from Warner Bros. and had already worked for Joe Barbera as an assistant in-betweener at MGM before the company decided to shut down its cartoon studio. His father was Harvey Eisenberg, known perhaps more for his work in comic books than animation, which went back to the days of the Van Beuren studio in New York.

For a minute, it appears as if Alfie Gator will succeed in his quest for a culinary delight—a duck dinner (out of camera range, Fibber Fox swats the gator’s butt, forcing Yakky Doodle back out of his mouth. Alas). Alfie was a parody of Alfred Hitchcock, specifically the TV host version, where Hitch would appear in silhouette to “Funeral March of a Marionette” and introduce tonight’s stawwww-ry.

Alfie was one of the characters created by the writer whose name you see on the right. Tony Benedict arrived at Hanna-Barbera from UPA and was put to work drawing story sketches. He was soon working on stories for Huck Hound and Yakky Doodle in addition to The Flintstones, The Jetsons and so on. My favourite creation of Tony’s is the comic relief dog Astro. Tony stayed on at Hanna-Barbera until the rise of adventure cartoons and the studio’s sale by Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera, and various Columbia pictures interests to Taft Broadcasting. Before his stop at UPA, he began his animation career at Walt Disney.

The credits you see to the right are not from a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. The title card is from the Beany and Cecil show from Bob Clampett’s studio. Clampett had a bunch of plans for various animated series, including one starring Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, but things fell apart when prime time cartoons failed in 1961-62 and the networks, for the most part, stayed away from the idea. Willie Ito then moved on to Hanna-Barbera where he provided layouts for a number of series. Like Eisenberg, he had worked in the Chuck Jones unit at Warner Bros. and like Benedict, he got some early grounding at Walt Disney (where he eventually returned).

Getting the opportunity to hear first-hand experiences in animation from these veterans should never be missed. That opportunity is today. The three will be appearing on “Stu’s Show,” which has become far more elaborate and graduated to streaming video (you can still listen to the programme as well). Want tales about putting together The Flintstones? Want to learn what Joe Barbera ate for lunch? Want to hear what kind of practical jokes O.B. Barkley pulled? (O.B. was an assistant animator at MGM and Warners). If anyone knows, it’s these men.

Read more below to find out more about this afternoon’s show. Click here for the link to the broadcast at 4 p.m. Pacific.

Have you got an hour to hear about Hanna-Barbera? Good. Then settle back and watch this video taken at this year’s Wonder Con in Anaheim, California. Former layout artist Jerry Eisenberg, writer Tony Benedict and voice director Wally Burr talk about their creations and co-workers at the studio.

Having chatted with Jerry and Tony (and you can read Jerry’s chat here on the blog), I can’t express enough what friendly and genuine people they are, though you’ll pick that up from the video. Both had many contributions to the comedy cartoons the studio made in the 1960. Mr. Burr was employed at the studio in a later period and had the distinction of being hired by Bill Hanna and fired by Joe Barbera. He tells a funny tale of voice directing Daws Butler in “Laff-a-Lympics,” though I’m at a loss to understand why Mr. Burr just didn’t level with Daws about who was giving the order.

The highlight may be Tony’s video featuring candid footage from the ‘60s of the people he worked with. You may notice it has music by Hoyt Curtin for “Top Cat” and other shows from that period which has never been released on DVD.

The session is coaxed along by another extremely friendly and genuine person, Mark Evanier. I can’t help but think that cartoon writer Earl Kress would have been there, too, if Earl were still with us.



My thanks to Mr. Benj. Edge for pointing out this video. I hope it hasn’t been taken down by the time you read this.

Time to empty some of the mailbox and see what readers have sent. And we’ll have an extra treat at the end.

Billie Towzer has made another journey around the internet and passes on some ads for Hanna-Barbera’s best shows. Kellogg’s bought 5:30-6:00 p.m. on a station in Springfield, Missouri. H-B must have had all kinds of art available for advertising use based on its cartoons. Huck appeared in desert garb in “Legion Bound Hound” while Quick Draw took on a (white) bull in “Bull-Leave Me.”



These ads are from TV Guide for the 1966 Alice special. There were a bunch of things I didn’t like about it at the time (and I haven’t seen it in its entirety since its original airing) which I’ve mentioned here before, but Janet Waldo, Howie Morris, Harvey Korman and some of the other voice actors do a nice job.



Mike Clark has what, no doubt, is a satisfying little avocation. He runs a historical website about WTVT, Channel 13, in Tampa, Florida and has sent me a photo and some background.

Sometime around '61 or '62 (you'd probably know the date better than I would) Channel 13 bought the H-B package of programs. As a promotional gimmick Screen Gems sent H-B character costumes to Tampa (I don't know if the people inside were from Hollywood or if WTVT hired locals) and they were photographed "arriving" at Tampa Airport. Meeting them was WTVT's general manager, Gene Dodson (the man on the right). The other fellow in the shot strongly resembles the station's promotion director at the time, Ned Jay, but I can't absolutely confirm that. He is shaking Mr. Dodson's hand which suggests he may be from outside the employment of WTVT....perhaps he is from Screen Gems. This is my 'best guess.'

The children in the photo are probably those of WTVT staffers. You'll note that some of them are barefoot, which in the south was farely common (as a youngster I used to be barefoot at the store, believe it or not). In fact, Mr. Dodson is rather casually dressed as well.

WTVT also produced a special telecast that aired twice. The program was videotaped with their mobile unit and showed the H-B characters walking along the streets of Tampa in search of WTVT. No video or stills exist of this program....but I remember seeing it at the time.

The photo is courtesy of BIG13.com. Mike would like you to know you can see stories about the local kids show hosts where the HB cartoons were shown at the BIG13 web site. Looking at old photos from TV’s past is always worthwhile.



Brent Pearson saw the posting about Jerry Hathcock and passed on a shot of a drawing that Jerry did for him of Dino. Jerry had worked at Disney and arrived at H-B to work on “The Flintstones.” He also animated on “Jonny Quest.”



Occasionally, I get notes from people asking how much cartoon art is worth or where to sell it. I’m a cartoon dog, not an appraiser, so I honestly don’t know how much anything is worth. There are several places that sell animation art; an on-line search will net a few names. Of course, people also sell through on-line sites.

Tim Hollis sent me this sad clipping and attached a note:

I found this Associated Press photo in a May 2, 1962 newspaper. It certainly shows that H-B toys could be good for more than just being future collectibles and museum pieces! This certainly has to be one of their grimmest media appearances, though. Sort of makes one wonder whatever became of that little girl, who would be 61 years old now.

By the way, Tim passes on word he’s working on the records chapter of TOONS IN TOYLAND and about to plunge into the Hanna-Barbera Records story. When isn’t he writing a book?

Finally, someone asked me about Alfy Gator, who appeared in four “Yakky Doodle” cartoons. Fibber Fox is my favourite Yakky character and Alfy’s second. Tony Benedict gets the story credit on the Alfy cartoons so I asked him how the character was invented.

Alphy Gator was mine from the start. I was a big time Hitchcock fan. His characters often got away with serious crimes in the body of the show. Only after the last commercial in the epilogue Hitch would inform the audience that the bad guy was eventually caught and sent to jail. That little twist always amused me.

Tony sent me a great drawing of the H-B characters combined with old and new pictures of him and layout artist Jerry Eisenberg (and Joe and Bill from their early MGM days) at an internet cafe. If he wants me to take it down, I will, but the characters look so good in this, I thought I’d pass it on. The drawings even have shadows. Tony is working on a project involving his time in animation, including Hanna-Barbera, and I hope it comes about soon.



Thanks to everyone who has helped with this post.

If you’d like to read the full interview starting at the beginning, click HERE and click on the links at the end of each part to continue.

What follows is a hodgepodge of reminiscences by Jerry of his work—in no chronological or particular order—at the end of our chat.

You may have noticed nowhere does a name come up that is synonymous with Hanna-Barbera cartoons—Hoyt Curtin. Jerry mentioned him when I talked to him several days before the interview and simply said he saw him around the studio sometimes.

The impression I get from Jerry’s comments throughout our talk was he spent a lot of time in his layout room with Iwao Takamoto (who wrote an interesting autobiography) but not an awful lot with the rest of the staff, hence his paucity of remembrances about other H-B co-workers, at least when it comes to the period I was interested in. He’s invited me to call again some time and talk some more.

Just a note about Alan Dinehart. Alan changed his name in 1936 because of his son. Here’s a short newspaper story:

Alan Dinehart Has His Name Changed
HOLLYWOOD, Aug. 8 (UP). — Alan Dinehart, writer and screen actor, was baptized “Harold Alan” but today was legally named Mason Alan Dinehart. He applied for the change of name for his writing but will continue as Alan Dinehart on the screen. Mrs. Dinehart, whose stage name was Mozeig Britton, explained his 11-weeks-old son could now legally become Alan Dinehart III, as the actor-author’s father was Mason Alan Dinehart.

Someone asked me before the interview to ask about the death of Jerry’s dad, the wonderful comic artist Harvey Eisenberg. That’ll come up in a moment. Here’s the last part of our conversation.

Yowp: You left Hanna-Barbera when?

Jerry: I left the first time in 1975. I was doing some freelance work, helping to develop a feature project for a Japanese company. I even took a leave of absence for six months to go to Tokyo for some final development. And while I was there, this friend of mine who was in layout with us, his name was Takashi [Masunaga], he’s the one who came up with the idea for that feature. It was based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I read a book on a lot of his stories. We did about five stories in the feature. I read one called Pyramus and Thisbe and thinking “This is Romeo and Juliet.” So Shakespeare got his idea from Ovid. While I was in Tokyo, we’re having a drink one night and he said “Hey, we’re ready to go into production in a couple of weeks.” And I was thinking “You know, I don’t just want to work on this on the side. I want to work on it full time.” So, when I came back, I gave my notice. It was an easy decision because I loved the feature project and it gave me a lot of new experiences. I got to be a sequence director. I had never done animation directing. And I had some really good animators that gave me a lot of help.

Yowp: What was Joe’s reaction to you giving your notice?

Jerry: He was always pretty cool about things. Who knows what he was saying privately. I was there for two years on the feature. During the second year, I was helping Ruby and Spears. They were working in house at ABC, which was near us in Hollywood. We were down on Sunset and Vine and ABC was just down the street on Vine. And they’d come over and they’d ask me if I could do some freelance work for them developing some stuff. The network was doing their own in-house development. Silverman was in charge in those days and if he’d like something, then he’d go to the studios and have them develop it further. And it was...what was your question?

Yowp: What Joe’s reaction was to your resignation.

Jerry: Oh, here’s what I was getting at. A couple of times, I’d meet with Joe [Ruby] and Ken [Spears] for lunch and they’d have one of the fellows from the network, Peter Roth, a really nice young guy, and we were meeting at the Villa Capri in Hollywood, and that was one of Joe’s favourite places. When we got up to leave, I heard my name and it was Joe [Barbera] calling. So I went over to him and spoke to him and he said “How’s things going” and I said “Well, things are winding down at San Rio and they want me to stay on for a year and do a comic strip for them. I’m not sure if I’m interested in that.” And he said “Well, why don’t you come and meet with me, I’d like to get you back at Hanna-Barbera.” So, I ended up going back to Hanna-Barbera and he treated me so well. It’s interesting. In those days, you used to hear when people would leave they’d be treated better when they came back. That was my experience. He let me do what I wanted to do and there was no haggling about how much money I wanted. I felt bad when Ruby and Spears approached me about three, four months later and said “We have an opportunity to open our own studio and we’d like you to be our producer and art director.” And I was very interested, but I said “I wish you guys were doing this about a year or so from now because Joe just brought me back.” I really had mixed emotions but it offered me more new experiences. I got to be a producer. And I was offered participation, besides net profits. I mean royalties on stuff I would design.

Yowp: Are you still collecting from that?

Jerry: No. Unless they do some new episodes. I wasn’t thinking about syndication.

Yowp: You were mentioning studios would shut down for periods of time. Was that the case at the time you arrived at Hanna-Barbera?

Jerry: It was only at Warners Bros. I experienced that. They would send out something to all the employees. They would show like maybe three different two-week periods in the summer. One could be in June, July and August. And people would vote for the period they wanted. So whichever got the biggest vote, the whole studio would close. Everybody would have to be off for two weeks at that time.

Yowp: But Hanna-Barbera kept operating twelve months a year.

Jerry: Oh, yeah. But a lot of people were seasonal. When a production was finished, not everybody could shift into development. Our development group was maybe an average of six or seven artists, three or four writers or so.

Yowp: Was there ever a time that a series, say The Flintstones, wouldn’t be in production?

Jerry: Usually production would go for six months. Maybe The Flintstones could have gone a little bit longer because they were half-hour shows. Once the production was over, we’d go into development starting in October and it would last until March, sometimes April, then back into production.

Yowp: I’ve seen stuff about voice actors coming over the winter months to record.

Jerry: Unless it was redoing something. You know, I remember the first voice of Flintstone, Alan Reed. He looked like Flintstone. I couldn’t get over it. I’d bump into him sometimes when he’d come in the studio. Very nice man. And he was from radio. And in some movies. Did you ever see the Marlon Brando film Viva Zapata?

Yowp: No.

Jerry: Alan played Pancho Villa and he was terrific in that.

Yowp: Did you have much interaction with Daws or Mel Blanc or the other voice actors?

Jerry: Once in a while, but not a lot.

Yowp: Because I figured they’d come in and Joe Barbera would direct them, or Alan Dinehart, then they’d go home.

Jerry: Oh, Dinehart was great. What a funny man. He dressed very flamboyantly. He always had a funny joke. Oh, let me tell you something about Alan. In World War Two, I knew him for 18 years before I found this out—he was in the O.S.S. He was a spy. He and a team of four others, he told me, they would be in German uniforms, working behind the lines. I know how it came about. I was working with Joe and Ken at Ruby-Spears and Joe was telling me “Oh, I was at Alan’s house for a dinner party on Saturday night and last week I was asking him ‘Who’s going to be there?’ and one of the people he mentioned was William Webster.” And Webster was either, at that time, still the head of the FBI or the former head. And Joe thought “Ah, sure, sure.” Then he said “When I got there, there he was.” And it came out that Webster was in the O.S.S. with Alan during the war. I feel a chill now thinking about it. And Alan never said a word for 18 years. You know how some people will brag about almost nothing.

Yowp: All I know about him is he was directing live television before Joe Barbera called him to offer him a job.

Jerry: Well, the way I heard it from Alan was that he was directing live television back in New York, mostly comedy stuff. Alan told me “John Mitchell asked me to come out with Hanna-Barbera.” But then, one time, Joe said “I brought him out.” I think I believe Alan’s story.
I was getting together with him once in a while and I would ask him “What can tell me about your days in the O.S.S. that’s still not classified?” because he was, technically, like still in the C.I.A., even though he wasn’t active. He said “I’ll call you, I’m going to be in town next week.” So he didn’t call. And then two week later, his son called and said “Dad was in the hospital, had some stomach problems and he died suddenly, unexpectedly. The doctor was surprised.” [Dinehart died March 14, 1992]. What a wonderful man. And what a brave guy to be in the O.S.S. He could speak fluent German and impersonate different types.

Yowp: Joe Barbera was briefly in the comic book business with your father. Did your dad tell you anything about it?

Jerry: Somewhere in the late ’40s, he and Joe teamed up. It was all secret. They published a copy of comics called Red Rabbit and Foxy Fagan. It was being printed back in Chicago. And I remember my father saying to me, I was a kid, “Don’t say anything to your friends because I’m under contract to Western Publishing and Joe was under contract to MGM.” And it probably lasted a couple of years and I guess they both got too busy to continue it. Or maybe the sales started lagging or something.

Yowp: When did he leave MGM?

Jerry: My father left, I think, in 1945, ’46, somewhere in there.

Yowp: And that’s when Bick took over?

Jerry: Yeah, probably. I only got to know him when I got to Hanna-Barbera in 1961.

Yowp: Kenny Muse was at MGM when you were there. Were you close to him?

Jerry: Not close to him, but I’d see him there. He was a nice man. I think he had a hearing aid. Oh, he was a machine. I think I also heard he had a problem with one or both of his ears, some kind of pain. He used to drink, too. Maybe that would dull the pain.

Yowp: I gather a lot of guys drank back then. Did it interfere with work that much?

Jerry: Most of them could handle it. There was a young guy who worked in our layout department, Joel, and he could drink but it never affected him. One day, we went to lunch at this Chinese restaurant that was real popular and I think he had about ten martinis. But it didn’t affect him.

Yowp: He went back to work that afternoon?!

Jerry: Yeah. We were all in the layout department. His name was Joel Seibel. He lives in Minnesota now, but he does freelance work from there. Joel must have joined us in the late ‘60s, mid ‘60s. In fact, the famous Ernie Nordli from Disney joined us at Hanna-Barbera for awhile. He was terrific. And a nice person.

Yowp: I was told he committed suicide [in 1968]. And his son committed suicide about 15 years later [in 1984]. I saw his name on at least one of the Yogi shorts. I don’t know if he worked on the Yogi feature. But I understand Friz did.

Jerry: Yeah, he came over before the feature. I think he came over in ’62 because that’s when Warners closed their division. He came in with a guy named Vic Haboush. He eventually opened his own commercial studio called the Haboush Company. They did wonderful stuff. But he and Friz were developing some ideas because I remember seeing some storyboards they had on the wall. You know, I can’t tell you what the project was. I can’t remember it.

Yowp: That was at Hanna-Barbera.

Jerry: At Hanna-Barbera. They were probably there not more than six months, I’m sure, because when was it that Friz and David DePatie opened up DePatie-Freleng?

Yowp: Some time in 1963.

Jerry: They probably were planning that so he didn’t stay at Hanna-Barbera very long. DePatie was a film editor at Warner Bros. and David’s father was E.L. DePatie, Jack Warner’s number two man, or number one man. And E.L. put David into the cartoon division when I was still there. He was made the producer.

Yowp: That’s when John Burton left.

Jerry: Yeah. He was the production manager when I started there, then he became the producer when Ed Selzer retired but then David DePatie was put in there by his father and I guess they moved John Burton out.

Yowp: Jerry, what about your dad? Did he just retire from comics, or—

Jerry: No, no. He passed away. He died, it was heart trouble, back in 1965. Unfortunately, there was so many things I thought of since then to ask him that I wish I had thought of back then, but I was still pretty young. He had a couple of heart attacks and I remember I saw him for the last time in ICU, and he looked so good when my sister and I went in there, and it looked like he was really recovering. And I got a call at 4 in the morning the next morning that he had passed away. My father was only 53. But, you see, in those days I don’t think they were doing bypasses. I think he would have lived longer if they had already started doing them in those days.

Yowp: Are there any specific shows you designed you remember best, not series but individual cartoons?

Jerry: I wish I could remember certain episodes. I can’t. But I worked besides, Pixie and Dixie, [on] Snagglepuss, Hokey Wolf. I worked on so much. There was Secret Squirrel, Atom Ant, Inch High Private Eye, Squiddly Diddly. There was Touché Turtle. They used to call Iwao and me, I’m tall and Iwao was real short. They’d call him Touche and I was the dog in the show, Dumm Dumm. The Hair Bear Bunch, I remember designing those and did layout work on them. And Iwao and I did the presentation storyboard. Oh, and there was a couple of cute little shows we did presentation boards for, the Space Kidettes and Frankenstein, Jr. and the Impossibles.

Yowp: So you designed the characters on the Space Kidettes?

Jerry: All the little kids? I pretty much did all those. Who else designed stuff? Iwao, myself. I remember Willie designing a dog called Goober. There was a show called Goober and the Ghost Chasers. And then there was a man named Bill Perez. I don’t know if he designed any characters but he designed a lot of titles for Joe. He was very good at title designs, because Bill came over from UPA. I loved what they used to do at UPA. Really nice, modern stuff.

Yowp: When I was a kid, I saw their TV stuff and I thought how incredibly bad it was. I’d rather watch Huckleberry Hound.

Jerry: Well, Joe used to do a lot of the writing in the early years. I remember one night I was over there and he was showing me he was drawing his script, like Tony Benedict and Mike Maltese used to.
Don Jurwich was producing the Tom and Jerry Kids series. Don got me to come back and I met with Joe to work with them on that back in ’89. And we did that for about five or six years and it was really great to work with Joe who was very actively involved. And we’d go over the storyboards with him, and he was funny, and came up with all kinds of funny stuff.

Yowp: Was Don at Disney?

Jerry: He joined us in Hanna-Barbera in the mid to late ‘60s. He had worked in the Cartoonists Guild at other studios like Jay Ward, on Rocky and Bullwinkle. Don was mainly a layout man and also he could write. In fact, he and I and this writer Jim Ryan created a short for that short programme at Hanna-Barbera and Don and I co-directed it. It was a good collaboration. It was great working with Don and Joe on Tom and Jerry Kids. One of the elements in the show was Droopy. Then we did the Droopy show for one season. There was two shorts of Droopy then a character called Screwball Squirrel which Tex Avery had done back in the ‘40s. I liked that squirrel character.

Yowp: The writers were kind of limited, though, weren’t they? They weren’t allowed to do some of the funny violence gags Tex used to come up with.

Jerry: In the early years at Hanna-Barbera, we’d use guns and stuff but eventually that all got phased out. Standards and Practices. We never had to deal with them in the early years at Hanna-Barbera. And when they’ve rerun old cartoons over the years, they’ve had to edit out certain violent things. The old Bugs Bunny things.
I remember when I worked at Warner Bros. helping to do the assistant work on the opening titles for The Bugs Bunny Show.

Yowp: I understand Gerry Chiniquy was the animator on at least some of that.

Jerry: Oh, probably. I think Ken Harris and I did some of the stuff. Maybe all the units were involved in that show. They would show some of the old cartoons but with new animation in between them. I liked it. We must have done that back in 1960.
But those were the days. I remember when The Huckleberry Hound Show came out and Yogi Bear. Wow, it made such a big hit. That really put them on the map. I’m sure Hanna and Barbera did very well with the merchandising.

Yowp: You didn’t have anything to do with that end of it?

Jerry: Nope. They had some guy back east who was handling merchandising for them at one time, Ed Justin.

With that, we wrapped up the interview. I hope it’s been worth your time reading.

What some consider the ultimate Jetsons episode is the one I liked the least when it first aired on September 30, 1962—A Date With Jet Screamer. As an almost six year old, I couldn’t understand why Judy was nuts over some singer. And, worse still, the cartoon got interrupted. I wanted to see Astro saying “Right, Rorge.” Or Uniblab being a sleazy executive. Or Cogswell making fun of Spacely. Or some invention of the future screwing up. Instead, the plot came to a complete halt for a song with some drawings that had nothing to do with the main characters.

Little did I realise the cartoon wasn’t designed for the going-on-six demographic.

The animation style and concept is a rarity for Hanna-Barbera. While I still don’t understand why girls go nuts over teenaged singers, I can watch the animation of what amounts to a cartoon music video and appreciate the work that went into it. It may be Howie Morris’ finest H-B acting job. And Jerry Eisenberg was a part of it, along with someone you wouldn’t expect to find at Hanna-Barbera. We’ll get to that in a moment.

Four animators did all the work in the first couple of years at Hanna-Barbera—Mike Lah, Ken Muse, Lew Marshall and Carlo Vinci, all from MGM. After the MGM studio shut down in early 1957, Marshall got a job in May at Animation, Inc., a commercial house. H-B was getting into business about that time. Lew had a lengthy career at the studio. I asked Jerry about him.

Jerry: Yeah, he became a story director at Hanna-Barbera and did storyboards, and associate producing, like Alex Lovy did.

Yowp: You say that when the studio started, Lew and some others were promised a piece of the action?

Jerry: Well, I was talking to Lew one day, this was years ago, and he told me when they were at the Chaplin Studio, that’s where Hanna-Barbera started there on La Brea—Charlie Chaplin had built a studio once and they were leasing part of it and they were also renting space several blocks down for the ink and paint department—but Lew said “Hanna came into my room one day and he took the waste basket, turned it upside down and sat down,” I guess they didn’t have any guest chairs, “And he said ‘Hey, Lew, if you and the other guys’ (meaning Bick, Monte and whoever the core group was that started out with them) he said ‘Listen, if you guys stick with us and we make a success and stay in business, well, we’d like you guys to share in a couple of points.’” Which was nice of him to say that, but he didn’t keep his word. I don’t like that. He didn’t have to say that. But I just figure ‘shame on him’ because, you know, he died, I’m sure he had more than a few hundred million dollars in his estate and what if he had a few million less? Big deal. Those things bother me, you know. If I give my word to someone, I keep it. I didn’t like that about Hanna. I don’t know why the guys didn’t get together and call him on that back then.

Yowp: I guess probably because they didn’t have anything in writing.

Jerry: Yeah, but they could have almost threatened a walkout. Hollywood has always done business with a handshake, so it was like on that level. Like my father, he wasn’t business-like when he gave Joe that idea that became The Flintstones. I mean, if he had been more business-minded and really smart, since Alan [Dinehart] was there as a witness, he could have said “You know, Joe, I’ve got an idea that might help you but what’s in it for me? I’d like to get a finder’s fee or maybe something.” Because he [Joe] never mentioned it to me when he was alive. It was his ego, I guess. I said to Alan “You know, he should have sent my father a cheque, maybe $25,000 after they sold the show.” And Alan said “Bullsht! He should have sent him $250,000.” But, it’s a shame, you know. That disappointed me about Joe. But I still liked him. I guess I always preferred him to Hanna.

Yowp: Was Joe difficult to work for?

Jerry: No, not, Joe. Hanna was bit difficult. At first, I would negotiate with him, like if I wanted a raise. And that wasn’t very good, so I was so glad when I didn’t have to deal with him any more when Joe really made the layout department his department.

Yowp: I gather Schipek handled the production end of things as opposed to the business end.

Jerry: That’s right. Bill Schipek became the production manager after Howard Hanson left. And Howard wasn’t treated that well and he goes back to the MGM days. He worked with Bill and Joe at MGM.

Yowp: So what exactly did those guys do?

Jerry: Production Managers? They would keep track of where everyone was, they’d have to deal with the animators, the layout men, or the department heads. They would be responsible for making up a production schedule so to speak and giving everybody the dates when stuff is due. And also coordinating with the camera department and ink and paint. Any kind of production they would be manager-ing.

Yowp: So would they decide which animators would work on a series or a cartoon?

Jerry: No. That went through Nick Nichols. And, later on, Nick had some of the animators helping him with the supervision, like Ray Patterson and maybe Jerry Hathcock, who came over from Disney. It’s like in layout. When they formalised the department and asked Iwao if he’d be the supervisor, but then there were, you might say, sub-supervisors. I was supervising a couple of shows or so in layout. Because one the studio really started growing big, you just can’t have one person to the managing.
Nichols came over from Disney and when I started full-time, I think Nick was already there.

Yowp: Can you give some memories of Alex Lovy?

Jerry: We loved the work he did. His storyboards were the most fun. Well, also Tony Benedict, who also drew his scripts, he had a funny style. Alex’s style was so fluid, like my father, his stuff really flowed. And the way he would draw some of the characters was funnier than the model sheets. And he was just a funny person. He would come around and joke around with us, and he was just nice to be around. Very, very talented. And he could draw with both hands.

Yowp: Did he draw storyboards with both hands?

Jerry: He could. I don’t know if he did it at the same time. He goes back to the days in New York. I don’t know if he worked with Joe Barbera, like my father did in New York, but they must have all known each other.

Yowp: Did you work closely with guys like Kenny Muse or Carlo Vinci?

Jerry: Not really, that I can recall. It wasn’t set up like that. They would maybe have to confer with Nick or Bill Hanna or even Joe Barbera sometimes on a timing question. I guess later on when I got into producing and stuff with Ruby and Spears, sometimes we’d have to talk to the director and ask him to tighten up some of the timing or make something happen quicker. Timing is so important. You know, Friz Freleng was a master of timing. Oh, his stuff was so good. It really makes a difference.

Yowp: Was there any particular background artist you preferred working with, as opposed to another?

Jerry: Naw, there were a lot of good ones. I loved Monte’s [Fernando Montealegre] work. And Art Lozzi. Monte did beautiful work. He was quite talented. He was working in background [at MGM] with Bob Gentle. Actually, he used to take photographs. He’d come over to my in-between room and take photographs of me. And one day I walked into his room and Jack Nicholson was sitting on a stool and Monte was taking some portraits of him. And I never asked Monte later on to show me the photos.

Yowp: Was Monte later drawing portraits from them?

Jerry: Not paintings. Just photo portraits. He would give us 8 by 10 enlargements. He’d give me three different poses, you might say. It’s a nice souvenir but I never saw the ones he did of Jack or anyone else.

Yowp: Virgil Ross’ name is on an Augie Doggie cartoon [Let’s Duck Out]. But was he still in Freleng’s unit at Warner’s at the time? I’m presume he would have been working on a freelance basis.

Jerry: Yeah, probably. Another man in Friz’ unit was Art Davis [later an animator and story director at Hanna-Barbera]. He was a nice man and very talented. And Friz had a great layout man. Hawley Pratt. A funny thing about him. Our in-between room [at Warners], the bull-pen, was next to his office. And every once in awhile, he’d sneeze. And as soon as he’d sneeze, he’d give out this huge yell and wake up the whole studio.
I know that Friz had Yosemite Sam designed and his personality after himself. He seemed like Yosemite Sam. He would even talk like him sometimes. Of course, Tweety Bird, he had his daughter Sybil in mind. He had two daughters. Sybil, I think was the first one.
We had a young guy that came in [to Warners] after Mike [Maltese] left. A young writer [from] Peterson Publications. He did a lot of car magazines, Carl Kohler, he worked with us at the studio as a writer and, in fact, he got Willie and me to do a little freelance work. We did some comic book work for Peterson, it was called CarToons.

Yowp: He did a Huckleberry Hound cartoon, too.

Jerry: I don’t remember if he worked in with us at Hanna-Barbera. I just knew him at Warner Bros. I knew him. He was a nice guy. He was fun to be around.

Yowp: Were there a lot of guys, like Kohler, or Manny Perez, that Hanna-Barbera brought in just to freelance?

Jerry: Probably. Gosh, I remember by 1970, when we were doing the Superfriends, the studio got so busy. Boy, Joe sold a lot of shows. The previous year, we were averaging 1,200 feet of animation per week. All of a sudden, it went to 5,000 or so. So that’s what caused Bill Hanna to have to go out of the country looking for help. There weren’t enough people here. That’s when he started with Japan and, of course, it went to Korea and the Phillipines, and places like that, Australia. [Later], Disney bought it. My complaint was, years later, by the ’80s and ‘90s, there was too much management and middle-management. Hanna-Barbera used to run a very tight ship. You didn’t have a ton of vice-presidents. Then you’d have people under them. And everybody had to have an assistant. I felt there should have been runaway management sometimes, not so much runaway production.
Hanna ran a tight ship because he was kind of a tightwad. He probably didn’t want to spend the extra money. You know, a lot of us used to do stuff ourselves that maybe today they use a secretary or another assistant to do. A lot of featherbedding goes on.

Yowp: Let me ask about your dad. I don’t recall seeing his name on any cartoons. Did he get any credits anywhere?

Jerry: When he worked in New York, he started as an inker. I used to watch him ink his comics. When he was doing the Tom and Jerry comic books he used to do everything in the beginning. He would draw it, ink it and letter it. And, oh, he was so good and so facile with a brush. Then, he got into in-betweening in New York and then assistant animation. But then when Joe Barbera came out to the West Coast and when he and Bill formed a unit at MGM, he kept in touch with my father and the way I heard it was he asked “Harvey, why don’t you come out and work with us here at MGM?” That’s probably when my father started in layout unless he was already doing some layout in New York.
He worked in the same room with Joe. And Irv Spence was there. They used to have more fun. My mother said my father came home one day with just his jacket and pants on. His shirt had been ripped off. They did wild things over there.
Irv was working next door to my father and Joe. They used to play tricks on each other. They’d do things like, water balloons. They’d suspend a balloon over a desk and drop it on someone. And so Irv, the way I heard it, Joe was telling me this, he had all these empty film cans stacked up on his animation desk and they were attached to a string that went to the door. So if somebody started opening the door to try to pull a prank on them, it would knock over the film cans. It was like his burglar alarm. So what my father and Joe did was they figured out where Irv was sitting on the other side of the wall. They must have done some measuring when he wasn’t there. They drilled a couple of holes in the wall. So when Irv came back from lunch, and he set up his alarm system with the cans and everything, and he sat down and he starts working, Joe and my father got these two straws and they would get a mouthful of water, and they’d stick the straws in the hole and blow the water on Irv. And when they did that, they heard this big crashing sound of the film cans falling. Stuff like that. I haven’t heard too many other stories.

Yowp: Did stuff like that happen at Hanna-Barbera, or was it pretty much nose-to-the-grindstone?

Jerry: A little of both. What we did to have fun, there was always a lot of gag cartoons being drawn. That’s another unique thing about the animation business. At all the studios they would do gag cartoons of each other. And of the bosses. Guys used to do Disney. Or Joe and Bill. Like Iwao Takamoto. He did so many gag cartoons, mostly of him and me. You know, I guess I was giving him a lot of material. His sense of humour really came out in those gag cartoons. He was such a great artist. Boy, could he draw. And I saved them all. They’re just beautiful. I always thought it would be nice some day if we could publish a book on stuff like that, the stuff they did at Disney’s, MGM, Warners and Hanna-Barbera, for instance. Tony [Benedict] once did one of me playing basketball and then he had all this written stuff saying, you know, ‘Jerry Eisenberg would average 24.3 cheeseburgers per game.’ I was a pretty big eater in those days.

Yowp: You’ve just reminded me of a story about you in a Yogi Bear costume, helping Joe Barbera get the Banana Splits on the air [in 1968].

Jerry: When we were developing the Splits, at some point, for some reason, the sponsors, Kellogg’s was interested, and the network didn’t quite understand [it]. I remember designing the Banana Splits and he would show them the design, saying “These are going to be made into costumes and we’re going to have people wearing the costumes.” Because it was really a live-action show. Joe was going to go back to Chicago to the Leo Burnett agency and the people from Kellogg’s were going to fly over from Michigan, and I don’t know if there was any network people there, but Joe had me go back with him. He wanted me to wear this Yogi Bear suit. It wasn’t one of the Banana Splits designs but it was just to show them the idea of the show. So I flew back with him and I had to do some lettering and some stuff, anyway. And the night before, we rehearsed. Joe’s agent Cy Fischer was there at the hotel and the plan was the next day we were going to use this conference room and I was going to be waiting in a smaller room just off the conference room and Joe was going to start making his pitch. At a certain point, I would enter, I’d open the door and came out in the Yogi Bear suit. And it was almost like a light bulb would go over everybody’s head, they got it. And, so, Joe had me to like a little ‘Shuffle Off to Buffalo’ dance with him, like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby used to do. He told me “Just walk around the room and sort of ad-lib.” I would touch somebody on the shoulder, this and that. Somebody told me they remember me sitting on somebody’s lap. I don’t remember that. But there was one empty chair at the end of the table where Joe was. It was left there on purpose. So I took a seat. And I’m sitting there, and I cross my legs. And Joe is continuing with his pitch. Then after a couple of minutes, he stops and looks at me and says “Aw, you can leave now.” So I get up, act kind of huffy, and I put my hands on my hips and stalk off. And they love it! In fact, Cy Fischer told me that sitting next to him was maybe the head of Kellogg’s or something and the guy passes him and note and he said ‘You’ve got a show’ or something like that. They wanted to sponsor it.

Yowp: Was the Banana Splits always in development as a live action show?

Jerry: That’s right. I had to design costumes for people to wear. It was never intended to be animation.

Yowp: Was this a case of Joe coming down and saying “I’m looking for a costume-type show” or was that something you pitched to him?

Jerry: No, I didn’t pitch it. He came to us with it. I don’t know where the initial idea came from. It could have come from him, it could have come from one of his writers. Maybe someone at the network, even. It’s funny, I never thought to question it. I could have said “Hey, Joe” or “Mr. B., whose idea was that, how did that develop?” None of us seemed to care about that.

Yowp: That brings up something else. Did you call Joe by his first name?

Jerry: No. I always called him Mr. B. Of course, one time, he used to call me “Geraldine” once in a while. I’d carry on and put on kind of a fey act. And one time I called him “Josephine.” He didn’t seem to mind. He was always Mr. B. It didn’t seem right [using his first name only]. For the older guys that were in his age bracket, that would be okay.

Yowp: I’m backing up in time a bit because I never got a chance to ask about The Jetsons. I’m presuming the main characters were designed before you got involved. Did you design any of the secondary characters?

Jerry: I remember trying to design the main characters, actually. Sometimes, it would be a blend. I know Iwao designed Astro the dog. And I think one or two of the other characters might have been ultimatedly designed by Bick. Or maybe Ed Benedict was involved.

Yowp: And Bobe Cannon worked on The Jetsons.

Jerry: In fact, Joe brought him in to help on a song sequence, the only song that was done in the whole Jetsons series. And I was lucky. Joe assigned me to work with Bobe and to lay out the sequence. Bobe was such a nice person and so talented. I think the song was called ‘Eep-Opp-Ork.’ And then, years later when I was back at Hanna-Barbera in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, I did a cartoon cel for their merchandising division on that song. It felt kind of fun. I designed the sequence back in ’62 and then I got to do this cel which did very well.





Yowp: Guys like Bobe, the artists at Hanna-Barbera had great careers either at Disney or Warners or MGM where they’re doing full animation on some of the greatest cartoons ever. But, now, they’re in a situation where there’s no time or budget for that kind of creativity. They’re doing a lot of eye-blinks and walk cycles. Were they bitter or resentful about that?

Jerry: I don’t remember any conversations about them about it. They could have. The animation was so simple and limited but, you know, over the years it became full animation again. I never thought that would happen.

Yowp: There was fuller animation on the Yogi Bear feature [Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear, 1964]. You worked on that.

Jerry: I did. Iwao and I worked with Joe on one of the song sequences, The St. Louis Bears. We had to design them. And that was fun because, I remember coming up with some almost like gag writing. I’m not like a “writer” writer but I can come up with gag ideas and it was fun laying out that sequence and designing it. It was mostly Iwao and I on that one.

Yowp: I gather on something like that, you’d be given a bit more time to play around.

Jerry: Yeah, and I forget what else we did on the feature. I’m pretty sure Iwao designed the dog that became Muttley. I think he had a lot to do with designing Cindy Bear, unless she was designed for the comic books.

Yowp: She was in a couple of the shorts.

Jerry: Then Iwao just polished her up. He was so good. He worked 16 years at Disney and he was the key assistant to probably what may be their greatest animator, Milt Kahl.

Coming up...some final words

Ideas for TV shows and movies get abandoned all the time. Financing falls through. People become unavailable. And cartoons are no different. MGM halted production on a number of cartoons; you can see the list of them on Thad Komorowski’s site. Tex Avery once explained you could only go so far with a story sometimes and have to shelve it.

Hanna-Barbara put together proposals that never got sold or shows that somehow never made it to air. One of the most interesting ones was revealed several weeks before The Flintstones made their debut. At first glance, it wouldn’t seem Hanna-Barbera was involved, but layout man Jerry Eisenberg says it was. And he was. Here’s a story from mid-September 1961.

Marx Trio To Be ‘Stars’ Of New Series
© 1961 New York Times News Service
NEW YORK—Doll-like figures constructed to resemble Groucho, Chico and Harpo Marx will be the stars of a proposed animated film series entitled “The Three Marx Brothers.” The figures will be made by Tri-Cinemation, Inc., a company recently acquired by Screen Gems, Inc., television film producer.
Screen Gems said it had reached agreement with the Marx brothers for them to be represented visually by what it called life-like figures. The sound track of the films will carry voices similar to-those of the brothers—all except Harpo, who will just whistle.
Screen Gems said the stop-motion filming technique would be employed to give movement to the figures. “The Three Marx Brothers” is contemplated as a half-hour weekly network production for the fall of 1962.

Several attempts to get the Marx Brothers into cartoons were announced. In 1963, Erskine Johnson’s column tells of a feature “How The West Was Lost.” And in 1965, Filmation worked out a deal for 156, five-and-a-half minute TV shorts. All of them were derailed.

We’ll find out about other failed ideas in a moment. But, first, Jerry Eisenberg has some words about the studio’s first action-adventure cartoon in 1964.

Yowp: You worked on Jonny Quest.

Jerry: Yeah, I remember Iwao and I helping to develop it with other people. We also laid out some of the episodes. Iwao and myself did the character layouts and the rough backgrounds and we had a guy named Lew Ott who cleaned up the backgrounds. He was a very good artist. He did beautiful background work.




Yowp: How different is it to lay out a cartoon like that as opposed to a comedy like The Flintstones?

Jerry: I don’t know. It probably took a little longer with the realistic characters. We were pretty much used to doing the silly characters. That’s always been my favourite, but I like doing the adventure stuff once in a while. It’s a nice change.

Yowp: Was there a fair amount of interaction with Doug Wildey on layouts?

Jerry: Well, I don’t remember too much. I remember Doug. I remember meeting him when he first came to the studio. It [the concept work on Jonny Quest] started at the old building. Joe called me up to his room and introduced me to him. I mean, I really didn’t know who he was at that time. Evidently he’s the guy who pretty much created the Jonny Quest idea. We were doing something about Jack Armstrong. I wish I would have asked more questions to find out how Jack Armstrong became Jonny Quest. Doug was a volatile guy. I remember starting to walk out of our cubicle one day. He came walking down the hall like he could kill somebody, he was so mad. I don’t know what it was. He was probably coming from Barbera’s office. It might have had something to do with credits. Maybe he felt he wasn’t getting enough credit or money or whatever. I never questioned anybody about that.

Yowp: At that point, you were in the new building. How many guys would be working in layout? Were you in your own room or were the layout guys all together?

Jerry: Iwao and I shared a cubicle, sometimes with a third person. Like on Jonny Quest, Lew was in there with us. Other times it was just the two of us. Then, later on, Iwao ended up being the supervisor of the layout department and we moved down towards the end of the hallway and we each had our own cubicle.

Yowp: How did that go over, having Iwao taking over? Because there were layout guys who had been there a lot longer, someone like Bick.

Jerry: I don’t think Bick was interested in doing that much supervision, basically, because he was older. Bick was sort of like the layout supervisor when I started there. Iwao and I actually started there the same week full-time, though I had freelanced for Hanna-Barbera for a couple of years with Ken Harris; we would make commercials for them.
I think Bick just didn’t have the energy any more. By the time Iwao got into supervising, I would say it was like maybe 1965 or something [Bick would have been 58] and we doing quite a bit more work then than we were in 1961.

Yowp: You were mentioning you spent six months in layout and six months in development. When did that happen?

Jerry: I know when I first started there helping on, Joe wanted to do something with the Marx Brothers and he asked me if I would do a presentation storyboard which I worked on. But I don’t remember working for six months in ’61. Maybe in ’63, ’64, it started becoming more and more like that, we started doing more work. More development and selling more stuff.

Yowp: Did you end up working on the Abbott and Costello cartoons?

Jerry: I remember them but I don’t remember if I worked on any of them in production or not. I don’t think I did.

Yowp: So which were the cartoons that you developed?

Jerry: A lot of the stuff, of course, didn’t sell, but some of the things we helped develop sold, like Jonny Quest, Squiddly Diddly, Secret Squirrel. There was [sic] a few characters I created when I was there. I once brought some drawings to Joe with a hippopotamus, put a pith helmet on him and a safari coat. He liked it, so he said “Let’s develop it.” We got some writers involved. That’s what became Peter Potamus. I don’t know who came up with the name but there used to be a disc jockey on the radio called Peter Potter in those days. It’s like with Yogi Bear was like Yogi Berra, the baseball player.

Yowp: When you’re working in development, it is a matter of sitting around and batting around ideas then bringing in Joe to explain what you’ve got?

Jerry: I went to him with these drawings. Actually, I was taking a break and I was looking through an old comic book, it was called Wash Tubbs. Are you familiar with Buzz Sawyer or Captain Easy?

Yowp: Buzz, yes.

Jerry: Wash Tubbs was like a sidekick and there was a jungle scene and this hippo was coming out of the bushes, not a cartooney hippo, just a hippo. And I thought “Hey. We’ve got Wally Gator, we’ve dogs, we’ve got Quick Draw McGraw. Nobody’s done a hippo. So that gave me an idea, let’s do a hippo. Joe liked it, so it became a show.
Then during that same period I started thinking about another idea, doing teenagers. Nobody was doing teenagers, like surfers, hot rods, cute girls, the malt shop and everything, so I made a bunch of drawings, took those to Joe, but he didn’t spark to that so to speak. And I wasn’t pushy about it. I was in such awe of him in those days. So nothing happened with that. But two or three years later, Filmation came out with The Archies, based on the comic book, which was a teenage show. Then Joe was interested in doing teenagers. But he might have had the chance to have the first teenaged show if he would have sparked to it a bit.

Yowp: So it sounds like what happened was you came up with concepts, like a squirrel that was a secret agent, and you’d take it to Joe and he’d decide what to do.

Jerry: Yeah, I only did it with those two things. Later on, are you familiar with Ricochet Rabbit?

Yowp: Yes.

Jerry: Well, no, not that show. Excuse me. There was a show that I designed called Blastoff Buzzard. And when we first developed it, Joe wanted the buzzard to chase, it was like a Tom and Jerry thing, he wanted him chasing a rabbit. And, again, he’d come back from a network meeting, “Ah, they’re not interested in it.” So I started thinking “Well, what else lives in the desert? What else could the buzzard chase?” So, I was thinking of a lizard, a turtle, and I thought “A snake!” So I just designed a snake and I put a football helmet on him and the network liked it. Joe came back and he said “Oh, they bought it. They liked the snake.” So that was my contribution to that.

Yowp: Were there other things in development where you thought “It was a great idea. Gee, I wish they had bought it?”

Jerry: I remember one time Iwao and I were developing a thing based on that movie Cat Ballou. We were really enjoying it and having a lot of fun with it but it didn’t get sold. Joe had a cute elephant character called Fumbo Jumbo but he never could sell that.
He did sell something I had a lot of fun designing with wacky airplanes. I think it was called Stop the Pigeon [the working title for Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines]. It had Dick Dastardly in it from Wacky Races. I designed about seven of those cars. I really like designing cars, things that would be animatable, almost. They weren’t alive, but. In fact, the next year he [Joe Barbera] said “Let’s do Wacky Submarines and that was fun. I really enjoyed that. But it didn’t sell. I think it could still be viable today, I don’t know.

Yowp: So, on Wacky Races, did you design the characters in addition to the cars?

Jerry: Yes. I think we had about ten. I remember Corny Cole designed, there was a professor [Pat Pending] with a funny-looking vehicle like a boat. Iwao designed Penelope Pitstop and her car. And I think he did the Red Baron [Red Max], I remember he used to think I did it but I know that was his. And then there was some guy named Don Peters, who Iwao knew from his days at Disney, he was a designer. And he got Don to do some freelance help, and he designed that car that Dick Dastardly had, it looked like a Captain Nemo-type car, you know, like a submarine. I think I did about seven of them. I remember when I did the Bouldermobile, I did one caveman and then Joe came back, either him or the writers, and they said “Let’s do two cavemen,” so we did two cavemen.

Yowp: And then it was the following year they did the Flying Machine cartoons.

Jerry: I loved doing some of those wacky airplanes. Some would maybe have six wings or ten wings and all kinds of armament.

Yowp: Did you do the characters on that series, too?

Jerry: Yeah. Dick Dastardly was already designed. I think Iwao designed Muttley, he was done for the Yogi Bear feature in ’63, called Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear but I remember designing the three guys who worked with Dick Dastardly. I can’t remember their names. I think one was called Klunk. They were like his pilots. Almost like the Three Stooges, but they weren’t mean spirited or anything.

Yowp: You said Joe would pitch to the networks and they’d say “No, we’re not really looking for that.” How much influence did the networks have toward the end of the ‘60s in what you developed?

Jerry: When Fred Silverman first came on the scene, I first met him in 1965, he would be very involved. He had a lot of input. He was very creative himself. He was responsible for a lot of the Scooby Doo thing. He’s the one who came up with the name. And he decided to make the dog and Shaggy the stars.
It was great to work with him. You know, of all the network executives, even when he became president of NBC, he would still read Saturday morning scripts. We always felt he had a respect for the cartoonists. He liked cartoonists and cartoons and he was a fan. I kind of miss working with him.

Yowp: The original Scooby concept, before Fred modified it somewhat, who put that together?

Jerry: I wasn’t involved in the early meeting. I remember helping to develop the show with some of the other guys. Well, Joe Ruby and Ken Spears had a lot to do with the initial creative development, and Barbera, and Silverman. Iwao, of course, designed Scooby Doo. And he helped design some of the other characters. I think I helped on Shaggy. I don’t remember doing anything on the dog. I can’t find any rough drawings, I may not even have tried to design Scooby. I just can’t remember why. I didn’t work on production once it got sold because I was busy supervising some other shows.

Yowp: So you were supervising layout?

Jerry: Yeah, I would have maybe two different series, sometimes three, and keep track of everything. I was doing some layout work myself but mostly supervising. Iwao was doing some of that. I don’t know who else. We had a lot of shows.

Yowp: Did things change at the company a lot from a creative standpoint when Bill and Joe sold to Taft?

Jerry: Well, no, they stayed on for quite a few years after that. The sale was in ’68. I remember that’s when we met the Taft people. They came out and had kind of like a party out in the parking lot. And everybody got to meet them.
The sale was supposed to happen in 1967 but there was an article in the trade paper, the widow of Harry Cohn, who was the head of Columbia Studios, they had private stock in Hanna-Barbera. I think Harry owned a certain amount of stock and, of course, Bill and Joe, and their silent partner was that film director.

Yowp: George Sidney.

Jerry: What I read was Bill Hanna, at some point, had bought the shares that Mrs. Cohn had, the widow of Harry Cohn. And he, or his people, represented to her that “this is what the stock is worth.” But, then, when the sale was announced in ’67, from what I read, they were selling the studio for $25,000,000. And, evidently, Mrs. Cohn’s attorneys figured out that, oh, Bill Hanna really low-balled her, and so they filed suit on her behalf and that held up the sale for about a year, till that was settled.

Yowp: Let’s go back to the animation for a bit. Who was the best animator at interpreting the character layouts? Were some better than others?

Jerry: Oh, I’m sure. Maybe there wasn’t a big, vast difference. I think most of the animators that Bill had were just fine.

Yowp: There wasn’t a case where you’d look afterward and go “No, that isn’t what I wanted.”

Jerry: I don’t recall. Everybody had a model sheet to follow but you could still see differences if you inspected the individual scenes, but I don’t think the general public would notice something like that.

Yowp: Let me mention a few names and get your impressions. What about Walt Clinton?

Jerry: I don’t know much about Walt. I can’t remember where he came from.

Yowp: He had been in Tex’s unit at MGM.

Jerry: Okay. Just a nice man. He was one of the older guys. Some of us younger guys, we used to call them the “senior schticks.” We always had this banter going back and forth.

Yowp: Walt’s wife’s name was Wilma. Was that how Wilma Flintstone got her name?

Jerry: I really don’t know. It’s possible, I guess. Walt was working there when they were developing The Flintstones.

Yowp: It’s difficult finding information about some of the artists. In newspaper stories at the time, you read about Bill and Joe but none of the artists.

Jerry: It wasn’t as anonymous as, say, Disney. On the Disney comic books, my father and a lot of the guys couldn’t have their name up there. It always had to be Walt Disney.

Yowp: Did not having a credit bother your dad, or did he accept it as the way of the business?

Jerry: I don’t remember him saying anything. There were some comics that allowed their artists to have a name. Some of the men who worked with us, I would see their names in comics. Like Moe Gollub, Dan Noonan. They did comics for, evidently, not Disney comics or MGM comics.

Yowp: Another layout guy was Tony Rivera. He came over from Disney and did a lot of shorts.

Jerry: I knew him but not that well. I don’t think I ever worked directly with him myself.

Yowp: Let’s talk about Mike Maltese, because he’s really my hero and his humour really carried the short cartoons, he and Warren Foster.

Jerry: He was magnificent because once he left Warners, Chuck’s cartoons weren’t quite the same because they didn’t have Mike’s input. He was brilliant. What a funny person. And a nice person. God, I really miss him. Very talented. Same for Warren Foster and Tedd Pierce.

Yowp: I gather from his time at Warners that he’d bring everyone in to run through the storyboards and he’d act out the whole thing and ham it up quite a bit.

Jerry: I may not have seen it. I guess being an assistant animator [at Warner Bros.], I wouldn’t be in on those kind of meetings.

Yowp: What about Hanna-Barbera? Did you work closer with him there?

Jerry: Well, we’d see each other. When I arrived at Hanna-Barbera, I have a feeling Mike worked a lot at home in those days. I don’t remember if he had an office. It was such a small studio at Cahuenga before they built the other building. Mike lived up in the hills there off of Barham which was right next to Universal Studios. We were right in that area, so he was so close to home. I think I socialised with him more at Warner Bros. because he had his office there and we had the greatest coffee break times.

Yowp: But I imagine a bunch of you would end up going to the bar after work.

Jerry: Yeah, once in awhile, I’d join in. There was a place near NBC called The Nightcap. They had other places like the Smoke House [not far from Hanna-Barbera] and Sorrentino’s and once in awhile I’d join some of the animators and others for a drink after work. And I was a bachelor. Of course, I don’t know if I was 21 at first, but I’ve always passed for 21.

Yowp: Back to people. You were talking about Gene Hazelton overseeing the comic strips. Did he parcel out work to your dad, did your dad work under him, how did that work?

Jerry: Well, he would parcel the stuff out. Gene, you could say, was a story editor on the comic strips. I don’t know if he wrote any of them but he would do the rough storyboards and that’s what he’d give to my father who’d do up the whole panel. I guess Gene was just coordinating the strips. At that time, I don’t think he was working for Hanna-Barbera. He worked at home, also.

Yowp: It seems like a lot of guys worked from home before they moved to the new building because Art Lozzi was saying they could fit in about 35 employees and that was it.

Jerry: Yeah. Well, they were renting space up the street. It was almost like a motel-type thing. There were all these different bungaloes, or little units, and a lot of the animators were up there. Us layout guys were mostly at the main building because, like I say, we were Joe’s department. Nobody had some windows except the film-cutting department, they had a glass door that went from the outside into the department. But Joe and Bill, none of us had windows. It was like a bunker.

Part Five.. how Lew Marshall got ripped off.