Colonel Bleep Blasts Off

Once upon a time, there was a company in Florida that made animated commercials. Soundac Productions decided to try for something bigger—a cartoon series for television.

There weren’t too many examples to follow. The adventure series NBC Comics (1950) was little more than still drawings with an intoning narrator. Crusader Rabbit (also 1950), produced by Alex Anderson and Jay Ward, was a narrated adventure series with humour but very little character animation.

Miami wasn’t near the television capitals of New York City or Hollywood/Los Angeles, but Soundac decided to give it a go in 1956. That’s the year a cartoon called “Man Hunt on the Moon” was copyrighted by Soundac’s general manager Robert D. Buchanan, but the man behind it all was the company’s production manager, a former animator named Jack Schleh. The cartoon starred “interplanetary investigator” Colonel Bleep and “space deputies” Squeak (a puppet) and Scratch (a caveman) battling the evil Dr. Destructo.

It doesn’t appear the cartoons aired in 1956. Variety reported on June 19, 1957 that 78 half-hour episodes (in colour) were being readied for syndication, with Richard Ullman of Buffalo signed to find stations willing to air them. Newspaper TV listings show the half-hours began airing on WGR-TV in Buffalo every Monday evening as of September 23, 1957; I can’t find anything earlier. The last listing for the series I could discover was in early 1973.

Schleh chatted with historian Jerry Beck. Schleh designed the characters and directed the cartoons. There may be little animation and the stories may be pretty basic (they were aimed at younger children who loved outer space) but the designs are neat and some of the movement short-cuts were imaginative.

But there was another artist involved. Fran Noack was the art director for Soundac. Long after retirement, he was interviewed by the Fort Meyers News-Press. He doesn’t take any credit for Bleep, other than he “drew occasional concept art.” What’s interesting is he claims to have been responsible for “The Weather Man,” which employed pose-to-pose animation (if you want to call it that) as some happy tunesters sang a jingle before George Fenneman announced a vague, one-line weather prediction (“Rain, and cooler”). They’re cute in their own way and you can find them on video-sharing sites.

Here’s the story from August 10, 2012.

On TV screen, his creations came to life
Cape Coral artist created some of TV’s early cartoon characters.
By Charles Runnells
Scratch the Caveman, Colonel Bleep and The Weather Man: Fran Noack knew all three of them well.
An exhibit of Noack’s paintings opens today at The Alliance for the Arts, but the Cape Coral man is best known for the TV cartoon characters he created, designed or otherwise helped bring to the air in the 1950s.
As art director for Miami’s Soundac TV Film Productions, Noack created TV weather mascot The Weather Man and drew occasional concept art for the ground-breaking “Colonel Bleep” series—the first TV cartoon broadcast in color.
“We beat (animation studio) Hanna-Barbera by several months,” said Noack, 86, sitting in his Cape Coral living room. “We felt pretty good about that one.”
Noack’s best-known creation is The Weather Man, a triangular cartoon character who appeared on TV weather reports. The animation was syndicated to TV stations across the country.
Noack doesn’t have any original art of The Weather Man—he says most of it was stolen from a studio van in the ‘70s—but he doodles his creation on the back of a notepad: Googly eyes, bulbous nose and a weather-vane-shaped hat.
“He’d pull out an umbrella sometimes,” he said. “Or it would start snowing on him.”
The Buffalo, N.Y., native helped form Soundac after graduating with an art degree for Albright-Knox Art Gallery. He and four other men set up shop in a former Miami truck stop and soon found themselves shooting TV commercials and cartoons.
“We were just boys right out of art school,” Noack said. “We decided to do this grand thing and create a world of entertainment.”
Wife Peggy even got to act in a TV commercial for the Buffalo Evening News newspaper.
“That was quite an adventure for all of us,” she said about starting up the studio. “We were all kids. I was just 20.
“They had big ideas back then. They were going to rule the world.”
The studio started out with a $10,000 TV commercial for an olive oil company. That led to more animated commercials—sometimes with live action mixed in—for companies and products such as Good & Plenty candy (he designed an alien character), GE, Mountain Dew and Pan-Am Airlines (Noack created a cartoon owl for those commercials).
Villain battler
The studio’s biggest success was “Colonel Bleep,” a kids cartoon about an alien who battles villains such as pirate Captain Patch and master criminal Doctor Destructo. The cartoon short ran from 1957 until the early 1970s.
Noach says his involvement in “Bleep” was minimal, but he did concept sketches of side-kick Scratch the Caveman and also occasional designs for minor characters such as a zebra and a hippo.
“I did a couple of sketches (for studio head Jack Schleh and the cartoon’s creative team),” he says. “Sometimes he used them, and sometimes he didn’t. But, really, it was his baby from the word ‘go.’” “Colonel Bleep” was a milestone in the history of TV animation,” said Andrew Farago, curator for the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco.
“It introduced color,” Farago said. “Making that innovation was very important.”
The animation on “The Weather Man” and “Colonel Bleep” was very limited, Farago said.
“You can see that if you watch them on YouTube,” he said. “They were working on a very tight budget, obviously.”
Noack can’t recall all the details from his animated TV creations in the ‘50s. He’s foggy, for example, about he exactly he dreamed up The Weather Man.
“It’s been a long time,” he laughed. “And I do so much afterward. This is something I did when I was a kid.”
At its height, Soundac employed about 30 people and created ads and TV shows that appeared nationwide.
He and his family—Peggy and four sons—eventually moved to Key Largo and lived there 30 years before moving to Cape Coral in 2002 for medical reasons. His son, Kevin, also lives in the Cape.
Noack says he’s happy, after all these years, to be remembered for his 1950s cartoons. His colorful, Tropics-inspired paintings are being displayed in the Foulds Theatre lobby at the Alliance. “This is a total surprise,” he laughed. “I’ll have my 15 minutes of fame. And then, all of a sudden, they’ll say ‘Fran who?’”
People don’t made many cartoons like Noack’s anymore. He said he loved modern computerized animation, but he misses that old-style animation—drawn by hand, frame by painstaking frame.
There’s magic in a simple pen, paintbrush and paper.
Anything can happen.
“It’s that instant when you pick up the paintbrush, before you actually start, that makes all the difference,” he said. “I’ve probably changed it three or four times in my head. There’s a lot more freedom.”
Noack draws and paints as much as he can.
“I’m blessed with a gift,” he explained. “And I’m going to use it until I can’t lift up my pen.”
He smiled.
“The studio lamp is still burning,” he said.

Noack died in 2016. Schleh passed away in 1993. For the record, the narrator on Colonel Bleep was Miami TV newsman Noel Tyler, who died of a heart attack in 1963 at the age of 48. Oddly, his obituary doesn’t mention the cartoon series at all.

Naturally, Jerry Beck has more about the cartoons on his website and we visited the cosmic colonel before in this post.