Bob Gribbroek and Background Reruns

Television in the 1950s was ready to be spoofed. Radio comedians had been doing it. Jack Benny, for example, had one show where he was tuning in a television set and got nothing but Westerns. In fact, Screen Gems joked about the video box in a theatrical cartoon as early as 1940 with Tangled Television.

Over at Warner Bros., writer Tedd Pierce figured there were shows on the air that could stand a gentle kidding. Thus Superman inspired Stupor Duck (1956), Boston Blackie gave birth to Boston Quackie (1957), and You Bet Your Life, You Asked For It, Liberace and several shows (as well as KTTV in Los Angeles) found themselves lampooned on Wideo Wabbit (1956).

One TV series in the ‘50s was so popular, Pierce was sparked to write three cartoons based on it. The show was Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners (1955-56 season). Pierce came up with the idea of turning the characters on the show into mice. That was pretty much the gag. There wasn’t any real exaggeration of the Gleason series. The mice had close proximities to the voices, thanks to Daws Butler and June Foray, and repeated the same catchphrases, but that was about it.

The first short was The Honey-Mousers (Dec. 8, 1956), the second Cheese It, the Cat (May 4, 1957) and the last Mice Follies (Aug. 20, 1960).

The plot of the second cartoon was similar to Frank Tashlin’s A Tale of Two Mice (1945) where Abbott and Costello knock-off mice try to get past a cat to get cheese from a refrigerator. Pierce did a fine job as the Abbott mouse, but Warren Foster’s story is superior in gags and the animation is far more exaggerated and fun in the older short. Bob McKimson oversaw Cheese It and was the most lacklustre of the three directors at the Warners studio in 1957.

While art styles had become more abstract by then, McKimson employed the most literal background people possible. Dick Thomas painted the settings for The Honey-Mousers, then after leaving the studio (he ended up at Disney), was replaced by Bob Majors; whose hiring was announced in the April 1956 edition of the Warner Club News. His replacement, Bill Butler, was first mentioned in the News the following August.

It doesn’t appear Majors did all the work on Cheese It. McKimson re-used some of Thomas’ paintings, a practice unheard of at Warners. Any changes were slight.

Check and compare.


The Honey-Mousers


Cheese It, the Cat


The Honey-Mousers


Cheese It, the Cat


The Honey-Mousers


Cheese It, the Cat

The first interior shot. Majors seems to have given Bob Gribbroek’s layout a new paint job.


The Honey-Mousers


Cheese It, the Cat

Here’s some of Majors’ work from Cheese It. It’s reminiscent of Thomas’ work in the earlier cartoon. Gribbroek’s layouts utilise thimbles, match boxes, postage stamps, a spool of thread and other small household items as furniture; Tom and Jerry cartoons of the ‘40s had the same thing of thing.

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Ajax comes in a box, apparently.



The lady of the house doesn’t keep a box of Tide detergent.



An inside joke. Ed Selzer ran the cartoon studio, retiring March 1, 1958 after 28 years with Warners and 14 years overseeing the animation department. He couldn’t draw. He’d been a PR flack on the main lot.



Here’s an inside joke in Thomas’ background in The Honey-Mousers. I’m under the impression Tedd Pierce preferred martinis over beer.



We provided some information about Dick Thomas on the Yowp blog and Bob Majors in this Tralfaz post. I thought I had posted a biography of Bob Gribbroek but cannot find it on the blog. At the risk of lengthening this post, let me pass along a few notes:

Robert Carter Gribbroek was born in Rochester, New York, on March 16, 1906. His grandfather owned a grocery store that employed four sons, including Gribbroek’s father. In 1915, one of the sons was found shot in the head. The wife of one of the other sons was charged with murder but cleared due to lack of evidence.

In his ‘20s, he became interested in New Mexico and its native population. In 1929, while art director of the Hutchins Advertising Company in Rochester, he spent a month among members of the Pueblo, painting portraits and scenes. By then, his parents had separated (his father died in Los Angeles in 1935).

In the 1930s, he was living both in Taos and Rochester, with his work in oil and charcoal being exhibited in both cities. A story in one New Mexican paper reports about a gallery exhibit: “As part of the entertainment, Robert Gribbroek danced the Varsoviana and a Schottish with Mrs. Esco Leibert.” In 1940, he was working for the New Mexico State Assessment Authority. His draft card dated that year has a note in pencil that he moved to Hollywood. We find him and his mother in the Los Angeles directory for 1942, where he is listed as an “artist.” A squib in the Los Angeles Times of April 25, 1943 reveals he and six others from the Taos Art Colony (he was a founder of the Transcendental Painting Group in 1938) were working in Southern California war factories. After his service, he returned to live with his mother.

His first credit in a Warner Bros. cartoon was in Chuck Jones’ Hare Conditioned, released August 11, 1945, where he painted the backgrounds from Earl Klein’s layouts; it doesn’t appear Jones’ cartoons had full credits before this, but Gribbroek’s picture is in a staff photo montage dated April 1945. His last credit for Jones was in Don’t Give Up The Sheep, released Jan. 3, 1953. He was replaced by Maurice Noble and it appears he left the studio. He is not listed in the studio staff birthdays in 1954 in the Warner Club News. More of his artwork was being exhibited in New Mexico in 1955. This wasn’t his only cartoon work. His name is on the credits for The 3 Minnies: Sota, Tonka and Ha-Ha, the second of the four Jerky Journeys cartoons made by Impossible Pictures for distribution by Republic, and released April 15, 1949. Gribbroek was also an illustrator, providing art for Howdy Doody’s Island Adventure (Whitman, 1955).

Jones recalled Gribbroek had begun training as a bullfighter in New Mexico but, after one lesson, realised he could not get away fast enough from a charging toro, so quickly gave up the idea (Gribbroek was gone from the studio when Jones made Bully For Bugs). He also said Gribbroek had lived in an adobe house in Taos, but used green hay that sprouted flowers every spring. The Warner Club News of January 1955 featured a picture of Gribbroek and chinchillas he was raising in Taos.

Gribbroek was also an accomplished amateur chef, winning a $10,000 prize from Kaiser Aluminum in November 1959 for his Pork Tenderloin Javanese. He had written the paper in Taos the previous August, saying his car had been hit by a driver who turned left without signalling and had been left with whiplash that used up his sick time and vacation days, though he had just started working on the Bell System Science Series film on Genetics that had an impossible deadline.

He returned to the studio after Noble left in 1953, handling layouts for Two Scent’s Worth, released on Oct. 15, 1955. After three more cartoons for Jones, including One Froggy Evening, he was transferred to Bob McKimson’s unit, with The High and the Flighty the first cartoon to be released on Feb. 18, 1956. Into the ‘60s, he began to handle both layouts and backgrounds for McKimson. His last Warners cartoon was the final Bugs Bunny short, False Hare, released on July 16, 1964. By then, he had been hired by Walter Bien’s SIB Tower 12 Productions to re-join Jones, who was making Tom and Jerry shorts for MGM. His first was Is There a Doctor in the Mouse? He also did some moonlighting at Hanna-Barbera as a background designer on the feature Hey There, It's Yogi Bear (1964).

In August 1970, the local paper reported he had moved back to Taos after five years in Barcelona and Sitgas, Spain, where he had worked on an animated feature and as an actor in TV commercials and four feature films. He died there on October 13, 1971.

To get back to a possible reason Thomas’ backgrounds were re-used after he left the studio, Bob McKimson may have dropped a hint in an interview with historian Mike Barrier.

I had a layout man—he was a very good layout man—who was a queer, and a background man at the same time who was a queer, and they were just at each other's throats all the time. So finally I had to get rid of the background man.

As Dick Thomas was quite heterosexual, we leave you to draw your own conclusions about whom McKimson is referring.