One Droopy Night Backgrounds

When the second unit was revived at the MGM cartoon studio in September 1955, director Mike Lah acquired Fernando Montealegre as his background artist. Monte had been born in Costa Rica on June 23, 1926 and, in his late 20s, began work at MGM as an assistant animator.

His style meshed very nicely with that of Lah’s layout man, Ed Benedict, who seems to have preferred the flat style popularised by UPA. Monte’s backgrounds tend to be very stylised. The two of them moved to the Hanna-Barbera cartoon studio in 1957 where Monte’s work wasn’t quite as abstract.

Here are some of his backgrounds for the Oscar-nominee One Droopy Knight (1957). I like his use of colours. Mountain ranges are indicated by a simple purple line.



I don’t know if the characters are on overlays on this one.



Monte worked on all the early Hanna-Barbera syndicated shows and the ABC half-hours, like The Jetsons. He stayed with the studio through the early ‘80s, and died in California on April 29, 1991.

The Old Paint-a-Tunnel Gag

If the gag works for Chuck Jones and the Roadrunner, it’ll work for Mike Lah and Droopy, right?

In Mutts About Racing (1958), Spike tries getting the edge on Droopy in a car race by painting a tunnel against the side of a mountain. You know the gag. The difference is, other than you can barely see what’s happening thanks to the huge CinemaScope screen, is that Spike’s car breaks up into little pieces, then Spike does the same. The cracking-up-into-pieces bit is an old Tex Avery gag; in fact, Avery used the paint gag in one of his Droopy/Spike competitions.

Ed Benedict laid out the scenes in this cartoon and Fernando Montealegre painted the backgrounds. By the time this cartoon was in theatres, the two were making TV cartoons at Hanna-Barbera with stylised backgrounds toned down from what you see here. The MGM studio was winding down when this cartoon was made as even Dick Bickenbach, normally the layout man in the Hanna-Barbera unit, did some animation on this short. Irv Spence is credited, but he had left MGM in August 1956 for a job at commercial house Animation, Inc.

Goodbye, Waves Barney Bear

There’s an early Yogi Bear cartoon where the smarter-than-the-average you-know-what is suspended in mid-air after some balloons break. He turns to the audience, waves with a sad look on his face and then plummets out of the frame.

It sounds like something borrowed from Wile E. Coyote, but we also find it pre-Wile E. in the 1947 MGM cartoon The Bear and the Hare, co-directed by Mike Lah and Preston Blair. Incidentally, Lah animated the Yogi scene mentioned above.

It’s a six-drawing cycle, with the first and fourth drawings (the paw up and paw down) held for two frames. The third and the fifth drawings are re-used.



Here’s the cycle.



And here’s Barney falling out the scene.



Don Patterson, Irv Levine, Ray Abrams and Gil Turner provide solid, though not spectacular, animation. The story writer is not credited.

That Makes Me Mad

Tex Avery’s influence wasn’t far away in Mike Lah’s Oscar-nominated One Droopy Knight (1957). It owes a lot to Señor Droopy (1949), and the climax gag is partly lifted from Homesteader Droopy (1954) and partly from other Avery cartoons where a character cracks up into pieces.

A dragon draws a moustache on a picture of Droopy’s beloved princess. “That makes me mad,” exclaims our hero, who proceeds to beat up the dragon. Finally, he snaps off the dragon’s tail (it is hollow) and bashes him with it. These frames tell the story.



For ripping off Avery, Homer Brightman gets a story credit. The animators credited are Irv Spence, Bill Schipek, Herman Cohen and Ken Southworth, with Ed Benedict designing a great-looking dragon.

Sir Mix-It-Up-A-Lot-With-A-Dragon

Perhaps it’s best that “One Droopy Knight” didn’t win the Oscar. After all, who would have accepted it? The awards were handed out in March 1958, months after MGM shut down its cartoon studio.

Many of the gags are lifted from earlier, Tex Avery Droopy cartoons (Homer Brightman got the story credit). Here’s a collision gag with an Avery-like “break into pieces” ending. Director Mike Lah and layout artist Ed Benedict gave the dragon some good expressions through the cartoon. Note when the impact happens, the background changes to coloured cards.



Herman Cohen, Irv Spence, Ken Southworth and Bill Schipek were given the animation credits. Bill Thompson supplies all the voices, except the woman’s scream which likely came from the studio’s effects reels.

Grin and Share It Backgrounds

If it weren’t for the bright colours, and the jeep in front, this might look like a background from an early Hanna-Barbera cartoon.



There’d be a reason for that. This opening shot from MGM’s “Grin and Share It” was designed by Ed Benedict and drawn and painted by Fernando Montealegre, who both went on to work on “Huckleberry Hound,” “The Flintstones” and the other earliest Hanna-Barbera cartoons. This Droopy cartoon was released not too many months before H-B Enterprises was incorporated in 1957. The director of this cartoon, Mike Lah, worked at H-B for about its first year of operation.

Here are a couple more, including a snipped-together background that’s panned at the start of the cartoon.



And to add to the similarity with Hanna-Barbera, Scott Bradley’s orchestra plays Huckleberry Hound’s “My Darling Clementine” to open the cartoon.

A Right Purdy Leg of Lamb

Mike Lah inherited Tex Avery’s Droopy and southern drawling wolf when he was handed a unit at the MGM cartoon studio. But he and designer/layout man Ed Benedict came up with their own characters, too. Like this leggy female lamb in “Sheep Wrecked.”



The chorus girl lamb is revealed after the wolf pulls off her wool with a toilet plunger attached to a cord.



Notice the two background drawings are different. They’re the work of Fernando Montealegre. Animating on this were Ken Southworth, Irv Spence, Herman Cohen, Bill (Victor O.) Schipek and Jim Escalante, who had been an effects animator. The cartoon was released in February 1958. By then, the MGM cartoon studio was but a memory. Lah, Schipek and Monty were working at Hanna-Barbera, making Ruff and Reddy.

Mr Jinks Pretzel

The Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon studio will never be accused of fluid animation. But when the studio opened in 1957, it had the most elaborate for-TV animation seen to date. And there were some funny poses, too, at least for a few years after ‘The Huckleberry Hound Show’ made its debut the following year.

Huck had three main animators—Ken Muse, Lew Marshall and Carlo Vinci, who had all been in the Hanna-Barbera unit at MGM. But some of the earliest cartoons on the show (which also featured Yogi Bear and Pixie and Dixie), Mike Lah took care of maybe a minute’s worth of footage. Lah’s drawings don’t look all that polished; odd considering he went from Disney to MGM. But he seems to have been given some of the funniest poses to do.

Lah takes care of some of the action in ‘Judo Jack’ (1958), including a scene where the stereotype Japanese mouse puts Mr. Jinks in an airplane spin. Lah has a couple of swirl drawings shot on twos and then the gag pose.




The credited animator is Muse.

Lah was working at Quartet Films, a commercial house, at the time, so I can only presume he was freelancing at Hanna-Barbera. He animated a couple of cartoons on his own with his distinctive drawing style. It’s a shame he didn’t stay longer.