I wanted my Yogis to have some feeling of the original 195-1960 cartoons. I didn't want them to be like the 1970s, an 80s redos where the characters try to be be with the times. No cleaning up the environment or riding skateboards - and no pink purple and lime green airbrushed bgs. I got Ed Benedict to do some of the background layouts and design and he drew them in pretty much the style he drew in the 1950s. Trying to get the painting style down was tougher.
Here's a beautiful painting - I think by Richard Daskas that is sort of half Ren and Stimpy style, half early Hanna Barbera. It wasn't until Boo Boo Runs Wild that I thought we got the finished BG style to look like the Art Lozzi/ Montealegre techniques I so admire.
Here's my key. This is from a scene that was cut from Ranger Smith's Day In The Life for time. It had RS inspecting the underwater world and making sure the fish were obeying the rules of the scummy lake bottom. Even scum has to have rules and order in Smith's world.

All these BGs are from one cartoon: The Tycoon from the first season of the Flintstones.
Take a look at how striking limited palettes and even large amounts of gray can be.

These are some of the most beautiful BGs I've ever seen in cartoons. So cartoony, such unique color choices, stylized textures, yet it all feels so organic and alive. Bedrock is a place I'd love to live in.
I would kill to have this BG pan of Bedrock!This is proof that you don't have to have big budgets to have good looking cartoons. Talent, taste and controlled choices can add up to a lot more than money and lack of controlled decision making:This looks like the painter couldn't make up his mind what colors to use, so he just decided to use every one. Straight from the tubes and shot through a blotchy airbrush. It's definitely hard to make creative decisions, but those who can are to be highly admired!

Using a lot of opposing pure colors just breaks up the image into little pieces and makes the character hard to see. It also makes the cartoon look fake. It doesn't help to not have a composition either.

Compare the texture in these trees to the textures in more cleverly painted BGs. These pine needle textures are not only blunt and sloppily painted. They completely fill the silhouettes of the trees. No creative selection has been made. "I'll just fill up the whole image equally with evenly spaced detail" is the decision that was made.
Well this has a composition and that makes it easy to read, but there are those favorite cartoon colors again!

It's hard believe this image below is from a fully animated big budget feature and not a Saturday Morning cartoon. Money doesn't always buy taste.

I'm willing to bet that many artists don't have much say in the stylings of their cartoons. A lot of the decision making is likely in the hands of execs who think more detail and brighter colors equals quality.Look what happened just 10 years later!

The other main BG color/painter/stylist in the early HB cartoons was Montealegre.

His style in general is more primary/secondary colors and you can really see that in some MGM cartoons he did for Mike Lah Droopy cartoons. He was already doing the sponge technique but in a simpler, more garish style.

http://klangley.blogspot.com/2006/07/more-montealegre.html

He actually started painting richer lusher cartoon BGs for Hanna Barbera's TV cartoons even though the budgets were considerably smaller.

http://klangley.blogspot.com/2006/07/hanna-barbera-backgrounds-montealegre.html

Here's a great one.

Lion Hearted Huck is one of the first Huckleberry Hound cartoons. The BGs are really striking in this and many of the earliest pictures they did.
It's funny, this whole flat style was unpopularized by UPA cartoons, cartoons that were made on purpose to not connect with regular folks. They designed them to appeal to snooty critics and bland but artsy fartsy cartoonists.

The one cartoon series that UPA considered to be their "sellout" series is boring as crap-Mr. Magoo. They felt guilty even making them as meagerly entertaining as they are (read all the cartoon history books-they admit it!) These UPA cartoons were done for big budgets-as big as the lusher fully animated classic Warner's and MGM cartoons that the artists were rebelling against.

In my dumbass regular guy on the street who likes girls opinion, the "UPA style" was done best by the cartoonists who still wanted to appeal to a wide audience-Tex Avery and Ed Benedict in their 50s cartoons and Hanna Barbera in their earliest TV cartoons (also designed by Ed Benedict).

I like the look of these cartoons way more than the bigger budget, slower produced snooty molasses paced UPA cartoons.

These Hanna Barbera artists used the simpler styled flatter design but left in the main ingredient that separates cartoons from other mediums-the ingredient of "fun". These cartoons are like ice cream for the eyes. They are really fun to look at and have a big "kid appeal". They don't look down their noses at the audience. These color combinations are subtle, harmonious yet bold all at the same time.
It's strange how beautiful the colors are when you consider that they were made to be broadcast in black and white. Maybe Art can shed some light on why they paid so much attention to the color. Did they expect the cartoons to be syndicated later? That would be pretty far-seeing for 1958.
Look at the amazing colors that go into making that tree look so rich. Violet, reddish brown and burgundy.
The green BG has fern leaves painted on and criss-crossed. Some are lighter than the BG, some darker. The combination gives a rich and subtle texture to the scene without distracting from the character.
It's funny-The BGs are so bold and stylish in this cartoon, yet the animation is as bland as can be. It's animated by Ken Muse, the blandest of the HB animators. Even with a severly limited animation budget, Mike Lah, Carlo Vinci, Ed Love, Don Patterson and some other animators managed to put their own styles and some life into the animation drawings. Ken just did the minimum of what was required-and this later became the HB style and formula that so many people condemn them for.
Wow! I would kill to have this BG hanging on my wall. If you have it, let me know so I can put out a contract.
Do you know how lucky we are to even have this styling in Hanna Barbera cartoons? Ed Benedict told me that Joe Barbera hated stylized cartoons. Joe walked in on Ed working one night on a Tex Avery cartoon and started grilling him. "Why are you drawing this flat crap? Nobody wants it. Nobody likes Mr. Magoo! The folks in middle America want round soft cute things."

The only reason Joe and Bill went with Ed's graphic style, was that they figured it would read better on the tiny black and white TV screens of the 50s. Simple characters with big black lines would read from a mile away, even in Black and White.

As Hanna Barbera became successful, the cartoons became less stylized, more bland, more even and generic. Just watch Yogi Bear's 1960 cartoon series and you'll see it is already way less adventurous than 2 mere years earlier. By 1962 we have Touche Turtle and Wally Gator which are so bland it hurts.

Hanna Barbera went from:

1958 - adventurous, radical, experimental, fun. Every cartoon feels different.

to 1960 - still very professional yet more conservative (leaving out the first season of the Flintstones which I will talk about later)

1962 - conservative, bland and repetitive, HB starts recruiting young inexperienced artists who never animated.

1965 - ugly xerox lines, Iwao Takamoto reluctantly imitating Ed's design style, Saturday morning executive interference.

1967- Iwao and his crew starts to design harder to animate characters in a pseudo 60's Disney style-which are impossible to animate well with a low budget.

Gang cartoons start which further hampers the chances to animate well.

1969 - Scooby Doo-absolute crap. Ugly design, sloppy amateur execution, not written by cartoonists anymore-the ugliest BGs ever. The end of the world.

This is Hanna Barbera copying Filmation's Archies show. All basic cartoon principles are outlawed from here on in. No squash and stretch, no line of action, no funny teeth and tongues, no exaggeration, no design appeal, no composition, no professional voice acting, no writing on storyboards. Tiny FLESH-COLORED EYES!!!!!!!

Anything fun or professional is deemed "too cartoony". "Cartoony" becomes a swear word. And here we are today still in this retarded illogical state of mind.

Anyway thank God that no one was paying much overall attention in these early cartoons and left the artists to put some of themselves into the art and entertainment.

I asked Art to tell us a little bit about Monte and here's what he said:

Monte? Fernando Montealegre, Costa Rican, a charmer (at times), a good artist, funny guy, sort of conceited and family-proud. We started the same day at MGM and became close friends. He had studied classical painting in San Jose. When Bob needed assistance, Monte was sent in to help out, following the oldish MGM technique. As I already mentioned, because of the fact that in the new Hanna/Barbera set-up, we had to work fast and simple, we established a style that allowed us both to work on one cartoon without noticeable differences. When we each had a complete cartoon to do, which became more and more frequent, then our styles began to show. But we managed to keep it all Hanna-and-Barbera-identifiable.

Was there a plan or any direction to the BG styling in the late 50s Hanna Barbera Cartoons?
You'd be very surprised how little was preplanned, studied, discussed, reviewed, exchanged with Monte, Bob Gentle or the layout department. Esp. at the start there simply was not enough time. "Here are the layouts. Get busy. A new batch is coming up."
Since each layout artist drew differently from one another, it was up to the bg painters to established a unity among all the cartoons.
Just as Yogi had to look like Yogi in all of the shows, so did the bg's have to look recognizable for the most part....with allowable variations. Yogi's Jellystone park had to look like it.

John: If you are going to use large areas of primary colors, separate them by a neutral color inbetween. In this case Art used white and greys to separate the bright colors.
If you had blue right beside red, then the two areas would clash and cancel each other out as they do all through Disney's Alladin.

Pure bright colors seem brighter when they are framed by neutral colors because the neutral colors don't compete with them.

Do You Remember Anything About Ruff ‘N’ Reddy?
Ruff and Reddy? I have very little recollection of it. It was early, it was great fun - those voices! And the bgs were simple, flat and direct. A fence was white. Sidewalks were toned grays.


John: This rooftop may look simple, but to me, I love it just because it is not typical. Each sort of primary is mixed with organic (non-mathematical) proportions of other tints and greys.
The sky is slightly violet blue, the roof is not red, it's red mixed with purple and brown-I guess you could call it burgundy or even funnier-maroon.
The chimney is one shade of greyish reddish brick on the light side and bluish shadow on the dark side.

This pretty combination of colors was done fast and looks a million times better than the more expensive fruity looking fuzzy tasteless mess below.

BG Painters Selected The Paints-Cell Paints
The paints were selected by us. The paint supplier was somewhere in the neighborhood. We used plastic squirt-type containers with spouts... that you can see in the photo of me that I sent you.

As you know, we painted the bgs so that they didn't appear too heavy and dark. The characters were painted with exactly the same paint as the bgs. Acrylic. We worked out all the hundreds and hundreds of colors and shades for all the cel levels, labeled them, and according to the number of cels, the density of the bg colors was determined. Paint colors were named with the initials of the color. Ex: Y was yellow, YO was yellow orange and OY was orange yellow, etc. ...obviously.

Then there was OY1, OY2, OY3, OY4, OY5, for the different cel levels. That "yellowish'' picnic basket that appears next to the table, by the way, was that color because it was also animated in other scenes...it was one of the Ink and Paint department colors, not a bg color.


The Painting Tools and Brushes
Rollers, brushes, colored pencils, sponges, cut-outs, tape; these were the basics. I still have a couple of those old brushes here...Finepoint....expensive. I wish I could find that great bg paper here....maybe if I look around. I'm sure that all of this is deep-ingrained in you but maybe it could be useful in explaining it to others.

Thanks To The Commenters
I want to thank those young bloggers for the the flattering comments. I could never really understand why they thought the bgs were SO good. I never analyzed them. They just seemed to happen. One of them -Akira- said, "Any idea how Art Lozzi learned to paint like this? besides a god-given talent, i'm guessing lots of actually observing and painting the real world." Very good commentary. Akira, thanks, but not to sound disillusioning, very little was studied. The bg's were the result of painting them. Lots of enjoyable experimentation too of course. Looking at work from other studios could also be an inspiration where you love what you saw and try to do a variation. The same would be for music too, or whatever else creative. Mozart, I'm sure, was influenced by Bach, etc. The Flintstones by The Honeymooners. Etceteraandsoforth.

-Art Lozzi








...more to come...Art will talk about his fellow artists and how and why Hanna Barbera became standardized and less experimental later