Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, we love Hanna Barbera.

Welcome to the fantastic world of Hanna and Barbera, a celebration of Bill, Hannah, Joe Barbera and the thousands of people, past and present who have shared in their entertainment tradition.

And now your host, Greg Gerbar.

Thank you, Chris Anthony, Welcome everyone to the fantastic world of Hanna and Barbera.

I'm Greg Gerbar.

I wrote a little book called Hanna Barbera, the Recorded History.

And once again, we're going to have a very good friend of the podcast and a good friend to us all who love the classic material, the good stuff, as I used to call it as a kid, but I still call it the good stuff.

He is the Warner Brothers Discovery Library historian.

Mr.

George Feltenstein, welcome.

Hello, Greg.

Great to be with you again, as always.

It is a banner year for a lot of these releases, particularly this one.

We're talking, of course, about The Huckleberry Hound Show, the long-awaited classic.

You've made a lot of people happy.

I'd love to go into this whole saga with you because this is really something that started back in the 90s really.

This is trying to right the wrongs of various owners of Hanna Barbera after they had to sell the company and before Turner bought it.

Turner bought Hanna Barbera in 1992, I believe, and it was really, I think in 1967 that Hannah and Barbera sold to their first buyer.

It was December 1966.

I was close.

I'm not that's only from, you know, osmosis that that I know that not that I never did a historical research.

It's close.

I always say it can get it within a year, but during that time there was enormous disregard for thinking about the long term preservation and care of Hanna Barbera's works.

Basically they were looking at older work.

All if we have a 16mm picture and if we have a 16mm track, we can make more prints.

For syndication, we're fine.

No one ever anticipated home video, no less high definition cable channels that popped up like Cartoon Network did.

Or before that USA Network, which was a home for Hannah Barbera content.

You know, I have very vague memories, if at all, because the tail end of Huckleberry Hounds initial being on TV was my infancy.

So my memory of Huckleberry Hound starts with the second syndication round where you didn't see Kellogg's and everything had been changed.

The intros and the interstitials were gone, and then cartoons were moved around from series to series.

We just did.

As you know, the Magilla Gorilla Show, there was no complete head to tail negative of each half hour of the Magilla Gorilla Show.

There were the Magilla Gorilla segments, the pumpkin, puss and mush mouse segments, and the Ricochet rabbit and Drew Belong segments.

Each one of those little segments was inventoried under that character.

And then if you're looking for the main titles and the end titles, we have an inventory notation for every television series here that says generic material.

And you have to go into those places and hope that maybe the main titles and end titles might be there.

But because there was so much ownership before, it got to Turner, who tried to make some sense out of the inventory, and then here at Warner Brothers, where there was even more attempt, more of a serious attempt to do right by this.

It really is only in the last, I'd say probably decade that it started with things we were doing with the Warner Archive Collection in bringing out so much of that Hanna Barbara shows that weren't the top of the tier, that weren't The Flintstones, the Jetsons, things they were doing for DVD.

And when we did the Peter Potamus show, which I guess was I'm going to say 2013, 2014, 2015, somewhere in there, we reconstructed the original half hours with the Ideal Toys mentions with the pieces that we could find the curtain call, the end.

It was basically you're like within a computerized inventory, you're dumpster diving.

There is a mass computerized grave in our inventory system called HB Bits and Pieces.

And in HB bits and pieces, there are probably thousands of inventory entries.

Some are listed as multiple, meaning that this is box 622 and it has 34 rolls of unidentified film or magnetic tape or quarter inch tape or 35mm magnetic full code.

And someone has to go through and literally open up those cartoons and see what's actually in there.

Fortunately, the work that we did in a preliminary basis for DVD kind of opened the door of letting us know what we were in for when we wanted to go whole hog on some of these shows.

Restoring Johnny Quest for Blu-ray was relatively easy compared to what we're doing with, let's say, Huckleberry Hound is the worst case scenario.

Jonny Quest is the best case scenario.

Why?

Because the Jonny Quest episodes were complete camera negatives, just like a live action show.

The titles, everything was episode 1, episode 2, exactly as it should be.

That was relatively easy.

We wanted to make sure it looked great for Blu-ray.

We wanted to make sure also that the audio wasn't censored.

And we achieved that goal.

And then the next series we attempted was The Jetsons, and that also was not too problematic.

And we were able to restore the Scotch tape and Colgate bumpers to that, which I thought was super cool.

And at one time in its earliest beginning, Hanna Barbera was, I believe, 25% owned by Columbia Pictures.

And built into that was that Columbia Pictures and their television distribution and production division, Screen Gems would be the distributor of Hanna Barbera programs.

And I believe that Screen Gems continued to do that even after they sold their interest in the company.

The distribution remained with them for quite some time thereafter, but it was in the contract when there was a formal divorce that no mention of Screen Gems could be used by Hanna Barbera and future distribution.

That also ruined one of the greatest gags in film history to me, which still hasn't been remedied, which is Wilma Flintstone, the torch lady at the Columbia Pictures logo at the head of the feature of The Man Called Flintstone.

If we got the opportunity to remaster that now, we could restore that opening because we received basically an OK from an executive at Sony that allowed us to restore Screen Jem's role in the early part of the lives of these programs.

So we didn't have to remove Screen Jem's names when we did Top Cat and we didn't have to remove it John Jetsons.

And when there's a logo particularly, people saw this on Magilla Gorilla, the dancing Sticks, which is I think the 1963 for logo for screen Jams before they did the film, you know, So we can do that now if it's there.

Now, the painful thing about Huckleberry Hound is I know that the 16mm black and white syndication prints had the Screen Gems lady at the end, but we do not have any film whatsoever of that.

We don't have the ability to use that because that was not saved.

You know, Again, if it had been a complete negative, that would be different.

But because everything was segmented, we found end titles for the Huckleberry Hound show, as it was originally shown with the Kellogg's ending before Huck was there.

And instead the Kellogg's rooster, you know, was there.

And then they changed the animation.

But that black and white 35mm film that we have for the end credits has no Screen Gems logo on it.

So we're not about to go to Columbia and say, hey, can we have your logo?

You know, that's pushing it a little bit because they were kind enough to allow us to honor what we had on our film elements.

But we did find for the Huckleberry Hound show the color camera negative for the opening titles, which we didn't think existed since the original broadcasts were in black and white.

So I'm getting a little ahead of myself here.

But the point is, is that this is like an archaeology dig.

It requires an enormous amount of research, and the documentation of what went where, how to reconstruct these shows as they were broadcast, was enormous.

We have some reference documents.

We have documents that take us through seasons one through 3 of Huckleberry Hound, as prepared by the Leo Burnett ad agency that packaged the original syndication of the Huckleberry Hound Show, and it shows us what went where in terms of billboards and bridges and bumpers.

It doesn't specify anything about commercials, but we were able to locate a lot of black and white Kellogg's commercials with the characters in there.

We weren't able to locate everything and we were not able to locate every bridge and bumper.

But in order to recreate the experience of watching 1 show as it was presented from the first season to the fourth season in our presentation, we have 68 half hours that are actually usually when you're talking about TV half hour, you're talking about 2526 minutes.

These episodes actually run 313233 minutes because of all the things we're putting in to have bumpers, bridges, commercials, maybe when commercials were running in a longer place where they were shorter.

But we wanted this to be as full and rich as possible and follow the chronology of how everything was syndicated from the beginning of the first season to the end of the fourth season.

As a result, it is very important that people know that because we wanted this to be reference.

These have been meticulously chaptered.

If you were to binge a full disk, you may see the same commercial 3 or 4 times or the same intro or bumper 3 or 4 times.

And that's what the skip forward function in chaptering allows.

You may want to watch those again because I mean, these are things that I never saw because it was before my time.

But I can understand the people have a binge mentality.

And usually when you put a disc in of classic television, you want to watch it from beginning to end.

And so we thought it was best to be faithful to, if you just like want to watch one episode, you'll get the commercials in the places where they belong.

And knowing that we were working with not complete access to every single thing that was ever done, we did our best to recreate the experience for every single episode.

So we have show 1 to show 20 to show 68 across 11 discs.

And it looks remarkable.

I think 1 cartoon.

We didn't have an original 35mm negative out of, you know, hundreds of segments.

If you really think of all of it together, we were in pretty good shape and we were so fortunate that we didn't fall shorter.

So at least they were very careful about preserving the segments and they only had one where there wasn't an original negative to work from.

And in the past, you know, everything was 16mm.

And then when there was the Hanna Barbera Golden Collection releases, I believe in the early aughts like 2000 and four, 2005, I had very little involvement with those because at the time I was strictly theatrical catalog.

I was consulted on Looney Tunes and consulted on Tom and Jerry because of prior work I had done with them, but on these Hanna Barbera releases wasn't really involved in the process at all.

And they did hire as a consultant Earl Kress, who was missed by many friends of Hanna Barbera because he was the torchbearer for The Legacy in a very major way.

And one of the things he did that made me seek him out on a friend basis.

It was the amazing series of soundtrack CDs he did with Rhino, the Hanna Barbera Picnic Basket.

And I keep trying to get people around here to think that that's something that needs to be available again.

Earl worked very closely with our kids marketing team, but there was so much more work that needed to be done that there wasn't as deep a dive into the inventory as needed to be to do these things right.

There's also been a situation where people thought, and I think Earl was the person who said this, that the reason why Huckleberry Hound only had its first 26 episodes released on DVD and not the rest of the episodes was that the release did not sell well and no one wanted to support a further release.

That is completely untrue.

The reason that there wasn't anything done further with Huckleberry Hound was huge music clearance costs.

This was before Hanna Barbera, as you know had its own genius Hoyt Curtain writing original music.

So they used what we called needle drop cues from music libraries, all of which were licensed for free television and non theatrical, but were not licensed for use on home video or digital distribution.

And as a result, all of those licenses needed to be upgraded both for the source music and in some cases the source music and publishing, which sometimes they were owned by different people.

So that was an enormous time consuming process and very expensive.

I would not be releasing these shows if the music was altered or changed because the home entertainment consumer wants everything as close to original as possible.

Music replacement has often been a necessary evil to some television programming.

But if it's something that I'm going to be involved with, if we can't do it the right way, we're not going to do it.

And that's held up a lot of like the Warner Brothers detective series, for example.

All are filled with songs written by Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter and Gershwin and all the other people whose music was published by Harms, Wit, Marker, Remic, the three big music publishing companies that Warner Brothers owned at one time.

Well, we haven't owned the music publishing companies in over 20 years.

But even before that, there was like a split between the studio and the music company so that Warner Chappell Music would need a license from Warner Brothers Pictures to use one of those songs through so many films in prior years.

That's why those detective shows aren't out, because they were using those melodies freely.

And some shows like Hawaii and I always had Connie Stevens singing, so we're still trying to wrap our arms around that.

But for this animation, Rough and Ready, the first Hannah Barbera series, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear Show and Quickdraw McGraw all have licensed music that needs to be cleared.

So everybody got together and you had one team working on the music clearance.

Then you had another team working on the inventory to find all the film elements and the audio elements.

In some cases, we found film for pieces where the audio, the magnetic audio had gone vinegar and would not play back.

The oxide would literally flake off as we tried to do an audio capture.

And it's heartbreaking because this stuff all should have been properly cared for.

And I think had Hanna Barbera had their elements cared for all the way along the way, a major studio would, some of that stuff might have been better cared for.

By the time it got to Turner, it was really an overwhelming inventory challenge.

So we still hadn't answered a lot of those questions as a company.

When those initial releases happened with Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear on DVD, subsequently as we faced improving the quality and making these available for what we call all media, which includes digital streaming, downloads, so forth and so on, as well as the most important thing in the world which is physical media.

We all banded together and this has been a project three years in the making just with the renewed focus to do it right.

But as you well pointed out, there is really a presidential decades before, like when Earl was working on Huckleberry Hound for DVD and 2004 and working with our people, there was so much stuff that was never found that we have subsequently found.

I'm very proud to be bringing this to the market because the consumers, I'm one of the consumers, I know what I want.

I don't want to see changed this or change that.

I want it as it was originally made.

So I'd say we're about probably 95% there.

And the only 5% that's missing is not having every commercial, not having every bumper.

The fact that we have what we have at all is remarkable.

And I cannot stress enough how exhaustive the research was on the part of my colleagues in our preservation and restoration department.

Just spectacular work.

And then once it got to the colorists, they did a beautiful job bringing out the color.

They look absolutely magnificent.

And just to see the show begin with the Kellogg's rooster is a thrill to behold in beautiful color.

And to have Kellogg's involvement, Kellogg's, as you probably know, was very supportive of allowing some of their stuff to be on the DVD.

And we really appreciated that.

When we were doing The Jetsons, we went to Colgate about their toothpaste and we went to Scotch tape.

Just is it OK if we keep these things instead?

Of course, you know, it's free advertising basically.

And there isn't much difference between the Kellogg's Cornflakes box today and what it was at the beginning of the Huckleberry Hutch show.

Looks very similar so I'm hoping this is going to increase the sale of Kellogg's cereals.

People are going to start watching these 11 Blu-ray discs and just want to have cereal with it.

Just makes sense.

You know, if anybody listening feels like they're buying more Kellogg's from this, you know, some people have made the wonderful idea of, and it is kind of a beautiful dream.

Why don't they put these characters back on the boxes?

I thought of that too, yeah.

And when you think about it, it's like, OK, well, you'll get the pushback of while they're not the current characters and all that, but neither are the Flintstones really.

And the Flintstones have been on Cocoa Pebbles since I believe 73, may have been 68.

And the vitamins Flintstones characters have been on a nationally advertised national product in major stores longer than any other characters.

So it stands to reason that Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound, you know it's not out of the realm of possibility.

Well from my understanding I believe Kellogg's is being bought by another company.

So who knows, maybe the new owner will take interest.

Sometimes when a new leadership comes in and sometimes they seem open to well, what can we do and what can we have?

And especially if they see these Blu rays and say, wow, I didn't know we did this.

So the commercials, just the commercials and just the end credits are the only black and white segments of this.

The rest that's.

Correct.

The commercials and the end credits are black and white, and given that the opening credits were shot in color, I have to believe that the end credits were as well shot in color, but they did not survive.

We looked everywhere.

I believe the commercials were probably made in black and white because the original airings were in black and white.

No one aired this show in color until the second round of syndication, which was after the Kellogg's era.

I could tell you that when Quickdraw McGraw moved from syndication to CBS Saturday mornings, CBS was still in their moratorium on anything being in color except for The Wizard of Oz as a result of William S Paley being infuriated by NBCRCA and the tricks they pulled to get their color system approved by the FCC.

And Paley was so angry that he said, I'm not going to allow any color television on the CBS television network.

You know, for 10 years, I believe that was the quote.

And it wasn't until the 196566 season that CBS finally made the change to start showing most of their programming and prime time in color.

You know, ABC was not part of that.

So Flintstones being in color on ABC, I remember really, really young, the first time I saw a color television set was at a neighbour's apartment.

They had won a color television in a raffle.

And I remember seeing a Flintstones prime time episode is probably like the great Gazoo era, but it was a color.

And that was, I think the first time I remember seeing color television, really ever since the original run ended in the early to mid 60s.

That was the end of seeing these shows as they were originally constructed.

And we're really bringing people back to 1958, to the very end of 61.

Will the individual cartoons have their individual credits or will they be like they were later with a quicker open?

They all have their original credits.

I believe the exception to that is some of the Yogi Bear segments.

I think they just have a title credit that goes into the cartoon, but everything else has the full credits, the full copyright.

You know, acknowledging.

It's interesting because they acknowledged the people who worked on the shows, but they didn't credit Daws Butler, Don Messick except at the end of the half hour in the end credits.

And I think they especially when it comes to Doz Butler, there would be no Huckleberry Hound or Yogi Bear without Doz Butler.

I don't think that necessarily was a a slight so much as it was just business as usual because yeah, absolutely.

Because voice over and almost anything was not always done.

I mean, Mel Blanc was an exception.

But most of the time, especially in a live action show when June Foray or Mel Blanc are doing something, they're not in the credits.

So voice, I think it's a different union even.

I completely concur.

And of course that has always LED people to say, you know, that wasn't Mel Blanc doing Elmer Fudd.

And I don't know how Arthur Q Bryan felt about that because his contribution is Elmer is very substantial and people like June Furay is witch Hazel or B Benedarett.

She was doing it and she's read Riding Hood.

I mean, just so many of the cartoons Stan Friberg and you could just go on and on and on.

People did not get credit.

And I'm glad that we have those end credits on there to at least acknowledge who gave specifically, especially the characters that does Butler voiced.

He was the architect of the essence of the character through the vocal performance.

We are fortunate that voice acting is not looked down upon today, and very famous people contribute their voices to all sorts of animation today.

And it's not considered like being a second class citizen.

It's considered very reputable work that generates a very impressive paycheck.

I would assume yeah, but that's a big difference from the days when HP was starting for sure.

Yeah, except for maybe Mel Blanc occasionally on The Merv Griffin Show or The Tonight Show.

I remember June Frey and Oz Butler being on Truth or Consequences, but in general they were not talk show guests like they might be.

Well, they're not even that.

Well, they're not with us now, but you don't see a very rarely unless the host is really into something.

Tom Kenny was on the Craig Ferguson show because he was a fan, but it's still pretty rare.

The voice acting professionals are still kind of in a different category.

And then they weren't even really talked about unless you knew who they were and were fans like us.

Well, and you'll appreciate this, my Huckleberry Hound and friends Cole picks LP.

I had two of them actually, because the first one fell out of a cardboard sleeve onto the floor of my school bus and broke and I was beside myself and my mom got me another one which I still have it.

It's unplayable, but the point is, on the back of that jacket was a picture of Daws Butler and a picture of Don Messick and a description of who they were.

And that was very unusual.

I know in your book you talk at length about Huckleberry Hunt for President, the Golden Record.

I got that when I was a kid, and because I was a little bit strange as a child, I wanted to understand like, why aren't the voices the same?

And who are those people?

And is this authorized by Huckleberry Hound and Hannah Barbera?

And then there had that little teeny weeny piece of the theme song on that album.

I was like, you know, I couldn't have been more than two or three.

Like, how'd they get the permission to use that?

I was thinking about those things as a toddler.

That's my clue that there's some kind of reincarnation because it's just what, how in the world would I have even come to think of such a thing?

I don't know, but I did.

I think a lot of people listening probably felt that way, and there's been many discussions on various episodes and shows I've been on about the Golden Records and the Peter Pan Records and why they didn't use voices.

And I really do feel like unlike any cartoons that ever came before because the Hanna Barbera cartoons were in your home.

They were like best friends, close neighbors.

Whereas the theatrical cartoons and the Disney cartoons were someone you went to visit or saw holidays and you love them and you look forward to them.

But these were at constants with you.

I mean, I know there were theatricals run on TV as well, but every day or every week, you knew what this character sounded like.

Popeye's voice varied.

Mickey Mouse's voice varied.

A lot of the famous voices, Woody Woodpecker's voice changed, so it wasn't as much of a thing.

But when you had this character, that's the way they sounded.

And for the first time, that became a major piece of importance to children and suddenly doing a record without that voice, which years before Disney did that capital, they didn't they.

Had those capital Bugs Bunny things they got re released in the late 60s yeah and I had no idea like how old they were or what their genesis was at the time being just a little kid, but I knew I was like why aren't they using the music for Warner Brothers cartoons right.

You know, why is it like the Looney Tunes theme sideways, You know, and I was thinking about things like that.

Just me too, and my brother too.

When I played Bugs Bunny and Storyland for him, he's like, why aren't they?

What is this?

It sounds like it but it's not and I didn't understand that.

Well, that's a purchase and they don't own it.

And the same thing with HB theme songs.

It wasn't until the television's greatest hits album that most of those were on vinyl.

And.

CDI completely agree.

And I think I I remember I was working at MGM Way Home Video at the time when the Picnic Basket came out.

So it was before my association with Warner Brothers and Rhino and having done so many soundtrack albums that I produced for our joint venture with Rhino.

Once I came to Warner Brothers, what Earl did with The Picnic Basket and I remember reading his liner notes the very first time.

This is the kind of album I dreamed of as a child.

I wanted to be able to have the real soundtracks and it was as if he was speaking from my brain.

That was exactly my thought.

I'm sure it was probably your thought too.

It was what we always hoped for.

And I think the Cold Pick soundtracks were so unique in actually giving you the real voice and the real stories, and I remember they suddenly became very hard to find very quickly.

Yes, I kept like asking my mother, you know, I want to get this Mr.

Ed record and I want to get this.

I see the pictures on the back, but they weren't available.

The only ones I had, I had Top Cat and I had Huckleberry Hound.

That was it.

I memorized top cat.

I actually did speeches in school where I did like the maternity ward scene.

I know it by heart.

Because you you didn't have, we didn't have home video, we didn't have endless reruns on cable.

That was your only way to keep the experience.

It's just like the 39 minute version of The Wizard of Oz that was on The MGM soundtrack LP.

I mean, that was a way you could re experience the movie in the middle of the year.

You waited for it to be on TV again.

Also hearing it as pure audio, even if it is the exact like the Jetsons Skull Picks, which is not just a pickup but a high fidelity pickup of two great sound episodes, Rosie the Robot and the Date with Jet Screamer.

Those are exact soundtracks.

They hold up as strong recordings and when you listen to them as pure recording without the picture, you gain a lot of appreciation for the music, for the way the voice acting is done, the timing of everything, the sound effects.

So I still enjoy listening to just the audio of things.

Was there a question?

And I'm not the only person that did this, I'm sure.

I used to hold my little tape recorder up to the TV speaker so that I could listen to sounds of TV shows and movies, not knowing what the future would hold.

It's a wonderful, wonderful thing.

But that all the more underscores my enthusiasm for having been able to work with so many people here to make what I, I hope our many fans dreams come true.

Having Huckleberry Hound because really he's the first big Hanna Barbera star.

And I know Yogi became a star on Huck show and some people say he clips them.

For me, Huck was always #1.

It is a a landmark television history item, too, because Huckleberry Hound was the first cartoon character to address the audience as the host, Gerald Mac Boing.

Boing sort of was the host, but it was the announcer talking sort of like the Pink Panther, Huck and his friends.

And in the commercials, I think that was part of the magnetism of those early shows.

In the commercials and all, they're looking at you talking to you.

It was the first animated series to win an Emmy, and it was a sophisticated kind of comedy, gentler than Jay Ward.

But what opened the door for getting Rocky and his friends on?

Because at the time, before there was the Jay Ward stuff, Huckleberry Hound was like Beanie and Cecil.

Praised by the literati as being beautifully written, aimed at adults and children.

Played in bar on the Huckleberry Hound for President album.

In the bar watching the show.

He was a mascot on college campuses.

They named an island after him.

I mean, Huckleberry Hound was, and it's forgotten now, but it's important to know what a groundbreaking thing this was.

Also, it was the first package cartoon made for television because before that it was a cluster of cartoons.

You know, Crusader Rabbit or whatever.

What existed before was added to shows, but it wasn't necessarily packaged as a show.

This was 3 cartoons plus interstitials with a beginning, a middle and an end and that had never really been done.

And I'm guessing, by the way I've been seeing it on ME TV tunes is it was so experimental they weren't quite sure how to order the segments every week because they rotate them.

Right.

And The thing is, with the repetition, people have to remember that it wasn't like what happened like with first run syndication in the 80s where you'd have a new episode every day for 12 weeks and 60 episodes.

Huckabay Hound, My memory of it was once a week, Thursday nights, you know, the next night would be Adventures of Superman, which was also sponsored by Kellogg's.

And, you know, I've gone back into my TV Guide collection, which I have a very substantial New York metropolitan area TV Guide collection to supplement when I started saving them myself.

So I have the years that precede me, and I see the way it was scheduled.

You know, it was an event you'd have to wake a whole week to see another Huckleberry Hound cartoon.

And I also think the repetition of certain bumpers and sequences and commercials were all part of children learning things and repeating them and memorizing them and memorizing the songs.

And what's kind of cool is some of the commercials we have are, you know, joining the Huck Hound Club and sending in your box top and getting a little toy or stamp kit or whatever, you know, But at the same time, another one of the commercials we have has a spoof of the What's My line?

Sign in, please.

I mean, that is the indication that they were looking to make adults laugh, not just kids.

Kids weren't watching What's My Line at that time.

Young children certainly weren't.

They weren't up at 10:30 on a Sunday night.

But the parents that were watching with the kids this way, it was entertainment that could be for the whole family.

It was like The Muppet Show in the 70s.

It was on once a week.

You couldn't wait to see it, and The Muppets had an edge to it.

But it was always gentle.

But it was always very funny and you really grew to love those characters for sure.

And I mean, like, that was my first favorite thing as a young child, The Huckleberry Hound show.

And because we saw Huckleberry Hound in black and white, I didn't realize that my stuffed Huckleberry Hound, which was improperly colored red by Knickerbocker toys, I didn't know there was anything wrong with that because I didn't necessarily associate the huckleberry and what a huckleberry was.

I didn't know that when I was two or three, you know, but I knew that my Huckleberry Hound stuffed animal was like what I saw on television with the little hat and everything like that.

And I still have them.

They are falling apart.

My father put masking tape on the feet in the mid 60s and it's still there.

I mean, those are collectibles from my childhood.

They will not go away.

But before I became, you know, enmeshed in Classic Cinema or even classic theatrical animation, certainly my first real passion for entertainment was Huckleberry Hound and the world of Hanna Barbera, The Flintstones and Quick Draw Everything.

All those early shows and Magilla.

I mean, as Hanna Barbera evolved in later years into the more action oriented cartoons and the influence of Alex Toth and those cartoons didn't interest me as much.

And then, of course, I started getting more involved in watching Casablanca, you know?

It also goes with a generational thing because you get to a certain age where you're watching or doing other things.

In my case, it didn't change because I have the same records and kept collecting the records and watch the shows.

But Hanna Barbera had such a long history that each generation holds a certain group of cartoons to its heart.

But it really started with this series.

One of the things I noticed I'm seeing, one of the interstitials was Pixie and Dixie were fencing with Jinx and that's the front cover of the Coal Picks album.

And I always wondered, I don't remember that happening on the show.

And there it is.

They adapted the art for the album cover.

That was very exciting to me.

And when this work we started on Huck was beginning, there was number thought that oh, there's going to be a 24 hour cartoon channel that's just filled with great television and theatrical animation from the 30s up through the 80s.

It makes me so happy that our company entered into a joint venture with Live O Broadcasting to make me TV tunes happen.

The quality obviously of what we have on Blu-ray.

It's a very different experience and owning it as one.

I mean, if something like this had come out, you know, on a laserdisc or something 25 years ago and I had nothing to do with it, I would have been the first person to buy it.

I think there are a lot of people who are very excited about this.

I'm feeling it.

I'm seeing it in the notes we get for social media.

You know, I read through all these various forums and I really like to know what the people think because I think that will always keep me effective in my job by knowing what people want and being able to balance that out by what's going to be profitable for the company.

But there's there's one or two people that have been pleading for decades for the rest of Huckleberry Hound to be released.

And I'm sure they are the nicest people in the world because they never ever said any.

You know, people can get really nasty on the Internet, you may have noticed.

I might have.

Yeah, these.

People only said the nicest things and I saw their responses once it was announced, and it just was so fulfilling.

And I'm particularly excited for the Deep fans, especially you, my friend, to actually see this in their hands and watch the shows because so much living care has gone into this.

And to have it all really as a almost like a Hanna Barbera encyclopedia of their origin story.

It's a tremendous chapter in the history of that company.

We we want to emphasize, please send that message to finance.

They like if something makes money please pre-order it or buy it.

What within a week or two?

Just like a movie, because if you wait too long it falls off their radar, correct?

Yes, absolutely.

And the more successful this is, it will pave the way for more projects of this nature that are comprehensive and put together with such love and care.

There is big new stuff coming.

I mean, you're working on it as we.

Speak right?

Oh yeah.

And I always have to, you know, beg and plead to get my budgets approved.

I just got 47 features approved for restoration and remastering, but I've also put in my animation and television requests for next year and I'm waiting to see if they will get greenlit because there's so much we need to bring out to the people.

And that's been my life's work and I'm excited at the prospects of what's to come.

I wanted to finish Huckleberry Hound on DVD when we started the Warner Archive in 2009, and when I found out what the music costs were, it was just impossible.

But thankfully everybody got together and said we need to prioritize these things, we need to get them off the shelf and into people's homes, and that has happened.

Well, Warner is lucky to have you, and we're even luckier that Warner has you.

George, thank you so much for all you do.

And we'll all be watching Huck and thinking of you and thinking of those days and eating our corn flakes, our sugar frosted cocoa Krispies.

You know, it tastes like a chocolate milkshake, only crunchy.

Thank you very, very much, George, for joining us again.

Oh, my pleasure.

And all of you listening, thank you once again.

And until next time, bye bye.

We hope you enjoyed the fantastic world of Hannah and Barbera with Greg Airborne.

Please join us again and Many thanks for listening.