December 14, 1957

[Ccook50]

This Friday, December 14, marks the 50th anniversary of the debut of the Hanna-Barbera studio's very first show, Ruff & Reddy. It is also the first cartoon made solely for network Saturday morning, airing on NBC.*


Earlier that same year of 1957, Bill Hanna and Joseph Barbera found themselves unemployed after Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer shut down their cartoon studio where Bill and Joe made Tom & Jerry for seventeen years (winning seven Oscars along the way). Bill and Joe decided to press on and make cartoons specifically for television, which Alex Anderson and Jay Ward pioneered eight years earlier with the syndicated Crusader Rabbit. They developed Ruff and Reddy as mismatched partners--a cat and a dog, much in the same mismatched way that Crusader Rabbit and his pal Rags the Tiger were. They pitched the show to numerous outlets and NBC took it. But even after much negotiating, Bill and Joe were only to get $2700 per half hour of cartoon show from the network, which meant all the lavish detail they used on Tom and Jerry had to be stripped to the near bare minimum. To offset the artistic liabilities, they gave Ruff and Reddy appealing personalities and created imaginative storylines.

On the NBC show, the cartoons were bookended with live-action host segments. Jimmy Blaine was the studio host during the show's 1957-60 run, and Captain Bob Cottle took over when the show returned in 1962. Three episodes of a 13-part Ruff & Reddy serial were screened each week. Hanna and Barbera had a modest success with the show, but the studio would truly hit pay dirt the following season with Huckleberry Hound, which won them an Emmy.

*--The first cartoon made for network TV period was Terrytoons' Tom Terrific, which was first screened on CBS's Captain Kangaroo show three months earlier. The first all-cartoon show made for network Saturday morning TV was the show that replaced Ruff & Reddy, Total Television's King Leonardo & His Short Subjects.