HEY, IT'S YOGI BEAR IN DIET (AND SCRIPT) DISASTER...

Characters copyright HANNA-BARBERA

25 years ago, a MARVEL U.K. editor asked me to letter a

Holiday Special at short notice.  I agreed, but when I received the

script and art, the script was awful.  It had been translated from a

foreign edition (which was a translation from an U.S. edition)

and the script was so immensely awful as to be insulting.

It was a HANNA-BARBERA-based comic, and nothing

was right.  RANGER SMITH was named WARDEN SMITH,

PICNIC BASKETS were called LUNCHEON HAMPERS, and

the characters spoke in a stilted fashion, merely repeating, in the

main, what was obvious in the pictures.  What's more, little care

had been taken to ensure the dialogue and captions fitted the

allocated space.  It was a dog's dinner.

I 'phoned the editor and related my concerns, and enquired

if I might be allowed to 'punch' things up a bit.  She reluctantly

assented, seeing the wisdom in my words, but she wasn't overly

happy that I'd spotted oversights she had missed.  However,

the deadline was looming and there wasn't time to return the

strips to the office to be lettered by anyone else.

You'll have to trust me on this, I suppose, but the finished

result was far better than the original version.  I tailored all the

dialogue to fit the balloons, I supplied the characters' logos for

the splash pages (taken from a Hanna-Barbera book I had),

and actually added some humour to the script.

The tale you see is one of the results.  If you get at least

one chuckle out of it, that's one more than was in it before

I got to work.  Did I get any more dosh for all the extra time

and effort I put into it?  Hey, don't ask silly questions.

******

(Incidentally, I suspect that 'parsley' should have been

rendered as 'celery', but that didn't occur to me until after I'd

turned the job in.  It's just that I know people munch on celery

to curb their appetite and lose weight, but I've never heard of

anyone advised to eat parsley to do so.  It would probably

work, but celery is the usual recommendation.)

I received the strip in b&w, so assumed that Yogi was using the tent as
a dress.  Nope, he'd borrowed a dress from inside the tent.  Ah, well...

Note that Yogi's borrowed tunic disappears in panel 2

Incidentally, all the balloon and caption shapes were already on
the art, so I had to fit my lettering within pre-existing outlines

And below is the cover which contained the above tale.

Posted in: Cartoons