The Ruff & Reddy Show

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The Ruff & Reddy Show
Image:Ruff and Reddy.jpg
The show's title card.
Genre Cartoon series, cliffhanger
Directed by Bob Hultgren
Presented by Jimmy Blaine (original run)
Robert Cottle (reruns)
Voices of Daws Butler
Don Messick
Country of origin Flag of the United States United States
No. of seasons 3
Production
Producer(s) William Hanna
Joseph Barbera
Running time 30 min.
Broadcast
Original channel NBC
Original run December 14, 1957 – April 2, 1960
Chronology
Followed by The Huckleberry Hound Show (1958-1962)
External links
IMDb profile
TV.com summary

The Ruff & Reddy Show is a Hanna-Barbera animated series starring Ruff, a cat voiced by Don Messick, and Reddy, a dog voiced by Daws Butler. First broadcast in December 1957 on NBC, it was the first television show produced by Hanna-Barbera.

Contents

[edit] History

William Hanna and Joseph Barbera entered the television field fresh from serving as the heads of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer animation department, which shut down in June 1957. Unlike its successor The Huckleberry Hound Show, Ruff and Reddy featured a live action host, Jimmy Blaine, and various theatrical cartoons from Columbia Pictures' Screen Gems library including The Fox and the Crow and Li'l Abner filling up the rest of the half-hour.

Messick's "Ruff" voice characterization was very similar to the one he would later use for Pixie the mouse. Butler used his tried-and-true southern drawl for "Reddy", a voice that would later become mainly identified with Huckleberry Hound. A supporting character in some episodes was the tiny-sized Professor Gizmo (also voiced by Don Messick). The show's episodes borrowed from the serialized storytelling format of such shows as Crusader Rabbit by making extensive use of cliffhanger storylines. The episodes were not much longer than four minutes, including an opening song and much repetition of preceding events.

Ruff and Reddy was broadcast in black and white until fall 1959, when it went to color. Actor/singer and Storyteller:Jimmy Blaine served as the series' first mc with Puppeteers:Rufus Rose And Bobby Nicholson providing comedic relief. NBC cancelled the show at the end of the 1959-1960 season, and was later rerun in 1962 with Captain Bob Cottle as the second and last live-action host. When NBC cancelled the series, Screen Gems syndicated the cartoons to local TV stations.

The donkey in the cartoon is known as "Poco Loco" and is commonly referred to as a Borough.

[edit] Other Appearances

The characters next appeared on The ABC Saturday Superstar Movie, in the episode Yogi's Ark Lark (which featured almost every Hanna-Barbera animal character that existed at the time). Since then, they haven't been used in anything new.

Ruff made an appearance in the Yogi's Treasure Hunt episode "Goodbye Mr. Chump" as a newspaper vendor.

Episodes of Ruff and Reddy later appeared on one volume of the Hanna-Barbera Personal Favorites home video series called Animal Follies, along with Yippee, Yappee and Yahooey, Touché Turtle and Dum Dum, Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy and Snagglepuss.

The computer game titled Ruff and Reddy in the Space Adventure was released in 1990 for Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amiga and Atari ST.

[edit] The Ruff & Reddy Show in other languages

[edit] External links