Spring has sprung in Jellystone Park, and the little bear Boo Boo (voiced by Don Messick) is awoken from hibernation by a drip of water in his ear. It's enough for him to leap from his cave enraptured that winter is over, and skip over to his best friend Yogi Bear's cave, although he proves far more difficult to rouse. After falling on Boo Boo and squashing him, Yogi (Daws Butler) is finally in the land of the living and with his customary huge appetite, especially after that long sleep, so with the tourists arriving there are plenty of opportunities to be fed - but Ranger Smith (Messick) is not happy...
The animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera had pretty much conquered television cartooning in the sixties, but there was one sphere of entertainment that eluded them at the time, and that was the cinema. The natural thing to do, therefore, was to bring some of their best loved characters to the big screen, and their first try at that was with Hey There It's Yogi Bear, a feature length adventure for the incorrigible ursine with the food addiction. This did well enough for them to bring out a Fred Flintstone movie - A Man Called Flinstone - which if anything took a more expansive take on familiar characters.
For this was pretty much a television episode writ large, not pushing back any boundaries but providing undemanding laughs and diversion for those who had enjoyed Yogi in the comfort of their own homes. You can imagine parents of the day wondering why they'd shelled out for something which had the only difference between this and the TV version being that this almost lasted an hour and a half, but the kids appreciated it. This would have been because, as with many of the Hanna Barbera stable, he was an easy personality to understand, having simple traits that would not go over the heads of the target audience.
Of course, that didn't mean that he was not stretched a little more, and he did get to sing here as it was a musical, but he was immediately familiar as Yogi and did not stray from his formula. Although he did stray from Jellystone, as in a slightly convoluted plot he is supposed to be shipped off to San Diego Zoo thanks to Ranger Smith getting seriously fed up with his unorthodox feeding patterns - basically nabbing every pic-a-nic basket he can. So far, so TV, but Yogi fools a friend into taking his place in the zoo trip, and becomes what he sees as a Robin Hood figure, taking from the holidaymakers and giving to... well, giving to himself. What he doesn't realise that his girlfriend (of sorts) Cindy Bear (Julie Bennett) wants to follow him to California.
So she plants a pie in Smith's face to show she is misbehaving, and is sent away - to St Louis, which means that Yogi has to make up for his misdeeds by going to save her, with the faithful Boo Boo in tow (although you'd think Boo Boo was the voice of Yogi's conscience, he also has an actual conscience character who appears in mid-air to tell him off). Meanwhile, Cindy has fallen in with a bad crowd and is forced to be a tightrope walking bear in the circus, complete with Muttley intimidating her up the big top. Well, the proto-Muttley, here called Mugger but obviously a character too good to be relegated to a one-shot appearance as a support in the Yogi Bear movie, hence his appearances later on in the Hanna-Barbera universe. There's nothing innovative here, but the songs are pleasant, it raises a few chuckles, and doesn't wear out its welcome, even if you are left to contemplate how they got so many episodes of TV out of such a slender premise. Music by Marty Paich.
Display comments