Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Looie.

QUICK DRAW MCGRAW

Original Medium: TV animation
Produced by: Hanna-Barbera
First Appeared: 1959
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A funny animal western where the hero is a horse — pretty clever idea. Clever enough for Hanna-Barbera to have made …

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Quick Draw McGraw the title character of their second half-hour animated TV series. Quick Draw's show debuted in syndication on Sept. 29, 1959, one year after Huckleberry Hound.

Getting past the clever idea, the series was based on a stock situation — between Quick Draw, who wore the star, and his sidekick, a burro named Baba Looey, there was about enough gray matter to make one good brain, and the second banana had most of it. Still, the series was entertaining enough to hold the interest of its young viewers — especially, to judge from the attention they've gotten in the years since, the episodes in which Quick Draw assumed a Zorro-like persona called El Kabong. The series remained in production three years, for a total of 45 episodes, which were re-run on CBS's Saturday morning from 1963-66.

Daws Butler, who provided voices for both characters, also did voices for Yogi Bear, the unnamed Wolf who played opposite Droopy, and many other toons. Quick Draw's pet, Snuffles (who was the answer to the popular trivia question about the dog who floated ecstatically in the air when given a dog biscuit) was played by Don Messick, who also did the voices of non-anthropomorphic animals in Hong Kong Phooey, Shazzan, Inch High, Private Eye and several other shows.

Back then, most half-hour cartoon shows had three segments, each about as long as the average theatrical cartoon (in fact, many used actual theatrical cartoons as the segments). The back-ups on Quick Draw's show were Snooper & Blabber (a pair of private eyes) and Augie Doggie & Doggie Daddy (a father/son sitcom). The latter was strongly reminiscent of Spike & Tyke, a minor series of cartoons Hanna and Barbera had worked on earlier, at MGM.

Within a few weeks of his TV debut, Quick Draw was starring in a Dell comic book. The series transferred to Gold Key in 1962, along with the rest of Dell's licensed properties, and ran until 1963. Gold Key put out one last issue in 1969, then the Hanna-Barbera license went to Charlton Comics. Charlton put out eight issues, from 1970-72.

Quick Draw hasn't been seen much in recent years, but he remains a strong memory among those who saw him in his heyday.

— DDM

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Text ©2000-04 Donald D. Markstein. Art © Hanna-Barbera.