Cartoon Modern

When Flintstones designer Ed Benedict was freelancing on TV commercials for studios like Cascade Pictures, he would photograph all of his designs before delivering them to the studio. The images below are from color xeroxes of Ed’s photo contact sheets. The quality isn’t great and the images aren’t very big, but if there’s interest, I have a lot more of these and can post them. These baseball players are plenty appealing and fun to look at, though I have no idea which commercial, if any, they appeared in.

Legendary animation artist Ed Benedict passed away Monday at age 94. He was the designer of most of Hanna-Barbera’s early stars including Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw McGraw. He was also an important part of my book CARTOON MODERN, which unfortunately I wasn’t able to show him before he left us. There’s a lot more about Ed at Cartoon Brew.

If you have memories of Ed or were inspired by his work, please share in the comments below and I’ll try to forward it to his family.

Continuing from the earlier post, here are some more examples of Ed Benedict’s TV commercial designs from the Fifties. Click on the images for larger versions.

A background layout by Ed Benedict from DIXIELAND DROOPY, 1954.
(Thanks to Jordan Reichek for the image)

Via YouTube, we can enjoy three shorts that Ed Benedict designed and laid out while working at MGM in the mid-1950s. Ed worked on these immediately prior to doing those Cascade commercial designs I posted yesterday. There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking in the design of the Benedict-era Tex Avery shorts, but they still hold up well and are solid examples of modern animation design.

DIXIELAND DROOPY (1954)
directed by Tex Avery

THE FIRST BAD MAN (1955)
directed by Tex Avery

SHEEP WRECKED (1958)
directed by Michael Lah

Random 1950s sketch by Ed Benedict

Ed Benedict (b. 1912) was one of the primary designers of the 1950s so it’s surprising that he hasn’t been mentioned more on this blog. I’ll try to correct that over the next few weeks, especially since Ed’s 94th birthday is coming up on August 23. Here’s a CliffsNotes version of Ed’s career in the 1950s. In the early-1950s, he was the head designer at Paul Fennell’s Cartoon Films Ltd. In 1952, Ed became Tex Avery’s designer at MGM, and styled a lot of Avery’s later MGM shorts including DIXIELAND DROOPY, FIELD AND SCREAM, THE FIRST BAD MAN, DEPUTY DROOPY and CELLBOUND. In the late-1950s, he started working for Hanna Barbera where he designed most of the studio’s early classic TV characters including Ruff and Reddy, Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw, Yogi Bear and The Flintstones. You can find out more about Ed in my book CARTOON MODERN (obviously), or check out the extensive interview I did with him in ANIMATION BLAST #8.

The designs below are from the mid-to-late-1950s when he was designing commercials for Tex Avery at Cascade Pictures. As far as I know these have never been published anywhere before. The only reason these images exist is because when Ed was freelancing, he would photograph all of his artwork before mailing it to the studio. These are scans from copies of Ed’s contact sheets so the quality is not that hot, but they offer a valuable insight into how he would design and lay out TV commercials.

(click on images for larger versions)

The Deep Archives, an animation gallery back east, is currently selling some of Ed Benedict’s commercial artwork. Benedict is, of course, the character designer of Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw, The Flintstones, and so many other early Hanna-Barbera cartoons, but these drawings are for TV commercials that he designed at Paul Fennell’s studio Cartoon Films in the late-1940s and early-1950s. I think some of it might also be from Cascade, where Ed designed TV commercials for Tex Avery in the mid-1950s. It’s perhaps not the most prime examples of his work, but nevertheless it’s rare Benedict art.

I spoke to the 93-year-old Benedict yesterday, and despite some physical ailments, he is still sharp as a tack. He was really happy when I told him that Fantagraphics is doing a book about one of his favorite illustrators, Russell Patterson, and he also told me that the Deep Archives recently got more of his work, so keep an eye out on their website for additional Benedict art. I’ll be writing about Ed much more in the future, but you can also check out my extensive interview that I did with him in the print edition of ANIMATION BLAST #8.