Jinks!

The groundbreaking “Huckleberry Hound Show” (the show that put Hanna Barbera on the map, the first half-hour animated show to succeed in the TV market and the first cartoon to ever receive an Emmy), was my favorite show when I was 5 or 6. God I loved that cordial, slow strolling blue dog in the straw hat, who crooned “Oh my darlin’ Clementine” in his syrupy, Southern drawl.

One of three segments on “The Huckleberry Hound Show” was “Pixie and Dixie and Jinks”, featuring a pair of scantily clad, adorably beaming mice. The mice struggled to outmaneuver their nemesis, Mr. Jinks – or “Jinksy”- a lovable, dunder-headed cat with a nebbish/beatnik vibe and an ungrammatical lament “I hate those meeces to pieces!” The local kids’ programming in Philly was a weird and depressing lineup of weirdos and divorced dads; a passive aggressive Lutheran minister named Captain Noah; Gene London’s seedy “Cartoon Corners”; a weirdly boyish yet overtly sexual “Pixanne”; Wee Willy Webber’s Colorful Cartoon Club” (who had excellent taste, introducing a generation to “Astro Boy”, “Speed Racer”, “Kimba The White Lion”, and the seminal “Tobor the 8th Man”); and an abjectly horrifying bit of kid’s fare called “Lorenzo the Clown”  – except that he wasn’t a clown at all, he was a “hobo”, a bum – in tattered clothes and slouch hat and beard stubble. The TV homeless guy had a cartoon show too, “Lorenzo’s Cartoon Festival”. The Looney Tunes confused me with the over-arching violence and World War II references.”Huckleberry Hound” was all new, cute and slanty and modern and even though the animation was unsophisticated, on the 1970’s-standard-issue, scratchy black and white basement Zenith, with rabbit ears and a 10 inch screen slammed into an 80 inch walnut cabinet, who the hell cared.

The designs were adorable, the stories were clever, the voices pure genius. Sure on paper it was your standard-brand, warring cat and mouse (or meeces) in a domestic setting fare, a low budget “Tom and Jerry” without the bells-and-whistles animation and with a low-violence mandate, but “Pixie and Dixie” was really funny. Tom was sinister and sadistic and Jerry was such an douche he was infuriating. The entertainment from “Tom and Jerry” didn’t need to derive from the personality of the characters because all the entertainment burst forth in the effulgent cacophony of the animation. When there was no budget for full animation and the show couldn’t rely on lots of action, it needed great characters.

I really love Jinks because he is a complete original – a hubristic idiot, spewing moronic malapropisms in a quasi beatnik delivery. He is like the idiot hipsters I see at my coffee shop every (workday) morning, mispronouncing “Baudrillard” and – ironically  -“espresso”. The voice behind Jinks is a psychotically prolific actor named Daws Butler who also voices Dixie Mouse and Huckleberry Hound (and, among others: Reddy from “Ruff and Reddy”, Quickdraw McGraw (and Baba Looey and almost every other character from Quickdraw), Snagglepuss, Augie Daddy, Hokey Wolf, Yogi Bear, Chilly Willy, Wally Gator, Elroy Jetson, Hair Bear from “The Hair Bear Bunch”, Lippy the Lion, Peter Potamus, Super Snooper and Blabber Mouse, Wimpy from the “All-New Popeye Hour”, and Capn’ Crunch, you know, from the cereal).

Part Marlon Brando, part Robert Zimmerman, Jinks has a laconic drawl, incongruous inflections, idiotic mumblings and weird enunciation. Jinks was “cartooned” via his voice acting. Rather than just reading the lines or slipping into some grating voice-type, Daws Butler “animated” this simply drawn, ordinary orange cat. The almost generic “cat” design, allows the personality to come first, the “design” to evolve out of the voice, the stories and events that “the cat” himself helps to create. Butler said that he found Joe Barbera inflexible as a voice director, that he had preconceived ideas he expected him to mimic, and that he insisted Butler do Yogi Bear with an “Art Carney cadence”, even as the character was evolving.”He wanted a “voice”. I wanted a character”, said Butler, “and he didn’t understand Jinks at all; so that was great. He didn’t know how to direct me with ole Jinksy”.

One of the things that made me want to be an animator was that I wanted to create and animate cartoon characters. When I was 8 or 9, I became obsessed with an idea for a character. It was a pony named “Slippers”, with a big pink bow between her ears who spoke with a fancy French accent (I had just seen “The Aristocats”). Slippers had a cat, an orange cat, who spoke like Jack Wild and wore a black bow tie. The orange cat would ride on Slippers’ back, and they would have serious conversations in their tres serious accents. Sometimes, Slippers would stop short and the cat would spin around while maintaining his seat on horseback. I wanted to see that happen, I needed to see that happen.

My favorite episode was called “King Size Poodle”. Oh how I wanted to take the scissors to the family dog.

The meeces meet a runaway lion and help hide him from the authorities by disguising him as a fancy French poodle. Mr. Jinx, always looking to make a quick buck, enlists the “poodle” to help track the lion down and claim the reward. The meeces have taught the lion one French line: “coup de grâce.” Since that is the extent of the lion’s French, he responds to everything with “coop de grass”. I thought that was the funniest thing I had ever heard. The gullible and linguistically-challenged Jinks is completely convinced by the lion’s performance and offers him a stake in the reward  (“spuh-lit up some easy loot”), if he agrees to be his hunting dog and help track down the missing lion.

The “poodle” agrees and acting like an English Pointer, pretends to spot the lion. He “points” to a basement crawlspace and lures Jinks in, then slams him in the ass with a two by four.

Mr. Jinks: “Uh, partner. Fill me in. What struckt me”?

The lion thinks for a moment before carefully conjuring up his inner French poodle…..

….pretending he is speaking perfect, fluent Français, confidently answers:  “Tch tch tch. Coop de grass”.

Jinks: “Yeah, uh. I get the picture”.

Ultimately, everyone’s fun comes to an abrupt end as they are spotted the by the central casting approved pesky zookeeper.

Jinks insists to the zookeeper that what he has is a French Poodle, not a lion: “I hate to disilluding you”. But no one ever believes Mr Jinx. The meeces and the lion pile into the back of the zookeepers’ van, leaving Jinks frustrated that the lion won’t explain to the zookeeper that he is a French Poodle.

Jinks: “Tell ‘em you’re a French poodle. Say some-minn”!

Lion: “Coop de grass”.

With an “au revoir-ee, Jinks” from Pixie and Dixie, the van rumbles off. Jinks, furious that the meeces will get the reward for the lion’s return, turns to the camera and says:  “I hate them meeces to pieces.”