December 14, 1957: The Hanna-Barbera Empire Begins

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Joseph Barbera (left) and William Hanna

December 14, 1957: The Ruff and Reddy Show premieres on NBC. It was the 1st animated series made by Hanna-Barbera Productions, beginning a cartoon empire.

The series follows the adventures of Ruff, a smart and steadfast cat; and Reddy, a good-natured, brave, but not overly bright dog. It runs for 3 seasons, and is not nearly as well-remembered as some other Hanna-Barbera creations.

William Denby Hanna (1910-2001) grew up in Los Angeles. Joseph Roland Barbera (1911-2006) grew up in Brooklyn, and moved to Los Angeles as a young man. They met in 1937, while working in the animation department at Metro-Goldwyn Mayer. They worked on the Tom & Jerry cartoons in the 1940s and '50s, and founded their own production company on July 7, 1957, when MGM shut their animation department down. It would eventually show cartoons on all 3 major networks then in operation: NBC, CBS and ABC.

The Ruff and Reddy Show was a blip on the history of animated television. In 1958, Hanna-Barbera premiered The Huckleberry Hound Show. In addition to the titular hillbilly dog, it included segments starring Pixie and Dixie and Mr. Jinks, two mice and a cat; and Yogi Bear. In 1959 game The Quick Draw McGraw Show, which also included Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy.

In 1960, they created The Flintstones, a caveman-era ripoff of The Honeymooners. In 1961, they gave Yogi Bear his own show, which also debuted the lion Snagglepuss; and premiered Top Cat. In 1962, they debuted the space-age series The Jetsons. In 1963 came The Magilla Gorilla Show; in 1964, Jonny Quest and The Peter Potamus Show; in 1965, The Atom Ant/Secret Squirrel Show. In 1966, they debuted their 1st superhero, Space Ghost. In 1968, they introduced The Banana Splits, 4 guys in big animal costumes, who ran skits and introduced previously-produced Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

In 1968, The Wacky Races was launched. Three of the 11 cars in the races saw their occupants appear in spinoffs debuting the next year. The Perils of Penelope Pistop featured the titular Southern belle in a parody of silent-film "damsel-in-distress" serials, aided by another group of Wacky Racers, the Ant Hill Mob, dwarves who were parodies of 1920s gangsters. And Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines featured the Races' chief villain and his not-so-faithful dog, apparently set in World War I, fighting for Germany, trying to stop an American messenger -- a bird known as the Yankee Doodle Pigeon.

The Wacky Races and its spinoffs began a new era for Hanna-Barbera, highlighted in 1969, with Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! The cowardly Great Dane and his 4 crime-fighting teenage cohorts started a trend in cartoons, with talking animals and people working together. In 1970, with The Archies already a cartoon hit, Hanna-Barbera merged that concept with Scooby-Doo, and premiered Josie and the Pussycats: A cartoon teenage rock band, animals, and crime-fighting.

This would be followed by such shows as a series based on the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team (with fanciful stories involving them fighting crime), The Funky Phantom in 1971, The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan in 1972 (inspired by the Charlie Chan stories), Speed Buggy in 1973, Hong Kong Phooey in 1974, and Jabberjaw in 1976.

In 1975, they brought back their first project, with The New Tom & Jerry/Grape Ape/Mumbly Show. Mumbly was a dog in a trenchcoat who solved crimes, and, except for his coloring, was just like Dick Dastardly's dog Muttley. The problem was, while they had gained the legal rights to Tom & Jerry, they had lost the rights to Dastardly and Muttley. So a new character had to be created.

In 1976, they launched The Scooby-Doo/Dynomutt Hour. In addition to new adventures for Scooby and the gang, it introduced a new superhero. As he had for Space Ghost, the great Los Angeles disc jockey Gary Owens (best known as the announcer for Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In) voiced the Blue Falcon, a Batman ripoff who built his own Robin, a robot dog named Dynomutt, voiced by Frank Welker, who voiced Fred on Scooby-Doo and lots of cartoon dogs, including Astro Jetson -- but not Scooby, at least until original voice Don Messick died.

These last 2 series inspired their biggest project, in 1977: Scooby's All-Star Laff-A-Lympics. There were 3 teams: The Yogi Yahooeys, captained by Yogi Bear, and consisting of Hanna-Barbera characters of the 1960s, including Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw McGraw; the Scooby Doobies, captained by Scoopy and consisting of Hanna-Barbera characters of the 1970s, including Blue Falcon and Dynomutt; and the ever-cheating Really Rottens, captained by Mumbly, who as professional wrestling fans would say, "turned heel" for this show.

Most of the Rottens were new characters, some human, some monster. Among the humans was the Dread Baron, an evil pilot obviously based on Dick Dastardly, another character for whom Hanna-Barbera had lost the legal rights.

A few years later, after they regained the rights to Dick and Muttley, a graphic novel was released, with a time-travel plot (enabling the inclusion of both the Flintstones and the Jetsons) that brought all the Hanna-Barbera characters yet used together for one great climactic adventure, preceding DC Comics' Crisis On Infinite Earths by a few years, and Marvel Comics' Infinity Saga by several years. In that graphic novel, it was revealed that Dick Dastardly and the Dread Baron were identical twins, and that Muttley and Mumbley were also litter brothers.

Like most Hanna-Barbera shows were at this point, the Laff-A-Lympics were on ABC, and ABC's show Battle of the Network Stars was more of an inspiration than the actual Olympic Games.

There would be further Hanna-Barbera shows in the 1980s, including cartoons based on ABC sitcoms Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, and Mork and Mindy; and adapting The Smurfs for American TV. The last show by Hanna-Barbera Productions was The Powerpuff Girls, which ran from 1998 to 2005, and had the animation style and the feel of a 1970s' cartoon.

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December 14, 1957 was a Saturday. Baseball was out of season. There was 1 game played in the NFL: The Chicago Cardinals beat the Philadelphia Eagles, 31-27 at Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia.

There were 3 games played in the NBA:

* The New York Knicks lost to the St. Louis Hawks, 136-124 at the Kiel Auditorium in St. Louis.

* The Boston Celtics beat the Philadelphia Warriors, 112-94 at the Boston Garden.

* And the Syracuse Nationals beat the Cincinnati Royals, 104-100 -- at the Rochester Community War Memorial in Rochester, New York, which had been the Royals' home in the 1955-56 and 1956-57 seasons, before moving to Cincinnati. (It is now named the Blue Cross Arena.)

And the NHL's entire "Original Six" were in action:

* The New York Rangers and the Detroit Red Wings played to a tie, 4-4 at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit.

* The Boston Bruins and the Montreal Canadiens played to a tie, 1-1 at the Montreal Forum.

* And the Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 4-1 at Maple Leaf Garden in Toronto.

April 21, 1918: The Red Baron Is Shot Down (Not By Snoopy)

April 21, 1918: The Red Baron is shot down, ending the career of the most famous -- but not the most successful -- "flying ace" in the history of aerial combat.

Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen was born on May 2, 1892, in Kleinburg, near Breslau, Lower Silesia, then part of the German Empire. His family were Prussian aristocrats, and, when he was 4 years old, they moved to nearby Schweidnitz.

Due to the family's wealth, he, his elder sister, and his 2 younger brothers could enjoy pursuits not available to the vast number of people in the Second Reich. The brothers hunted birds, deer, elk, and wild boars. Manfred also enjoyed riding horses and gymnastics, particularly excelling at the parallel bars. At age 11, he was sent to a military school. Upon graduation in 1911, he joined a cavalry (horseborne) unit.

When World War I began in 1914, he served as a cavalry reconnaissance officer, seeing action in Russia, France, and Belgium. But the advent of trench warfare made traditional cavalry operations outdated and inefficient, so his regiment was dismounted, serving as dispatch runners and field telephone operators.

Disappointed and bored at not being able to directly participate in combat, the last straw for him was an order to transfer to the army's supply branch. His interest in the Air Service had been aroused by his examination of a German military aircraft behind the lines, and he applied for a transfer to Die Fliegertruppen des deutschen Kaiserreiches (Imperial German Army Air Service), later to be known as the Luftstreitkräfte (literally, "air forces").

He was widely reported to have written in his application for transfer, "I have not gone to war in order to collect cheese and eggs, but for another purpose." His request was granted, and he joined the flying service at the end of May 1915.

A "flying ace" is defined as a military pilot who has shot down at least five enemy aircraft. There were 13 cases in World War I of men becoming "ace in a day," shooting down 5 planes within 24 hours: 3 Americans, 3 British, 2 Canadians, 2 Germans (neither of them Richthofen), 1 South African and 1 Bermudian (from Bermuda). In World War II, a German pilot named Erich Rudorffer set an all-time record for a single mission, taking down 13 Soviet aircraft. Another German, Erich Hartmann, is credited as the all-time "ace of aces," with 352 confirmed kills.

The top American flying aces: World War I, Eddie Rickenbacker, with 26 shootdowns, already a renowned auto racer, later an airline executive; World War II, Richard Bong, 40, but was shot down the day of the Hiroshima bomb; the Korean War, Joseph C. McConnell, 16, survived the war, only to be killed in a training accident within months; and in the Vietnam War, 4 Americans were credited with 5: Future Congressman Randall "Duke" Cunningham, William P. Driscoll, Steve Ritchie and Jeff Feinstein.

In World War I, René Fonck of France shot down 75 enemy aircraft, making him "the Allies' Ace of Aces." But one man serving with the Central Powers topped him, and that was Manfred von Richthofen, with 80 opposing planes shot down.

Richthofen flew a Fokker Dr.I -- "Dr" standing for "Dreidecker," or "three-leveled," for its three stacked wings -- and painted it red, so it would stand out, partly to make himself a better target for the enemy, to spare the others in his squadron, the "Flying Circus," but also partly to make sure his men saw him, and didn't shoot at him by mistake.

A recreation of Richthoften's Fokker Dr.I,

complete with the pilot wearing a replica of his uniform.

Designed by Anthony Fokker, whose homeland of the Netherlands was neutral in the war, Richthoften's Dr.I became the most famous plane of the war, even more so than the Sopwith Camel, designed and flown by British pilot Thomas Sopwith.

This, Peanuts fans, is a real Sopwith Camel.

Richthofen was a Freiherr ("Free Lord"), a title of nobility often translated as "baron." This is not a given name, nor strictly a hereditary title, since all male members of the family were entitled to use it, even during the lifetime of their father. This, combined with his red plane, led to him being called Der Rote Baron, the "Red Baron," both inside and outside Germany.

During his lifetime, he was more frequently described in German as Der Rote Kampfflieger, variously translated as "The Red Battle Flyer" or "The Red Fighter Pilot." This name was used as the title of his autobiography, published in 1917, made possible because he was already famous.

On April 21, 1918, he was flying over Morlancourt Ridge, near the Somme River in France. His cousin, Lieutenant Wolfram von Richthofen, had been fired upon by a Canadian pilot, Wilfred May. Manfred went after May, and was himself followed by another Canadian, Captain Roy Brown.

It was in this pursuit that Richthofen was hit in the chest by a .303 caliber bullet. He never had a chance, and may have bled out before hitting the ground. The force of the crash pushed him into the butts of his machine guns, breaking his nose and his jaw. It didn't matter: He was already dead. He was not quite 26 years old.

Britain's Royal Air Force, then with jurisdiction over all British Empire aircraft, including what would become the Royal Canadian Air Force, ruled that Brown had shot Richthofen down. Historians now generally agree that this determination was an error, and that it was a ground-based antiaircraft gun that hit him.

His plane was quickly dismantled for souvenirs. But the British gave him a burial with full military honors. In 1925, his family reclaimed his remains, and reburied him in Berlin. After World War II, his tomb was in East Berlin. In 1975, his remains were moved to a family home in Wiesbaden, in what was then West Germany -- with some irony, not far from a U.S. Air Force base.

Post-World War II changes meant also that his birthplace of Kleinburg is now in Poland, part of the city of Wrocław; and that the town where he grew up is also in Poland, as Schweidnitz became Świdnica.

In film, he has been portrayed by Carl Walther Meyer in Richthofen in 1927, Carl Schell in The Blue Max in 1966, Ingo Mogendorf in Darling Lilli in 1970, John Philip Law in Von Richthofen and Brown in 1971, Ron Ely on a 1979 episode of Fantasy Island, and Matthias Schweighöfer in The Red Baron in 2008.

The DC Comics series Enemy Ace told of Hans von Hammer, a German knight who became a pilot with a red plane like Richthofen's. Unlike the general portrayal of the Germans by the Allies, he was shown to be an honorable man, guided by a knight's code of chivalry, and often disgusted by the excesses of war.

Unlike Richthofen, later adventures showed him fighting in World War II, and becoming even more disgusted by the Nazis who had taken over his homeland, and finally breaking and surrendering to the Allies when he survives a crash-landing on the grounds of the Dachau concentration camp. The character lives until 1969, dictating his memoirs to an American reporter.

Fantasy writer Kim Newman, advancing his Anno Dracula series up to World War I, made Richthofen a vampire in his 1995 novel The Bloody Red Baron.

On October 10, 1965, Peanuts author Charles Schulz first drew the dog Snoopy, in World War I-style pilot gear, on top of his doghouse, saying, "Here's the World War I Flying Ace, zooming through the air in his Sopwith Camel. My mission is to hunt the Red Baron, and shoot him down!" Snoopy's adventures as the Flying Ace always seemed to end with his doghouse getting shot full of holes and smoke coming out of the door, leading him to shake his fist and yell, "Curse you, Red Baron!" However, in real life, Richthofen is not known to have ever engaged in combat with U.S. forces.

The routine proved so popular that it was included in the 1966 Halloween TV special It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, and was parodied by the rock band The Royal Guardsmen for their song "Snoopy vs. the Red Baron," which nearly hit Number 1 in 1967 -- partly because, in the end, unlike Schulz, they let Snoopy win.

In the 1968 cartoon Wacky Races, a character named The Red Max drove a red car/plane hybrid named the Crimson Haybaler, and he spoke with a German accent. He was voiced by Daws Butler, best known as the voice of Yogi Bear.

Another Wacky Races character, Dick Dastardly, was voiced by famed ventriloquist Paul Winchell. His dog, Muttley, was voiced by Don Messick, who became the original voice of Scooby-Doo. These characters were used in a spinoff cartoon the next year, Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines, which seemed to be based on World War I, and also on the 1965 film Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines -- which made sense, since Wacky Races was based on a film that came out right after TMMITFM, The Great Race.

By 1975, Hanna-Barbera Productions had lost the legal rights to Dastardly and Muttley, and so, voiced by the same actors, they created the characters of the Dread Baron (who wore olive drab instead of red, suggesting that he was American) and Mumbly. A few years later, after they regained the rights to Dastardly and Muttley, a graphic novel was released, revealing that Dick Dastardly and the Dread Baron were identical twins, and that Muttley and Mumbly were litter brothers.

Athletes with red hair who have been nicknamed the Red Baron include baseball pitcher Rick Sutcliffe and hockey player and coach Gordon Berenson, whose nickname is usually just shortened to "Red." Michael Schumacher, a German racer on the Formula One circuit, drove a red Ferrari, and was nicknamed the Red Baron.

And from 1989 to 2006, a minor league baseball team in the Scranton, Pennsylvania area paid tribute to two former teams in the area, the Scranton Red Sox and the Wilkes-Barre Barons, becoming the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Red Barons, and adopting a triplane logo. When their affiliation switched from the Philadelphia Phillies to the New York Yankees, the Red Barons name was dropped. Acknowledging a different form of transportation, the area's train heritage, they are now the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre RailRiders.

Perhaps the strangest piece of pop culture connected to Richthofen is Red Baron Pizza, produced by Schwan's Company. The company was founded by German-Americans, but pizza is Italian! And the figure on the box has a mustache that makes him look more Italian than German. (Richthofen did not have a mustache.)

Regardless, in the years since the World Wars, and the shame of the Kaiser and the Nazis, Manfred von Richthofen has become a "safe" hero for Germans, much like Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who excelled as a combat commander, turned on the Nazis, and paid for it with his life.

Had he lived, the Red Baron would have been 47 years old in 1939 -- 6 months younger than Rommel, and 4 years younger than Adolf Hitler -- and would likely have been called back to service in the Luftwaffe. Whether he would have agreed with the Nazi ideology is something for those more expert on the subject of German military and political history than I to debate.

UPDATE: In 2025, the YouTube comedy series Epic Rap Battles of History paired the Red Baron (played by "Nice" Peter Shukoff) with Simo Häyhä, the Finnish sniper of the 1939-40 Winter War, nicknamed the White Death (played by "Epic" Lloyd Ahlquist). Both Snoopy and Red Baron pizza were referenced, as was a parody of the name "Fokker."

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April 21, 1918 was a Sunday. The only scores on this historic day were 2 games in what would later be called Major League Baseball. The Chicago Cubs beat the Cincinnati Reds, 9-1 at Redland Field (later Crosley Field) in Cincinnati. Grover Cleveland Alexander was the winning pitcher. By the end of June, he had been drafted into the U.S. Army, and would soon go "over there," lose much of his hearing, and develop epilepsy, all of which made his existing drinking problem much worse.

And the St. Louis Browns beat the Cleveland Indians, 11-7 at League Park in Cleveland. George Sisler went 2-for-6 with an RBI for the Browns. Tris Speaker went 1-for-3 with 2 walks for the Indians.

March 31, 1914: "The Perils of Pauline" Premieres

Pearl White, 1916. No, I don't know why

she's holding a pig on a car's hood.

March 31, 1914: The Perils of Pauline premieres, one of the earliest film serials, starring Pearl White, one of the top film stars of the era.

It set the tone for serials to come: Every 2 weeks (eventually serials would be cut to every week), a hero would be put into a seemingly impossible situation, and, there, the installment would end, and you would have to come back and see the next installment to see how he -- or, in this case, she -- would get out of it.

White played Pauline, an ambitious young heiress with an independent nature and a desire for adventure. Her wealthy guardian had left her inheritance in the care of his secretary, Raymond Owen, who was legally obligated to release it as soon as she was married. Of course, if she should die before getting married, then the money would go to Owen. So he continually sets her up for calamity. There were 20 chapters, averaging 20 1/2 minutes apiece.

The complete serial, 6 hours and 50 minutes, has been lost: The only known version is a condensed 9-chapter version, running about 3 hours and 34 minutes, that was released for the European market.

Pearl Fay White was born on March 4, 1889 in Green Ridge, Missouri, and grew up in Springfield, Missouri. An accomplished bareback rider in a circus by the time she was 13, she did most of her own stunts in her films, becoming known as the Queen of the Serials. She married and divorced twice, and had no children.

She retired from films in 1924, moved to Paris, owned a nightclub there and a hotel-casino in Biarritz in southwestern France, and also owned racehorses. But injuries from her stunts caught up with her, and she drank to ease the pain, and died of liver failure in 1938, only 49 years old.

The alliterative title of her best-known serial, and the serial's style, was quickly copied by the even more adventurous Helen Holmes in The Hazards of Helen, which ran in a massive 119 chapters, from November 7, 1914 to February 24, 1917. Holmes would be the 1st film heroine put in danger by being tied to a railroad track.

But because White's films were more popular, people mistakenly thought she was the "damsel in distress" who had to be saved by a dashing hero as a steam locomotive came ever closer. She didn't, but she did inspire the term "cliffhanger ending," by actually having one where she was hanging off a cliff.

In 1921, William S. Hart starred in O'Malley of the Mounted, as an officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. This character would be parodied as Dudley Do-Right in the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons of the early 1960s, with the villain, the black-suited, top-hatted, mustachoied Snidely Whiplash often tying a young woman to railroad tracks. But Whiplash was a stereotype that never appeared in The Perils of Pauline.

Another homage to Pauline was the 1969 Hanna-Barbera TV cartoon The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, a companion cartoon to The Wacky Races, itself a parody of the 1965 film The Great Race, which was set in 1908. Janet Waldo voiced heiress Penelope as a Southern belle (often yelling "Help!" -- or, more accurately, "Hay-elp!"), whose inheritance was placed with lawyer Sylvester Sneekly, voiced by Paul Lynde.

Wanting to get his hands on that loot without restrictions, since Penelope had no heirs, Sylvester adopted the villainous identity of the Hooded Claw, and set elaborate traps for her. Sometimes, he would break the fourth wall, and banter with the narrator. That was the Los Angeles disc jockey Gary Owens, better known as the announcer on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, and voice of the cartoon superheroes Space Ghost on the show of the same title, and later the Blue Falcon on Dynomutt, Dog Wonder.

Sometimes, Penelope got out of the Claw's traps on her own. Sometimes, she needed help from a bunch of dwarf gangsters, the Ant Hill Mob, who had been villains on Wacky Races but had turned heroes for this series. Sometimes, in trying to rescue her, the Mob, complete with their talking Model T, Chuggaboom, would need help themselves; and Penelope, having gotten out of her own jam, would get them out of theirs. She turned out to be pretty ingenious, always foiling the Claw, who would yell, "Blast!" (with his henchmen mumbling, "Right."), but she never seemed to figure out that Sylvester was the Claw.

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March 31, 1914 was a Tuesday. Mexican poet Octavio Paz, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was born on this day.

Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. Professional basketball barely existed. And the hockey season had ended 12 days earlier, with the NHA Champion Toronto Blue shirts beating the PCHA Champion Victoria Aristocrats for the Stanley Cup. So there were no scores on this historic day.