Huckleberry Hound: Season 03 Plot Summary and Details

By the time The Huckleberry Hound Show entered its third season in the fall of 1960, Hanna-Barbera's position as TV's top animation studio was secure. In addition to this series, Hanna-Barbera was also churning out episodes of Quick Draw McGraw and The Flintstones, with such future cartoon favorites as Top Cat, Touche Turtle and Wally Gator still waiting in the wings. Indeed, only Jay Ward's Rocky and His Friends and UPA's Mister Magoo in any way challenged H-B's market supremacy. The 13 new episodes of Huckleberry Hound served up this season include 13 new "Huckleberry Hound" cartoon shorts and an equal number of "Pixie and Dixie" efforts. Conspicuous by his absence is longtime Huckleberry Yogi Bear, who had been spun off into his own starring series, logically titled The Yogi Bear Show. Yogi's replacement is Hokey Wolf, a "Sergeant Bilko"-type carnivore who in the company of his pint-sized pal Dingaling spends most of his screen time trying to steal sheep or cadge from meals from gullible farmers. While none of the "Hokey Wolf" cartoons this season are truly memorable (with the possible exception of "Hokey in the Pokey"), the "Huckleberry Hound" and "Pixie and Dixie" shorts maintain their high standard. The best of the "Huckleberrys" include "Spud Dud", a satire of mutant-monster horror films in which an overgrown potato tries to conquer the world; and "Cluck and Dagger", a wild spy spoof wherein Huck plays "The Man of 1000 Faces" (actually, he's only got one face, but nobody's ever asked him to display the other 999). And the highlight of the "Pixie and Dixie" manifest is the sublimely titled "Plutocrat Cat." All of these cartoons benefited from the sprightly orginal music scores by Hoyt Curtin, replacing the familiar, overused stock-music themes that had run through the first two seasons. At the same time Season Three of Huckleberry Hound was making the syndication rounds, selected cartoons from the series' first two seasons were network-run by CBS as a part of the live-action Saturday morning series The Magic Land of Allakazam.