The Ruff and Reddy Show

Did You Know?

• Every season of the series is divided into four lengthy story arcs where the titular duo engage in lengthy confrontations with adversaries.
• Sometime during the show's airing, Rudolf Ising sued Hanna and Barbera for the names Ruff and Reddy due to his involvement in conceptualizing two characters with the same name during their time at MGM.
• In the Wacky Races episode "The Wacky Always Races Twice", Professor Gizmo appears as one of Professor Bella's thugs and henchmen.

History

In 1957, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera lost their jobs at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer after 18 years of making Tom and Jerry and Droopy shorts. MGM let go of their entire staff of 110 artists, deciding it was cheaper to keep rerunning old cartoons than to make new ones. The partners stayed together and put $30,000 of their own money into a new company, H-B Enterprises. They started drawing storyboards for fresh characters, the first being a cat named Ruff and a dog named Reddy.

Hanna later said the names matched how he and Barbera felt at the time. They made a deal with former MGM colleague George Sidney, who got a small share of the company in exchange for acting as their business representative. Sidney set up a meeting at Screen Gems, which was thinking about getting back into animation. Hanna and Barbera pitched their characters along with a tight production budget that used limited animation.

This method needed far fewer drawings and less inking and painting, a necessity because high costs had wrecked the theatrical cartoon business. Earlier, Hanna had written a six-page memo to MGM bosses suggesting economized techniques to lower costs, but got no reply. He had figured a six-minute cartoon could be made for $17,500 with limited animation, compared to the $35,000 MGM gave them. When talking to Screen Gems, Hanna dropped the number to $3,000, and the duo felt sure the company would be thrilled.

Screen Gems liked the idea but warned that television budgets were tight. Eventually, they offered a deal to produce five five-minute segments, with a starting budget of $2,700 that would increase over time.

Other appearances

Ruff and Reddy showed up in the 1972 TV movie Yogi's Ark Lark, which was part of The ABC Saturday Superstar Movie and included nearly every Hanna-Barbera animal character from that era. In 1987, Ruff appeared alone for the first time, selling newspapers in the Yogi's Treasure Hunt episode "Goodbye Mr. Chump." The duo later turned up in the 2017 comic Green Lantern/Space Ghost Annual #1 as 1950s stand-up comedians who became TV stars, and also in a six-issue miniseries based on their own show. On HBO Max's Jellystone!, they are robotic brothers voiced by Oscar Reyez and Jakari Fraser, though Reddy no longer has his Southern accent.

Home media

Episodes of the series appeared on the Animal Follies volume released on October 20, 1988, on VHS and in 1989 on LaserDisc as part of the Hanna-Barbera Personal Favorites home video series, along with Yippee, Yappee and Yahooey, Touché Turtle and Dum Dum, Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy, and Snagglepuss. Warner Bros. Home Entertainment never released the series on home media. The first episode, "Planet Pirates", was listed on the press release for The Best of Warner Bros.: Hanna-Barbera 25 Cartoon Collection DVD set scheduled for May 21, 2013, but due to an inaccuracy in that press announcement, the episode was not on the actual set.