Conception and development Joseph Barbera went to Chicago to pitch the program to Kellogg's executives through their ad agency,
Leo Burnett. "I had never sold a show before because I didn't have to. If we got an idea, we just made it, for over twenty years. All of a sudden, I'm a salesman, and I'm in a room with forty-five people staring at me, and I'm pushing Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear and 'the Meeces', and they bought it." Barbera once recalled about
Daws Butler's voice acting versatility:
Format The series features three seven-minute cartoons, animated specifically for television. The first always stars Huckleberry, and the next two feature other characters. Each of three cartoons are in between the
wraparound segments, which originally set in the
circus tent where Huck acts like a showman in the late 1950s.
Distribution The show was originally intended to be part of a line-up of kid programs sponsored by Kellogg and broadcast on
ABC-TV, joining
Woody Woodpecker,
Superman and
Wild Bill Hickok in an early evening, weekday line-up. However, Kellogg's agency, Leo Burnett, decided instead to syndicate the show and buy air time on individual stations. The show was originally distributed by
Screen Gems (the television division at the time of
Columbia Pictures) which held a part-ownership of Hanna-Barbera at the time, over 150 stations. In April 1967, Screen Gems announced the show had been released from advertiser control, and would be made available to stations on a syndicated basis with available bridges to create 92 half-hour shows. The distribution was later passed to
Worldvision Enterprises, after it became a sister company to Hanna-Barbera. It was later distributed by
Turner Program Services, after Turner's purchase of Hanna-Barbera; the current distributor
Warner Bros. Television picked up ownership of the show following the 1996 acquisition of Turner by parent company,
Time Warner.
Original syndication The show was not broadcast on the same day of the week, or the same time, in every city; airing depended on the deal for time that the Leo Burnett Agency brokered with individual stations. However, the first time the Huck series appeared on television was on Monday, September 29, 1958; it was first seen at 6 p.m. on
WOOD-TV in
Grand Rapids, Michigan, which also served
Battle Creek, home of Kellogg cereals. A few other stations airing it that day were
WLWI in
Indianapolis (at 6:30 p.m.) and
WTAE in
Pittsburgh (at 7:30 p.m.). The show debuted on other days that same week in other cities; Huck originally aired in
Los Angeles on Tuesdays on
KNXT,
Chicago on Wednesdays on
WGN-TV, and
New York City on Thursdays on
WPIX. The show first aired in
Canada on Thursday, October 2, 1958, at 7 p.m. on
CKLW-TV in
Windsor, Ontario. The show first aired in
Australia on Monday, February 16, 1959, on the
National Television Network (now the
Nine Network), and the show first aired in the
United Kingdom on Friday, July 3, 1959, on
ITV. ==Plot and characters==