Hey There, It's Yogi Bear!

Back in December, TCM ran a salute to Hanna-Barbera, the animators nowadays better known for their TV show characters like the Flintstones. They had, of course, gotten their starts decades earlier working at MGM in their animated division. But even then, TCM showed movies based on the characters that had become popular on television. One example is Hey There, It's Yogi Bear!.

I assume most people here already know the Yogi Bear character, an anthropomorphic bear (voiced by Daws Butler) in Jellystone Park who pals around with little Boo-Boo (voiced by Don Messick) and making life hell for the park rangers because he's more interested in the park visitors' food than anything else.

As this movie opens, winter is coming to an end and the runoff from the melting snow is what wakes up Boo-Boo, who is excited to wake up Yogi. Yogi immediately sets out to get more food, which again makes him a terror at the park and causes the rangers to want to capture him and send him to a zoo because the rest of the bears are nowhere near as bad. However, Yogi is smarter than the average bear, leading him to come up with a ruse that gets a different bear captured and sent off to the San Diego Zoo. SOmehow, the park rangers don't notice this.

Meanwhile, Yogi has a female bear, Cindy (voiced by Julie Bennett) who is romantically interested in Yogi, even though he doesn't seem to notice since all he can think of is pick-a-nick baskets. She hears that Yogi has been captured, since that's what the rangers believe, and she's devastated. She'll never see Yogi again. So she comes up with the idea that if she can get herself captured too, she will also be sent to the San Diego Zoo where she'll be reunited with Yogi and the two of them can live more or less happily ever after, or at least as happily as you can live in a zoo.

Now, as I mentioned, it wasn't Yogi that was captured. And when Cindy gets herself captured, she doesn't get sent to the San Diego Zoo anyhow. Instead, she's put in a cage and on a train heading to Saint Louis and the zoo there, much to her dismay. Worse, the door of the train car she's on isn't properly closed, which results in her cage falling out of the car and breaking, which gives her a sense of freedom. At least, she's free until she's cought by a couple of dishonest guys from the circus who take her captive in a much worse way.

Yogi and Boo-Boo learn that Cindy has been sent away, and go looking for her, having a bunch of adventures along the way. But once they free her from the circus, how are they going to get back to Jellystone without getting caught by those awful circus people?

Along the way, there are also several musical numbers, because the story had to be padded out to something feature-length. Still, Hey There, It's Yogi Bear! is fairly weak in the story department. The Hanna-Barbera animation is also decidedly inferior to what Disney was putting out too, and the songs aren't very good. Still, kids may enjoy Hey There, It's Yogi Bear! even if I didn't think it was ll that good.