Writer, director, storyboard artist and voice actor C.H. Greenblatt has developed a following among animation enthusiasts for his work on series like Spongebob Squarepants (on such pivotal episodes as “Band Geeks,” “I Had An Accident,” “Squidville” and this writer’s favorite, “Krusty Krab Training Video.” As the creator of popular, acclaimed animated series like Chowder and Harvey Beaks, he has received an Annie Award and three Emmy nominations.

Greenblatt candidly shared the daunting decisions he faced as creator/executive producer of Jellystone! This marks the first series featuring some of the most famous (and not-so-famous but no less beloved) Hanna-Barbera characters since William Hanna and Joseph Barbera themselves created and executive produced Yo Yogi! in 1991. Ten episodes (each containing two cartoons) premiere Thursday, July 29th on HBO Max (with ten more to come).

I began this interview with a quote from The Chicago Tribune about The Huckleberry Hound Show after it premiered [courtesy of historian Don Yowp’s superb website]:

“Not since Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Pluto ventured into the movies has such a delightful company of characters been created.”

GREG EHRBAR: That’s referring to the stable of Hanna-Barbera characters that premiered, and then from that point on, grew to so many characters they could fill a city. Just seeing the crowd of them in a parade at the beginning doing a Wizard of Oz kind of march, it’s a moment of great rejoicing for those of us who grew up with them, but it’s also a moment of passing the baton on to young viewers so that they can carry this tradition on. Do you feel like it’s kind of a celebration?

C.H. GREENBLATT: Oh, one hundred percent. I mean, I keep saying this show is a love letter. It’s very much a love letter. My goal was to put every character that I loved–and characters I didn’t even know about, that I barely remembered–into this show, so that anybody who has any sense of who these characters are, sees someone that they remember, and anybody who doesn’t hopefully will find someone that they fall in love with. Yeah.

GREG EHRBAR: You wouldn’t be going to all the trouble to have these cues, these inside jokes, these one-after-another “Name That Character” moments if you were not nodding to those of us who are going, “Oh, I know who that is! Oh my gosh, it’s Bleep from Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space! You simply didn’t need to do that.

C.H. GREENBLATT: No, that was one of the biggest joys. Scouring through the library and saying, “Who can we use and put in this?” Not only for our fun but the fun of–it almost becomes like Easter eggs–of who’s in the background of a scene. You see the C.B. Bears show up here, and now the Hair Bear Bunch are here, now Scare Bear shows up on a thing. We keep saying, “What are the weirdest corners of the Hanna-Barbera universe that we can unearth and put into this show?” because there are so many interesting things to keep discovering.

GREG EHRBAR: And the key is that the weirdness factor seems to meld because the shows you’ve done–going back to Spongebob and Chowder and Harvey Beaks–they’re kooky but in a warmhearted, sweet way. So is Hanna Barbera. They threw together the most incongruous things and somehow they worked–I mean some people may debate whether they worked! I felt they worked.

C.H. GREENBLATT: (laughs) It worked, it worked. Was it the pinnacle of, you know, “Art?” Uh, maybe not, but it definitely defined a lot of our childhoods.

GREG EHRBAR: It did.

C.H. GREENBLATT: I think that’s the important thing.

GREG EHRBAR: That’s true and a lot of people don’t realize also the monumental contributions that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera gave the entertainment industry.

C.H. GREENBLATT: Yeah!

GREG EHRBAR: They don’t realize that the paths that were forged were really Hanna-Barbera’s paths.

C.H. GREENBLATT: Oh, yeah. It influenced every artist that I admired growing up. And you look at the early days of Cartoon Network that was all built on Hanna-Barbera. They all acknowledge that. I think you have a generation now that, because Hanna-Barbera hasn’t been available for so long, it’s different. You’ve got other influences that have come in, and I think that’s exciting, but it’s nice to be able to bring it back and hopefully get people to discover some of this stuff again.

GREG EHRBAR: That’s part of it as well. That seems to be your philosophy. One of the things John Favreau said that I admired when he remade The Jungle Book was, “I’m not trying to replace the original I’m trying to make something that stands alongside the original.”

C.H. GREENBLATT: Um-hmm, yeah.

GREG EHRBAR: And in your case, almost every entity that is in Jellystone! is somewhere on the net and streaming, or is on video.

C.H. GREENBLATT: And hopefully someday they’ll all be. We keep saying the hope would be that they would put at some point, put it all on HBO Max or somewhere that this whole library could be found easily.

GREG EHRBAR: More than most people imagine are on the Boomerang app. I mean, a lot of those shows astound me. Yo Yogi! which I like. (laughs)

C.H. GREENBLATT: (laughs) You know what the sad part is? I wanted to do Yo Yogi! I was like “I want to do Yo Yogi! in this show.” And there were legal issues that we couldn’t. I was like, “We’re gonna stick him in those costumes. Were gonna do this.” We were just obsessed with it for a little while.

GREG EHRBAR: (laughs) But you did have him say, “Yo!”

C.H. GREENBLATT: We did have him say “Yo!” So that’s the closest I could get. But I wanted a flashback of them in a mall, I wanted those outfits, I wanted this so bad. There were a couple of characters that we couldn’t do just because of legal reasons, I really wanted Babu [the Joe Besser character from the animated Jeannie with Mark Hamill] from the beginning, and there were problems.

GREG EHRBAR: So you had to make this ginormous list and then cull it down?

C.H. GREENBLATT: Well, we had to make a ginormous list and basically turn it in to legal and say, “Who on this list are we allowed to use?” Anybody that we could use we tried to use or we will use hopefully in the future if the show keeps going.

GREG EHRBAR: I love Granny Sweet. I mean, when I saw her in the trailer. I’m like, I have her album!

C.H. GREENBLATT: Yeah, we have that album on the wall in the office. My executive brought in all the albums and put them all up on the wall for us. He’s got all of those. That’s the thing you have to realize. I know this sounds kind of like shilling, but these executives were my executives back on Chowder at Cartoon Network. I’ve known them a long time. They’re really happy that we’re doing this with these characters, so they’ve been nothing but supportive. They were like, “Anything you want to do, whatever you want to do, it’s in your hands, we trust you.”

GREG EHRBAR: What were some of the things you and the creative team decided to do?

C.H. GREENBLATT: So, for the people that I brought in, within this world, Yogi could become “his own character.” Huckleberry Hound could become “his own character,” you know what I mean? They didn’t feel like they had to recreate the cartoons of the past. To them it was like, “Let’s talk about who Yogi is and let’s really figure that out.” I was there to sort of keep the DNA correct, but to them it was like working on a brand new show. So it was very exciting. Who are they, what do they worry about, what do they want–we spend a lot of time talking about that in these characters and figuring that out. What are their insecurities? What’s the comedy? Why are they funny as a person? What’s funny about their relationships? What’s funny about their society? Those are the questions that I’m usually most interested in. So it’s taking the DNA of who they were and putting them into those setups–like taking the DNA of Huckleberry Hound and saying, “What is ‘core’ about him, and then how do we really extrapolate that into someone that fits in this world?” So it still feels like Huckleberry Hound, but he really becomes a more fleshed-out character.

GREG EHRBAR: I love that he’s the mayor, because Huckleberry Hound was, in his day, a sophisticated character to the critics–and he ran for president!

C.H. GREENBLATT: Yeah, and to me he’s like the granddaddy Hanna-Barbera character, right? He’s the heart and soul of this world so he’s got to be the core guy who loves the town more than anyone. He is the prototype Hanna-Barbera character. So again, it’s taking that and making sense of the past and who they are, and how that fits into our show. It was nice to sort of acknowledge that.

GREG EHRBAR: How did you do the recording sessions? Was everybody in the room?

C.H. GREENBLATT: Not with COVID.

GREG EHRBAR: Oh, that’s right.

C.H. GREENBLATT: Yeah. Everyone’s either in their houses and they’ve had to set up recording studios in their closets and things, or we did open the recording studio and people can come in, but one person at a time. It’s a lot because it’s a big cast. So we spend a lot of time doing recordings this way. So whenever I work with Jeff Bergman, he’s recording out of his house. He’s got a set up at home and we record that way. Jim Conroy, he’s in New York, and we record him there. Some people go into the studio here. I’ll go in when I’m doing Boo-Boo and stuff. So it works, it works. It’s just it’s a lot more time-consuming.

GREG EHRBAR: How did you choose the voices? Because some of them sound like the voices we know and some of them were changed. I love what Thomas Lennon did with Top Cat.

C.H. GREENBLATT: He’s fantastic!

GREG EHRBAR: You couldn’t have duplicated Arnold Stang, but you went with a very unique sound again. I love the episode with “Hey, It’s The King.” I mean, for gosh sakes! What a great group to put him against.

C.H. GREENBLATT: That was another case of, we were watching stuff and we’re like–what is this?? I’d forgotten this was like a weird Happy Days rip-off! We gotta use these guys! Can we use these guys? And they’re like, “Yeah,” Then we’re gonna use these guys! Let’s do something! Careen Ingle, our director, wrote that story and it turned out fantastic. Tom just auditioned, I loved what he did, it was a weird Bing Crosby kind of thing, but it worked. It felt like Top Cat even though he wasn’t trying to do an impression. It just felt like this kind of slick huckster guy. It felt just different and it was great. I love what Tom does with him.

GREG EHRBAR: Now, Captain Caveman’s yell–is that the same [Mel Blanc] Captain Caveman yell that we knew from before that you’re using again, or is it a brand new one?

C.H. GREENBLATT: No, that’s Jim Conroy. He does Huckleberry Hound and Captain Caveman and he just nailed it. I loved Captain Caveman as a kid.

GREG EHRBAR: You know, I met [animation legend] Floyd Norman once at Imagineering and I sat down with him, and instead of talking about Jungle Book and Sleeping Beauty, I asked him about Captain Caveman and Kwicky Koala.

C.H. GREENBLATT: And we got Kwicky [in the show] too, but he’s only been in a little quick cameo.

GREG EHRBAR: Well, we do see Yogi Bear eat The Hair Bear Bunch!

C.H. GREENBLATT: Right, that’s the thing! It was the ‘70s and ‘80s cartoons for me, those were the ones that I grew up with.

GREG EHRBAR: Yeah, spread the love out, because Hanna-Barbera’s history—yes, the formative years were, just like Walt Disney, there’s a similarity there. There is that core era from Snow White to Bambi, but a lot of fantastic stuff happened [years after] and yeah, you can say what you want about “Aww, this or that wasn’t as good, but…”

C.H. GREENBLATT: Yeah I mean, let’s not talk about Wheelie and The Chopper Bunch! I mean, come on.. (laughs)

GREG EHRBAR: Okay, but ya know….

C.H. GREENBLATT: (laughs) But I get it. Yeah, I get it. Don’t be surprised if we try to use them at some point!

GREG EHRBAR: I thought it was weird [in the seventies] when Wilma and Betty were fighting crime with Captain Caveman and Barney and Fred were with the Schmoo. I mean, this was mind-blowing, this was so weird, ya know, but it was fun.

C.H. GREENBLATT: Yeah, and that’s the thing–blending them together is fun, and I think that was the impetus of this show. I felt like these characters are stronger when they’re together. There’s something magical and fun when you’ve really put them all in the same world and they all get to be together. That’s what I loved about Laff-A-Lympics as a kid. There was something that was just so cool about getting to see everybody in the same place, interacting, playing off of each other, that I felt individually wouldn’t have been as good.

GREG EHRBAR: Yeah, and if you know your H-B stuff you can listen for the sound effects because a lot of them are in there. I heard the Jetsons’ doorbell when the spaceship landed. There are also some songs, some delightful songs here and there, but then a lot of your other shows had some songs too.

C.H. GREENBLATT: This is the same composer that I worked with on Harvey Beaks [Ego Plum].

GREG EHRBAR: I guess if you just enter this world and get into it, and then watch them again–because I for one, when that Biskitts commercial came on, didn’t catch the “Since 1985” joke–there’s a lot of detail. And I haven’t even gotten to this: please explain for those who don’t know about “Magilla Gorilla’s Hat and Tie Shop,” and why. I burst out laughing when I read about that.

C.H. GREENBLATT: Just because I felt like he was the only one in town who wore pants and shoes. (laughs)

GREG EHRBAR: Yeah… but there’s a reason why the characters wore ties…

C.H. GREENBLATT: Oh! Because it was cheaper [to animate], and you could just change it at the head.

GREG EHRBAR: Yes! So that they could save on animation. That’s the ultimate kind of nod if you know that kind of stuff. I think you’re going to find a lot of people up there in that generation who will be very grateful that you did this. These characters need to live.

C.H. GREENBLATT: I really hope people give it a chance and don’t just say, “Oh, it doesn’t look like my old cartoons. I’m not gonna watch it.”

GREG EHRBAR: Well…

C.H. GREENBLATT: (shrugging chuckle) Whaddaya gonna do?

GREG EHRBAR: You’ve got to be ready and wear your iron hat for that.

C.H. GREENBLATT: (understanding tone) Oh, yeah.

GREG EHRBAR: We might as well address that “Undercover Elephant” in the room. Let’s be straightforward about it. How do you address someone who really feels that it isn’t the same and that it should be the same as the originals?

C.H. GREENBLATT: I mean the originals still exist. They’re still there. This doesn’t take away from those. I had to decide at the very beginning I had to make a conscious decision, how much do I keep one foot in the past and how much do I move forward? I have to say that my goal personally was never to make a nostalgia show. It wasn’t what I was interested in, it wasn’t what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to recreate the look and the feel of the old cartoons because A, it’s not what I do, B, it’s not my taste, but also I just don’t think I could do it as well. I feel like I wanted to do something bigger and sillier and more fun and so I had to visually change the style to fit the kind of jokes and animation style that I wanted in this show and I couldn’t do that with the classic designs. So I think it really came out of a decision to say, “What do I want this show to be?” and if that’s if I want it to be, like silly and fun and wacky, then I can’t be locked into the look of the old Hanna-Barbera.

GREG EHRBAR: But by the same token, your track record of the kind of cartoons you’ve done with the mix of the silly and wacky with the lovable and the endearing—

C.H. GREENBLATT: Right.

GREG EHRBAR: –and the bond of friendship, and all those ongoing themes, there was a connection where they did kind of fit. There was a good fit here.

C.H. GREENBLATT: Exactly. So it’s not about the artifice, it’s about the underlying DNA and the heart of it. I think a lot of the reboots in the past have gotten caught up in the artifice of “We have to make it in the style of that,” rather than “We have to make it in the feeling of that,” you know? To me, it’s about capturing a feeling more than anything.

Jellystone! premieres with ten episodes (two cartoons each) Thursday, July 29 on HBOMax. Ten additional episodes are coming soon.