General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Hey There, It's Yogi Bear

Hey There, It's Yogi Bear is a 1964 American musical animated comedy feature produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions and distributed by Columbia Pictures, directed and produced by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. It was the studio's first theatrical feature film and the first animated feature based on a television series, adapting its popular Yogi Bear character from The Yogi Bear Show.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	Premiered in Salt Lake City, Utah on June 3, 1964; copyright registered by Hanna-Barbera Productions on June 1, 1964¹
Working title	Whistle Your Way Back Home, retained as the title of one of the film's songs¹^•³
Runtime and format	89 minutes, Eastman Color by Pathé, sound film, United States¹
Directors and writers	Directed and produced by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera; screenplay by Barbera, Warren Foster, and Hanna, with uncredited additional dialogue by Bernard Evslin¹^•⁴
Principal voices	Daws Butler (Yogi Bear), Don Messick (Boo-Boo Bear and Ranger Smith), Julie Bennett (Cindy Bear), Mel Blanc (Grifter Chizzling), J. Pat O'Malley (Snively), Hal Smith (Corn Pone)⁴^•⁵
Music	Score by Marty Paich; songs by David Gates, Ray Gilbert, and Doug Goodwin; James Darren supplied Yogi's singing voice for "Ven-E, Ven-O, Ven-A"¹^•⁴
Box office	Domestic gross of $2,438,233, recorded by Box Office Mojo for a 1986 re-release distributed by Atlantic Releasing Corporation⁶

Spoilers

Plot

The story begins in Jellystone National Park, where the "No Feeding the Bears" signs force a showdown between Yogi Bear and Ranger Smith, leading Yogi to request a transfer to the San Diego Zoo.¹ The film opens like an episode of the television series, with Yogi, Boo-Boo, and Cindy waking from hibernation as spring begins and Yogi resuming his hunt for "pick-a-nick" baskets.⁵

Yogi tricks another bear, Corn Pone, into going to San Diego in his place, then hides in the woods disguised as "The Brown Phantom" and continues stealing food from the park.⁵ Cindy Bear, wanting to be sent wherever Yogi goes, steals food herself to anger the Ranger, but she is instead sent to the St. Louis Zoo. When Yogi learns of this, he and Boo-Boo set out to find her. Along the way they encounter the villain Grifter Chizzling, who kidnaps Cindy and forces her to perform dangerous high-wire feats in his circus while his snickering dog Mugger looks on.⁷^•⁵ Yogi, Boo-Boo, and Cindy escape by stealing a clown car, crash through a barnyard, and end up in New York City, where Ranger Smith flies in by helicopter to rescue them.⁵

Production

Hanna-Barbera had built its business on television cartoons since founding the studio for Screen Gems, and Hey There, It's Yogi Bear marked its move into theatrical features.⁸ The working title, Whistle Your Way Back Home, was announced in trade publicity and even referenced in the December 1, 1963 installment of the Yogi Bear newspaper comic strip, which portrayed a behind-the-scenes look at the film's production; by release the title had changed, though the song remained.¹^•³^•²

Staffing from Warner Bros. When Warner Bros. closed its cartoon studio in May 1963, many of its animators were hired by Hanna-Barbera to work on the film, including Friz Freleng, who served as story supervisor.² The animation crew included animation director Charles A. Nichols and animators Don Lusk, Irv Spence, Gerry Chiniquy, Ken Harris, Fred Wolf, and Kenneth Muse; art direction was credited among others to Iwao Takamoto, Willie Ito, and Jerry Eisenberg, with background work by artists including F. Montealegre, Art Lozzi, Ron Dias, and Robert Gentle.⁵^•⁹

Animation approach. While not as lavish as Disney's efforts at the time, the film's animation was fuller than Hanna-Barbera's television output.⁵ The television Yogi had been drawn with a collar, a device that let animators keep his body static and redraw only his head when he spoke, cutting the drawings needed for a seven-minute cartoon from around 14,000 to around 2,000; the feature's fuller animation was a step beyond that economy.¹⁰

Songs and music

Marty Paich composed the score, and the songs came from three writers: the title song "Hey There, It's Yogi Bear" by David Gates; "Ven-E, Ven-O, Ven-A" by Doug Goodwin; and "Like I Like You," "Wet Your Whistle," "St. Louie," and "Ash Can Parade" by Ray Gilbert and Doug Goodwin.¹ James Darren provided Yogi's singing voice for "Ven-E, Ven-O, Ven-A," in which Yogi, Cindy, and Boo-Boo imagine themselves on a Venetian gondola; "St. Louie" is sung to Cindy by a group of bears on a train.⁴^•⁵ Contemporary viewers noticed that the on-screen characters were not the ones singing; the animation historian and columnist Mark Evanier recalled realizing this even at age twelve.³

Release and promotion

The film premiered in Salt Lake City, Utah on June 3, 1964, and Columbia Pictures released it theatrically.¹ Sources differ on the general release date: the AFI Catalog and the Internet Animation Database give June 3, 1964, a JSTOR-published studio history gives July 3, 1964, and Rotten Tomatoes lists a wide release on July 29, 1964.¹^•⁸^•¹¹

Promotion began months ahead of the release, with merchandise, books, and comics issued in advance on the theory that children enjoyed knowing the story before seeing it on the big screen.⁸ A Western comic book adaptation, Hey There, It's Yogi Bear #1, appeared in September 1964.¹² The Yogi Bear newspaper comic ran a three-month storyline from late May to late August 1964 about an agent scouting Yogi for a movie, tied to the film's release.²

Reception and legacy

Howard Thompson of The New York Times wrote on the film's release that it was "as friendly, frisky and disarming as all get out," predicting that children would "eat it up" and adults would walk out smiling.⁵ On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a Tomatometer score of 57 percent based on two critic reviews, with an audience rating of 3.6 out of 5 from more than 2,500 users; a 2023 review judged that the Yogi Bear concept works better in a half-hour format.¹¹

The film's commercial footprint is documented through a later re-release: Box Office Mojo records a domestic gross of $2,438,233 with an earliest release date of January 17, 1986, under distributor Atlantic Releasing Corporation.⁶ One character had a longer career than the film itself: the sniggering laugh of Mugger, the Chizzling Brothers' canine cohort, proved so infectious that the character was developed and renamed Muttley, who became a Hanna-Barbera series regular.¹³

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026