The Yogi Bear Christmas Special You Probably Forgot

During the 1980 holiday season, viewers got a holiday treat on TV—just not necessarily in the usual places.

Starting that November, a new special called Yogi’s First Christmas aired. It featured Yogi, Boo-Boo, and Cindy Bear partaking in holiday festivities with other Hanna-Barbera characters, including Huckleberry Hound, Snagglepuss, and Augie Doggie and his Doggie Daddy.

The special debuted at an inflection point in animation and television history. Hanna-Barbara’s namesakes, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, had sold to Taft Broadcasting in 1966, but still had active roles in animation production. The special featured classic Hanna-Barbera voice actors—including Daws Butler, Don Messick, and Janet Waldo—but it wouldn’t be long before new voice actors would take over.

The special was also part of a new trend in production for independent TV stations, was made as cable television started to grow, and came as the home video era was ramping up.

But though Yogi’s First Christmas was a staple of holiday television programming in the 1980s and 1990s, it never got the love of other animated holiday specials, like A Charlie Brown Christmas or the Grinch That Stole Christmas, and showings diminished sharply after the 21st century dawned. It took another sea change in television—streaming services—for it to come back to the mainstream.

1. Hanna-Barbera and the Rise of the Christmas Cartoon
2. Enter Operation Prime Time
3. Where You Can Watch Yogi’s First Christmas Today

Hanna-Barbera and the Rise of the Christmas Cartoon

Hanna and Barbera got their start at MGM in 1937, where they created Tom & Jerry. At the time, cartoons were shown in movie theaters, and were most certainly not made exclusively for kids. “They were aimed at the full entertainment audience,” animation historian Jerry Beck tells Mental Floss. “They had a lot of topical references, and they didn’t really expect anyone to watch them 20 years later.”

But animation was expensive, and eventually, MGM shut down its cartoon studio. Hanna and Barbera saw a future in a new medium, at the time at odds with movies: Television. But they had to figure out how to make cartoons more cheaply. They came up with “limited animation,” using more close-ups and dialogue to cut down on the sheer number of animated cels that had to be generated. “When there was a car crash, it would occur off screen,” says Mark Evanier, who worked as a writer for comic books and television shows, both live and animated, including a stint at Hanna-Barbera. “You’d just {see} the wreckage.”

The 1960s also saw the rise of holiday-themed cartoons, starting with Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol in 1962, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer—based on the song, itself based on a character created for Montgomery Ward department store—two years later.

“They lit the fuse, and Charlie Brown was the explosion,” Beck says. “After that was The Grinch, and from that point on, there were holiday specials for every holiday you could think of.”

Hanna-Barbera made holiday specials in the 1970s, including A Christmas Story (not to be confused with the 1983 movie of the same name) and A Flintstone Christmas, but they weren’t the studio’s bread and butter. They dealt in volume, usually with series, creating animal characters like Huckleberry Hound, Snagglepuss, Yogi Bear, and Top Cat; prime-time cartoons like The Flintstones, The Jetsons, and Jonny Quest; and churning out cartoons for kids to watch on Saturday mornings—sometimes competing against themselves across the three major networks.

“Hanna-Barbera had a near monopoly, and if the show got canceled, it would get replaced with another Hanna-Barbera show,” Evanier says.

Enter Operation Prime Time

Also a near monopoly? The three broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC. But that started to change in the 1970s when Al Masini, a television advertising executive, formed a consortium with independent TV stations called Operation Prime Time. OTP’s goal was to develop shows and movies with network production standards to air on the independent channels, rather than being bought from networks to be re-run on those channels.

Among the projects were movies based on several John Jakes books, biopics on famous figures (one of them featured Ingrid Bergman in her last role, as Golda Meir) … and Christmas programming. Rankin-Bass did a special, Jack Frost, that appeared in 1979, and the following year, Yogi’s First Christmas was produced. (Operation Prime Time’s most enduring contribution, though, was the series Entertainment Tonight; other TV shows for OPT included Solid Gold and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.)

Yogi’s First Christmas told the story of Yogi and Boo-Boo waking up during winter hibernation and wanting to take in the holiday, having never celebrated it before (hence the title). The action takes place at Jellystone Lodge, where Yogi curries favor with its owner, Mrs. Throckmorton. Her bratty nephew and a misanthropic hermit learn the value of Christmas, she opts not to sell the lodge, and everyone feels warm and fuzzy at the end. The special also featured songs (some of which were taken from other Hanna-Barbera Christmas specials).

Yogi’s First Christmas could be found on various channels during the holiday, either as a two-hour movie, or serialized in half-hour installments, and its ratings were such that, Greg Ehrbar writes in Hanna-Barbera: The Recorded History, that Hanna-Barbera was able “to sell ten more syndicated full-length animated TV features”—including three that featured Yogi Bear himself.

 As VCRs started to proliferate, Yogi’s First Christmas became a natural candidate for release on home video. It went on sale in 1984 accompanied by what an ad called “a velvety Yogi Bear hand puppet.”

Then, in 1991, Turner bought Hanna-Barbera, and Yogi’s First Christmas—like a lot of the animation studio’s output—found a home on the new Cartoon Network. But its popularity waned as Cartoon Network started to create its own programming. The Hanna-Barbera cartoons found a new home on Boomerang, a secondary channel that was started in 2000, but that channel eventually also started producing its own programming, edging classic programming out.

Where You Can Watch Yogi’s First Christmas Today

Yogi’s First Christmas might have been merely a nostalgic memory of Christmas seasons past if not for streaming, which generated a shift in the entertainment industry similar to the one that had led to the special’s creation decades earlier.

Suddenly, streaming services were looking for programming, and Yogi’s First Christmas was still relatively high-quality, produced before Hanna-Barbera really started offshoring animation work. Today, you can find it on Apple+, Prime Video, and this holiday season, on MeTV Toons, a new network. Beck has been working with MeTV to select cartoons for airing, and Yogi’s First Christmas was a natural. “This is great programming that a lot of people have great memories of—and we want to get these shows back into people’s memories,” he says.

And maybe Yogi’s First Christmas will warm the hearts of a new generation of fans, just as it did for those who watched as kids 40 years ago.

“Hanna-Barbera characters to me are like friends and relatives,” Ehrbar tells Mental Floss. “They were always on TV. Seeing them at Christmas is like seeing old friends.”

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