Comic Book / Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles

Exit Stage Left!: The Snagglepuss Chronicles is a six-issue miniseries starring the classic Hanna-Barbera character Snagglepuss. It was written by Mark Russell and is part of the Hanna-Barbera Beyond series.

In 1953, as America looks for ways to outmaneuver the Soviet Union, the House Un-American Activities Committee seeks to rid the entertainment industry of those whose work they deem disruptive to public morals. Among their targets is Snagglepuss, creator of popular but controversial plays like The Heart is a Kennel of Thieves. When the HUAC's new head finds evidence that Snagglepuss is gay, he must figure out how to outwit them before he ends up on the blacklist.

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This series contains examples of:

• Adaptational Sexuality: In the original cartoons, Snagglepuss and Huckleberry were both straight, albeit with Snagglepuss being Camp Straight. In this series, they are both gay.
• All for Nothing: Quickdraw's attempts to draw attention away from himself fail when he gets caught and busted for a tryst.
• Animated Actors: Snagglepuss, Quick Draw, and Huckleberry Jr. end up joining a television studio to star in cartoons after their lives get upended by the HUAC.
• Armored Closet Gay:
  • Quickdraw McGraw has managed to build a reputation for himself as a homophobic cop to cover up his off-duty visits at the Stonewall.
  • Gigi Allen's vicious pursuit of suspected homosexuals is her way of misdirecting people from her own life, in which she is living with another woman.
• Artistic License – History: The trade paperback notes several cases of it that were taken for sake of the story (such as the Stonewall Inn being a mafia-run gay club around 1953; the real Stonewall Inn was still a normal restaurant during the early 1950's).
• Ascended Meme: The Simpsons joked about Huckleberry Hound being closet gay in "Behind The Laughter".
• The Atoner: Quickdraw McGraw sets up an animation studio for Snagglepuss and Huck's son to enable good careers, in return for having ruined lives by persecuting gays.
• The Beard: In order to protect his public image, the gay Snagglepuss is married to actress Lila Lion. Huckleberry Hound is also married, with a son.
• Becoming the Mask: Discussed, as Snagglepuss realizes that Living Is More than Surviving and that this trope was a serious threat if he retreated into a mask.
• Bittersweet Ending: Snagglepuss does his best to keep all his loved ones out of harm's way, but so much still goes wrong and his life as a playwright is over. Things are looking up at the end though: the HUAC is dissolved, and Snag finds a promising new career (see Animated Actors), reconciles with Quickdraw, gets closure through meeting Huckleberry Jr, and his Cuban lover initiates a reunion.
• Bluff Worked Too Well: Gigi Allen threatens to out the married Huckleberry Hound and ruin his career and his family unless Snagglepuss names some other homosexuals and/or Communists to throw under the bus. This plan goes horribly awry when Huckleberry kills himself, and an enraged Snagglepuss chooses to get blacklisted rather than help the people who ruined his best friend, which also effectively ends Allen's career, as her investigation hinged on Snagglepuss' cooperation.
• Boomerang Bigot: Gigi Allen, head of the House Un-American Activities Committee and outwardly militant anti-homosexual, is a lesbian.
• Call-Back: In the first chapter, one of Snagglepuss' friends notes that she can't get any more work in the entertainment industry after refusing to name names before HUAC, and that all of the rejection letters have the same typo - "I AM SOPRRY" - in them, indicating it's a form letter that every studio has been given to use. In the last chapter, when Snagglepuss reveals that he hasn't been able to get work in entertainment for five years, one shot is his desk with several letters that have the same "I AM SOPRRY" typo.
• Cassandra Truth: In a brief extra prior to the miniseries' events, Snagglepuss has a brief chat with Augie Doggie about how once the theater he was acting at began burning. He tried alerting the director, Peter Potamus... who promptly beat feet. Desperate, he ran into stage and screamed at the audience that there was a fire. Everyone laughed at him. He barely managed to escape and many people died in the fire. He uses the story as An Aesop to Augie as to why he's willingly confronting the HUAC - if there's danger, you have to warn people, even if they are going to try to escape it or ignore it altogether.
• Central Theme:
  • The horrors of censorship against the arts and McCarthysm.
  • The role of arts and "subversives" in shaping the culture they belong to.
  • The challenges of being yourself in a world that shuns certain identities.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Gigi bears a strong resemblance to Ayn Rand.
• Continuity Nod: In order to get a job on Quickdraw's show, Snagglepuss changes his name to Snaggletooth and dyes his fur orange. This is a reference to his early appearances in the cartoons, in which he was orange and called Snaggletooth.
• Darker and Edgier: A given for a Hanna-Barbera Beyond production. While the original Snagglepuss and Huckleberry Hound cartoons were lighthearted Zany Cartoons for the time, Exit Stage Left grounds them in the grim reality of McCarthy-era America, with themes of racism, homophobia, corrupt politics and Red Scare paranoia looming over the whole thing.
• Dead Guy Junior: Huckleberry's son stars in cartoons under his father's name as a way of honoring him.
• Deadpan Snarker: Snagglepuss, in spades. The very first scene has him snarking away at the HUAC.
  Interrogator: Mr. Puss, what do you have to say to critics who call your work "a three-martini subversion of American values" and "pornography for PHD's"?
  Snagglepuss: I try not to speak to critics. It only encourages them.
• Decoy Backstory: Huckleberry Hound is presented as a gay, depressive author, which is considerably different from how he's usually presented in cartoons, where he's usually a plucky everyman who comes out on top. The ending of the series reveals that this is actually the father of the more commonly-known Huckleberry Hound, who adopted his dad's name to honor him after he died.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: The severe and widespread homophobia of the 1950s plays a major role in the story.
• Driven to Suicide: Poor Huckleberry Hound kills himself after getting caught up in a raid and publicly outed as gay.
• Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal: Pretty much every anthropomorphic character (including all of the mains) completely forego pants, and this is never commented upon.
• Hauled Before A Senate Subcommittee: Well, HUAC, which is in the House not the Senate, but the trope still applies.
• Heteronormative Crusader: Snagglepuss' troubles begin when the HUAC's new head, Gigi Allen, starts directing the committee's efforts towards rooting out suspected homosexuals in the entertainment industry.
• Historical Gender Flip: Gigi Allen is based on Roy Cohn.
• Hunter of His Own Kind: Quickdraw McGraw and Gigi Allen, as mentioned in Armored Closet Gay.
• Hypocritical Humor: Nixon accuses Communism as copying innovations without creating anything new, only to whisper under his breath to one of his assistants that they desperately need the rotisserie oven Khrushchev shows off in the Moscow Trade Fair for themselves.
• Interspecies Romance: Snagglepuss and Huckleberry both married within their species, but have human same-sex lovers. It's eventually revealed that Snagglepuss's father is also human, and he takes after his mother.
• Karmic Jackpot: Snagglepuss, realizing that he hasn't been as emotionally attentive to his beard or his lover as he should be, decides to have a nice dinner with the both of them and start working on their issues. This allows him to avoid getting caught in the raid that Huckleberry Hound winds up arrested in and thereafter leads him to killing himself and is a big part of why he's able to live more or less freely when all is said and done.
• Lions and Tigers and Humans... Oh, My!: The world this takes place in is just shy of an Alternate History, taking place in a world populated with Beast Man and human living side by side.
• Living Is More than Surviving: During his hearings, Gigi tries to persuade Snagglepuss by claiming sacrificing careers of few people and censoring their works is a small price for stopping the threat of Soviets destroying America with nukes. He is having none of it.
  Snagglepuss: You are offering people their lives like a vegetarian sells ham!
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • While it only lasts for a moment, Gigi is clearly deeply unsettled when she learns that her actions have caused Huckleberry Hound to kill himself.
  • Quickdraw is horrified and disgusted with himself when he helps raid the Stonewall, leading to Huckleberry's public outing and downfall, just to keep his own reputation and job.
• My Greatest Second Chance: Peter Potamus, near the end of the series, describes his current directing job on Snagglepuss' latest play as one, after the previously mentioned fire incident caused him to effectively be blacklisted by any rational theater owner.
• The Needs of the Many: Gigi tries to justify her crusade against "subversives" and "agitators" in the entertainment industry with this rationale:
  Gigi: The Soviets have this weapon of awesome terror because nobody denounced the communists who gave it to them. Politics may seem a tawdry affair to you, Mr. Puss. But exposing disloyalty may be the only thing that keeps millions of Americans from ending up in a picture like this. So forgive us if we choose the lives of millions of Americans over a few showbiz radicals.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed:
  • Snagglepuss is rather obviously based on playwright Tennessee Williams.
  • Huckleberry Hound is based on William Faulkner.
  • Gigi Allen is a gender-swapped version of Roy Cohn complete with being in the closet.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: Gigi tries to present her actions as an effort to give America a much-needed leg up over the communist bloc, but Snagglepuss sees right through her and bluntly points out that what she really wants is to control what people say and do. It's later revealed that her hounding of suspected homosexuals is an attempt to distract from her lesbianism.
• Pantsless Males, Fully-Dressed Females: The male animal characters don't wear pants, but female animal characters wear dresses.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: The "Snaggletooth" persona isn't expected to fool the Government. The plan is for Snagglepuss to use the "disguise" until the Government either unmasks him so the cartoon makers will have plausible deniability, or ignores the matter long enough to convince the cartoon makers Snagglepuss may appear on the cartoons as himself.
• Self-Deprecation: Snagglepuss certainly isn't above turning his snark on himself.
  Gigi: First of all, I wanted to assure you that I have no desire to destroy your plays.
  Snagglepuss: There's no need, really. They do a perfectly good job of destroying themselves.
• Shout-Out: Gigi Allen's name is a reference to punk rock musician GG Allin.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: The last conversation Gigi Allen has with Snagglepuss is after his second HUAC hearing, in which he revealed on television that the indecency charges against Huckleberry Hound will not result in conviction, because Huck killed himself. She tries to apologize over what happened with Huck, but Snagglepuss is having none of it.
  Snagglepuss: You don't get to sell your soul and then say the Devil made you do it.
• Sour Outside, Sad Inside: When we're first introduced to Arnold, he remarks how he doesn't miss his son for leaving to persue a career on Broadway, blaming him for his wife (who was mentally ill) for dying afterward. Five years later, he admits to Snagglepuss, too senile to recognize his own son, that he actually misses his son and that he's afraid that all he ever did was hurt his son in his efforts in raising him.
• Spanner in the Works: Huckleberry Hound is this to Gigi Allen. She was trying to catch Snagglepuss but got him instead. She tries to use him as leverage against Snag, but Huck kills himself.
• Transparent Closet: Huckleberry Hound is very, very bad at trying to keeping himself in the closet. Snagglepuss isn't much better at acting straight, but he's got a better beard, because Lila is aware of the situation, and it seems Huck's wife doesn't. Discussed when Arthur Miller enlists Snagglepuss' aid in helping hide his affair with Marylin Monroe from her then-husband, Joe DiMaggio. It's noted (and turns out to be correct) that DiMaggio wouldn't assume Snagglepuss was conducting an affair with Monroe, because Joe knows Snagglepuss is a "sugarfoot" (period slang for a closeted gay man) - it's apparently a pretty open secret.

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