I’m a sucker for pretty much anything Hanna-Barbera, so I picked up this Quick Draw McGraw Blu-ray almost blind. I knew the name and could probably pick the horse out of a lineup, but he was never a character I knew as well as, say, Huckleberry Hound, whose complete series Warner Archive released last year. That turned out to be half the fun. This set gave me a chance to meet an entire corral of characters who had been sitting in the Hanna-Barbera vault all this time.

The Quick Draw McGraw Show was Hanna-Barbera’s third television series, following The Ruff and Reddy Show and Huckleberry Hound. It ran in syndication from 1959 to 1961 with Kellogg’s footing the bill, and each half hour serves up three separate cartoons.

Quick Draw McGraw (Daws Butler, The Yogi Bear Show) is a well-meaning but dim Old West sheriff whose burro deputy, Baba Looey, usually spots the giant hole in his latest plan just before Quick Draw shuts him down with “I’ll do the thin’in’ around here.” Augie Doggie and Doggie Daddy give us a dachshund son and his endlessly doting father, with Doug Young doing Doggie Daddy as a wonderfully shameless Jimmy Durante. Snooper and Blabber round things out as a cat-and-mouse detective team that somehow manages to investigate plenty without solving much of anything.

The secret weapon behind all three is Michael Maltese, who helped Chuck Jones create One Froggy Evening and What’s Opera, Doc? before bringing that sensibility to Hanna-Barbera. The writing here is a little sharper and more satirical than Huckleberry Hound, taking shots at TV Westerns, family sitcoms and detective shows while still leaving plenty of room for the broad slapstick.

And then there’s El Kabong.

Whenever Quick Draw pulls on a mask and becomes his bargain-basement version of Zorro, the show kicks up another notch. His preferred method of law enforcement is swinging into danger and clobbering somebody over the head with a guitar, which is every bit as ridiculous as it sounds. There’s no problem in the Old West that El Kabong can’t make worse with a guitar.

What surprised me most was how quickly I warmed to the entire supporting lineup. I came for Quick Draw and ended up just as happy spending time with Augie, Doggie Daddy, Snooper and Blabber, not to mention an early version of Snagglepuss before he moved over to The Yogi Bear Show.

Even Baba Looey managed to escape the series and become part of pop culture in a way Hanna-Barbera certainly never planned. Howard Stern producer Gary Dell’Abate’s mispronunciation of the name on-air in 1990 gave the world “Baba Booey,” a reference that has long since outlived the cartoon that inspired it.

That’s part of the pleasure of finally seeing these episodes. The characters never completely disappeared. They’ve been floating around television history, catchphrases and pop culture for decades. This set finally let me go back and meet them where they started.