In 1961, the Warner Bros. cartoon The Abominable Snow Rabbit was shown in theaters. The world received perhaps the first ever imagining of the yeti as a white-haired creature. None of the purported sightings of the yeti in the Himalayas that I've read from the 50's describe a white hue to its fur, and both the 1957 Peter Cushing film and a Japanese one the following year depicted the snow beast as brown. So does this mean that Chuck Jones is the reason the yeti is white like a polar bear? Looks like it to me!
In 1964, three years after "Snow Rabbit", Rankin/Bass made the stop-motion Christmas classic, Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which featured a white-haired, blue-faced yeti.
I believe the Chuck Jones and Rankin/Bass yetis have defined the look of yeti in popular culture for the last 40 years. Yeti hasn't changed much!
Turns out there was another yeti made in the Sixties, but it's hardly known about at all.
In 1968, legendary cartoonist Alex Toth created the yeti-esque being known as Gorr for Hanna Barbera's Mighty Mightor cartoon.
Gorr, ruler of the Ice Creatures, was an enemy of Mightor, a cave man superhero with a magic club.
I'm not sure it's in the cartoon, but Gorr must have wanted to get his hands on that stave. All yeti's covet staves. Look it up; it's in a book somewhere.
Oddly enough, the show was paired with another cartoon about the adventures of the whale named Moby Dick, and Mighty Mightor was even given second billing.
Click to get a larger look at this model sheet by Alex Toth. Note that the Ice Creatures ride white pterosaurs. Awesome. I think that more yeti should ride winged creatures. In fact, this may be the only representation of a yeti I've ever seen where it rides a winged creature. Gama-Go's Battle-Axe Yeti may have rode in on that pegasus, but he's already off it before Biskup painted him.
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