The Serenity of Book Revue

Leave it to Bob Clampett to lull the audience into false sense of serenity, only to suddenly splatter them with silliness, pop culture references and outrageous poses. That’s just what he does in “Book Revue.”

The cartoon opens with a shot of a book store in the evening, with a lamp on a separate cell in the foreground. The store looks photographic.



Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ plays peacefully over a pan of books. The one on the right is “The Life and Times of Bugs Bunny.”



The pan fades into the next scene. Then, wham! We’re hit with a drunken cuckoo, staggering and spilling his flask.



And then the cartoon really gets going.

Tom McKimson and Cornett Wood get credit for layouts and backgrounds in one of Clampett’s most acclaimed shorts (released in January 1946).