A Tail Of One Gag

“If you take a big bite out of any one thing,” Paul Terry opined in 1970, “that’s plagiarism and you’re a thief. So, we used to have a saying, John Foster and I, ‘Never steal more than you can carry.’”

Foster was the story chief at Terrytoons through the ‘30s and ‘40s. In one of his cartoons, he borrowed the old paint-a-scene-on-something-the-good-guy-runs-through found a few years earlier in Tex Avery’s Jerky Turkey (but popularised later by Wile E. Coyote). Here’s another familiar one in Felix the Fox (1948).

Dimwit the dog chases Felix into some bushes. The drawings tell the story.



If you’re an Avery fan, you’re saying “Hey, wait a minute!” and know what cartoon Foster “carried” this from.



It’s from The Screwy Truant, released in 1944.