Music by Screwy Squirrel

Screwy Squirrel cartoons are lots of fun. The only thing wrong with them is Screwy. You can like the gags he pulls but you can’t really like him. And I think that’s the way Tex Avery wanted it. The gags are the real stars in the Screwy cartoons.

Tex came up with great routines where the business of filmmaking actually appears during the cartoon; he did it at Warners then carried on doing it at MGM. In “Screwball Squirrel” (released April 1, 1944), Screwy is even responsible for some of the sound in his own cartoon. During one chase scene, the William Tell Overture blares in the background. Suddenly, a portion of the music keeps repeating, like a stuck record. The action on the screen repeats with it. Screwy steps out of the action, walks over to a record player, fixes the skipping record, then the chase resumes (passing behind the record player and on to the next gag). It’s a great little routine that comes out of nowhere.



But the best musical gag comes along later in the cartoon. Meathead the dog is in a barrel, rolling down a steep hill. Musical director Scott Bradley has a drum roll on the soundtrack.



Cut to a shot at the bottom of the hill. It turns out that Screwy is playing the snare drum. Not only that, he provides musical sound effects. When the barrel hits a tree, Screwy bashes a bass drum. Meathead flies up into the air and down. Screwy plays a slide whistle to accompany the action. When Meathead lands, Screwy bashes the bass drum again, then finishes up with a bird twitter as Meathead lays on the ground, dazed.







Only Avery would try a sequence of gags like this. Better still, he doesn’t let the audience rest. The short zooms along from one routine to the next once it gets past the deliberately syrupy opening with the overly-cute, frolicking Sammy Squirrel (who Screwy beats the crap out of behind a tree. Take that, Harman and Ising).

The credited animators are Preston Blair, Ed Love and Ray Abrams. The backgrounds (note the house on stilts) are by Johnny Johnsen. Claude Smith designed the characters; the first model sheet is dated December 1942.