Rabbit Meets Skunk

“Little ‘Tinker” is full of those cute, cuddly-looking characters that have no place in a Tex Avery cartoon, unless Tex is making fun of them. Except one.

There’s this gangly-looking rabbit doing any number of man-crazy characters from the radio.







“Oh, you great big beautiful hunk of skunk,” says the Vera Vague stand-in.




Then she realises what she’s said.



Now, the Avery take.





And the rabbit stretch-dives out of the cartoon.

The Disney-like characters (and the rabbit) were designed by Louie Schmitt, a former Disney artist who had worked on “Bambi.” Louis Walter Schmitt was born April 24, 1908 in Illinois to Louis P. and Olive Louise (Glasscoff) Schmitt. He, his widowed mother and his sister were in Pasadena by 1930. He was pulling in $3640 a year by 1940. He died in Los Angeles on May 3, 1993.

The model sheets for this cartoon are dated June 5, 1946 with the original title of “Smellbound” (it seems to me it had another working title as well).

The credited animators are Bill Shull, Grant Simmons, Walt Clinton and Bob Bentley.