Tex Avery, Literally Speaking

Tex Avery’s literal masterpiece is Symphony in Slang (1951), where idioms were visualised naturally. A year earlier, Tex tried out the concept in The Cuckoo Clock (story work had begun by early 1948).

There’s a great opening, reminiscent of Avery’s Who Killed Who (1943) with a dramatic narrator who loses his echo chamber when he’s revealed to be a house cat with the standard Avery design. The kitty narrator tells us..



There was a ringing in my ears.



I kept seeing things.



My eyes were big as saucers.



I couldn’t keep a thing on my stomach.



I didn’t know whether I was coming or going.



I was down in the dumps.



I kept blowing my top.



I felt myself going to pieces.



I had to pull myself together.



Here’s a great drawing of the cat declaring he is going mad.

I believe Avery changes animators during the sequence with the last three drawings handled by Grant Simmons. Mike Lah and Walt Clinton are the other animators with Rich Hogan helping with the gags, Johnny Johnsen providing backgrounds and Daws Butler as the cat.

One of Those Corny 'B' Pictures, Eh?

Screwy Squirrel is about to clobber Meathead the dog when his cartoon is interrupted.



In another great routine, Red Riding Hood and the wolf come out of nowhere to interrupt the action. Screwy explains to the wolf he’s in the wrong cartoon—with the assistance of the previously-seen title cards pulled out of nowhere.



The whole routine is topped when Screwy and Meathead briefly inhabit the world of Red Riding Hood, with none of its characters anywhere to be found.

Heck Allen helped Tex Avery with the story in this one.

M Is For the Million Laughs Tex Gave Me

“Lucky Ducky” features the great “Technicolor Ends Here” gag, but Tex and writer Rich Hogan fit in a bunch of quick gags during the extended chase scene.

Here’s one. The duck’s on the run through a pair of trees.



The dogs are in pursuit (in their motorboat on dry land).



The big tree protects the little tree, as Scott Bradley plays “Mother” on the soundtrack.



Tex liked surprising his audience from beginning to ending of his pictures. Unfortunately, re-issue prints of “Lucky Ducky” have the original ending chopped off. Film collector and researcher Jim Tucker came across an original print and reported his findings to fellow historian Jerry Beck. Read about it HERE.

Hungry For Horse

The Southern Wolf tries to get rid of the insatiably-hungry Billy Boy by putting him on a horse and sending him on his way. Billy eats the horse’s fur. Turnabout follows.



Ray Patterson and Bob Bentley work with Tex Avery regulars Grant Simmons, Mike Lah and Walt Clinton as animators on this one. Designs by Ed Benedict.

Chasing a King-Size Canary

Who has time to open doors or go through windows when you’re a gigantic cat chasing a king-sized canary? That was Tex Avery’s philosophy in “King-Size Canary.” The chase inside the house goes so quickly, Avery accommodates it simply by changing the background during the chase.



Johnny Johnson was the background artist.

He's 75

Confidentally...



...I am a wabbit.

The internet loves celebrating birthdays, anniversaries, deathiversaries, to the point of overkill. So it is with some trepidation that we join the huge throng of fans marking the 75th anniversary of the official release date of the first Bugs Bunny cartoon, “A Wild Hare.” The short could very well have been in theatres before then. And then there’s the argument that the Hardaway Hare of the late ‘30s was marketed as Bugs Bunny. Regardless, Bugs became Warner Bros.’ number-one animated star (and, arguably, cartoon-dom’s). His image started appearing in trade ads in September 1940 (the one to the right is from 1941). Trade papers reported Leon Schlesinger was rushing “Elmer’s Pet Rabbit” through production and had four other Bugs cartoons in development. Bugs eventually got his own series of “Bugs Bunny Specials,” though title animation on the cartoons themselves placed them with the rest of the Merrie Melodies.

Bugs’ exposure hit new heights in 1956 when Associated Artists Productions bought the TV rights to a pile of pre-1948 Warners cartoons and put the wabbit in practically every American home where a child could control the channel knob (the deal was signed March 1st between Warners and PRM, Inc., a shell company of AAP).

In keeping with 1940 practice, credits on “A Wild Hare” are sparce (but are now happily restored and available for all to see). Virgil Ross received the only animation credit, but experts today know that Bob McKimson and Sid Sutherland were among the artists under Avery’s eye at the time. Johnny Johnsen, who joined Avery at MGM, handled the backgrounds with nary a mention. And while at this point the studio didn’t give voice credits, C.E. Butterfield’s radio column published by the Associated Press dated September 17, 1940 reveals that “two of Al Pearce’s gang provided voices—Arthur Q. Bryan for the hunter and Mel Blanc for the hare.”

There are certainly greater Bugs Bunny cartoons than this one, but the relationship between Bugs and Elmer Fudd was instantly solidified by Avery and Hogan, providing a solid base to be adapted and parodied for years to come.

They're Nuts

Whether it was characters reading title cards, stopping the action and demanding the credit roll or hatching out of nuts and then beginning the plot, Tex Avery found unique ways to open his cartoons.

The nut-hatching (the characters are “nuts,” get it?) begins after the credits appear in the 1937 Merrie Melodie “Daffy Duck and Egghead,” while Carl Stalling plays “Here We Go Gathering Nuts in May” behind the action. Daffy does two takes when he sees Egghead, who fires at the fleeing duck. Could this be an Irv Spence scene?



The “nuts” pun may have come from writer Bugs Hardaway, who loved obvious stuff like that. Virgil Ross gets the animation credit.

Incidentally, the music over the title card is “‘Cause My Baby Says It’s So” by Warren and Dubin from the 1937 movie “The Singing Marine.”