Quips and Quotations (Of Course, You Realize, This Means Warners Edition)

 

Bugs Bunny is who we want to be. Daffy Duck is who we are.

--Chuck Jones

Humiliation and indifference, these are conditions every one of us finds unbearable–this is why the Coyote when falling is more concerned with the audience's opinion of him than he is with the inevitable result of too much gravity.

--Chuck Jones

Bad Santa

 

As Halloween approaches, let us pay tribute to the great Boris Karloff, who so chillingly brought to life--

Wait a second! Halloween's come and gone, hasn't it? So where does that leave poor Boris?

No matter the holiday, you just can't keep a good monster down.

Karloff, and, standing over him, Jones

Though we may associate him with an earlier era of pop culture, Boris Karloff still had a fairly busy schedule throughout the 1960s. He started out the decade as the host of the TV anthology series Thriller, kept on acting in horror films (most of which were low-budget drive-in fare) and narrated a series of children's records based on Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories.  It was the last of these that caught the ear of animator Chuck Jones (best known for the Coyote and Road Runner cartoons.) Jones wanted to make a TV version of Dr. Seuss' The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, and was struck by how genuinely tender Karloff came across as he recited Kipling's tales of how the camel got his hump or how the elephant got his trunk or how Great Britian got India (OK, the last one never appeared in Just So Stories, though Kipling DID bring up the subject quite a bit in his works geared toward adults.) Jones thought such a tender approach would work quite nicely for Seuss' story. Not that Jones was oblivious to the fact that Karloff also could do wickedness extremely well. So both the yin and the yang of Boris' vocal talents were brought to the fore as he's the tender narrator as well as the wicked Grinch who disguises himself as St. Nick and robs the town of Whoville of all its presents and decorations and foodstuffs until finally he has a change of conscience and promises to honor Christmas in his heart and Tiny Tim doesn't die--Oops! I'm getting my stories of Yuletide redemption mixed up. Which remind me...

Don't you think Alastair Sim would have made a scary monster? Just imagine him with a couple of bolts in his neck.

Quips and Quotations (Defamation of Character Christmas Edition)

You're a rotter, Mr. Grinch!
You're the king of sinful sots!
Your heart's a dead tomato
Splotched with moldy, purple spots
Mr. Grinch!
Your soul is an appalling dump-heap
Overflowing with the most disgraceful
Assortment of deplorable rubbish imaginable
Mangled-up in tangled-up knots!

--The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, 1966 animated version 

This Day in History

On April 30, 1938, a cartoon hunter for the first time preyed on a cartoon rabbit. However, you'd be forgiven if you'd thought it was the other way around:

That rabbit sounds a bit like Woody Woodpecker, doesn't he? An ex-vaudeville comic by the name of Mel Blanc freelanced as a voice artist for various animation studios, one of which belonged to Leon Schlesinger, whose cartoons were distributed by Warner Brothers, and another of which belonged to Walter Lantz, whose cartoons was distributed by Universal. It was the latter studio that Woody debuted, and Blanc voiced the first three of the berserk bird's cartoons before signing an exclusive contract with Schlesinger. This meant that he got to play the rabbit again, but without the laugh, with was now legally the property of Lantz. Of course, that meant someone else at the Lantz studio would have the unenviable task of trying to mimic Blanc. More on that later. 

The rabbit himself had gone through some changes by the time Blanc signed that contract:

 Prest-O Change-O (1939) Directed by Chuck Jones. The rabbit gives a dog, rather than a hunter, a hard time in this one.

Hare-um Scare-um (1939) Ben Hardaway, who had directed (or "supervised") the rabbit the first time, came back for this one. The rabbit (now grey) torments a hunter, but not Porky (who was much too busy getting tormented by Daffy Duck in a series of similar cartoons.)

Elmer's Candid Camera (1940) Chuck Jones gets ano--HEY, I SAID ELMER, NOT ALLEN!

That's better. Elmer's Candid Camera (1940) Chuck Jones gets another crack at the character. Yes, this Elmer's last name is Fudd (and not Funt!), but he's not a hunter, just a hapless photographer.

The rabbit went unnamed on screen, but around the Schlesinger studio, he was informally referred to as "Bug's bunny". Bugs was the nickname of Hardaway,  the rabbit's first director. Since this character seemed to have staying power, it was decided he needed an official onscreen name, something catchy and alliterative, and so the apostrophe was simply removed, and instead of a bunny that belonged to Bugs, Bugs was the bunny! Ironically, Hardaway would never again direct the rabbit. He was demoted to story man after Friz Freling rejoined Schlesinger's crew. So Hardaway went to work for Lantz. He was a story man there, too, but had an additional duty.

It seems Hardaway had a talent for voices as well. Well, at least one particular voice.

That's right. He replaced Mel Blanc for the rest of the 1940s (Lantz' own wife Grace eventually replaced him.)

Back at Schlesinger's, it fell upon Tex Avery, the first among directorial equals at the studio, to craft a new Bugs Bunny.

Visually, at least, Tex's take on the rabbit was no more definitive then the directors who came before him. It was Bug's personality, however, where he left his lasting mark. Bugs up that point had really just been, as Freling once referred to him, "Daffy Duck in a bunny outfit." Under Tex, Bugs went from being hyperactive to sly. He didn't wear out his opponent through sheer exhaustion, but outwitted him. Brains over brawn. Or, in the case of some many opponents starting with Elmer, brains over bumbling.

One additional element was to fall in place. As I said before, Blanc could no longer use the rabbit's original voice as that now belonged to Woody Woodpecker, so he had to come up with something else. Now seeing Bugs as a kind of streetwise character, he gave him a combination Brooklyn-Bronx accent, and left his lasting mark as well (but then he did that with a dozen or so other characters, too.)

On July 27, 1940, A Wild Hare premiered, today considered the first "official" Bugs Bunny cartoon. It's here that he says "What's Up, Doc?" for the very first time. However, as I've tried to show you, the rabbit was actually a work in progress, one that started a few years earlier. And continued to be a work in progress. Note that he's the same height as Elmer. He eventually would tower over him. I wouldn't be surprised if some animator somewhere is still tinkering with the basic design. Just be careful if you everhappen to cross paths with him. In whatever form, he's a little stinker.

 



 

Vital Viewing (Bea Benaderet's Long Count Edition)

Animator Chuck Jones was born on this day in 1912. He's best known for the thirty-some years he spent at Warner Brothers, where he brought to life such characters as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck (my favorite WB cartoon character, incidentally), Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Pepé Le Pew, Marvin the Martian, Wile E. Coyote, and the Road Runner.

The characters Jones didn't bring to life include Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, Tweety Bird, Speedy Gonzales, the Tasmanian Devil,  and, for those of you with long memories, Bosko. Also, his Bugs, Daffy, Porky, and Elmer look and act a little different than they do in shorts directed by Tex Avery, Frank Tashlin, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, or Robert McKimson. I bring this up to remind you that the animation studio founded by businessman Leon Schlesinger (whom Jones, Avery, Tashlin, Clampett, Freleng, and McKimson reportedly disliked) was no assembly line operation but a progressive arrangement that encouraged artistic freedom, innovation, and individuality. As long as the cartoon took no more than two weeks to make and turned a profit. Hell, I don't know. The system worked somehow. Maybe it was just dumb luck. Variously called Looney Tunes or Merrie Melodies, the cartoons were both commercial and artistic successes (though a whole generation would pass before the latter was acknowledged.)

Chuck Jones is now generally recognized as the most artistic, innovative, and individualistic animator ever to have emerged from the studio. Predictably, this almost got him fired early on.

Jones first cartoons for Schlesinger/Warners were cute Disney-like things, many starring a squeaky, motormouthed mouse named Sniffles, an innocent adrift in a world of antisocial basso profundos. These cartoons were lovely to look at but not all that funny. Jones was told to change his style. He did, and came up with this hilarious short. Except his bosses weren't all that amused.  Done in a kind of too slow-then too fast-then too slow again-then too fast again style, with minimalistic backgrounds and abstractly drawn characters, it was considered downright radical in 1942. Jones himself abandoned the technique for a while, until he took it up again about five years later, most notably with his popular Road Runner cartoons.

So, here, then, is The Dover Boys at Pimento University or The Rivals of Roquefort Hall, a parody of a once-popular, now-obscure series of books for adolescents. I really don't think you have to be familiar with the source material to find any of this funny.

 

 

Schlesinger/Warners never did fire Jones. World War II was on, and good cartoon directors were in short supply. So at least something positive came out of that attack on Pearl Harbor.

Quips and Quotations

A lion's work hours are only when he's hungry; once he's satisfied, the predator and prey live peacefully together.

--Chuck Jones.