Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Counting Down to Chuck Jones' Centennial

We are going to be posting a Chuck Jones-directed cartoon every day from now until September 21, which would have been Chuck's 100th birthday. We are going to do this here on the blog and then also on my Facebook page. We start with Chuck's first cartoon as director, "The Night Watchman", which was typical of the slower, gentler comedies that marked Chuck's first few years as a cartoon director. Eventually, Chuck loosened up, and his films became uproariously funny.

NOTE: Warner Bros. took most of the films down. I took the posts down so the page loads faster and I look less like a schmuck than I did before.

1 comment:

Dave Mackey said...

Chuck became a director later than he should have. What happened was that in 1937, Chuck and Bob Clampett were shipped off to the Ub Iwerks studio to work on some Porky Pig cartoons subcontracted to the ex-partner of Walt Disney. The Warner Bros. cartoonists were joined in this endeavor by Iwerks animators John Carey, Jerry Hathcock, Lucifer Guarnier, Bobe Cannon, and Bill Hammer. Iwerks took director credit for the first two, then Clampett for the last of them. Eventually, Carey and Cannon were brought into the WB studio proper with Carey being a studio animator well into the 1950's. Jones only got his director's chair on the temporary departure of Frank Tashlin the next year, but made the most of that opportunity.