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.

I Can Lick You And Your Whole Family!

Hundreds of rabbits enter the scene. Hunter's befuddled. A little clarinet lick, and end title. So ended the 1938 cartoon "Hare-um Scare-um"...

...Or did it?

Three Little Bops Musicians

It took more than three of those little piggies to play Shorty Rogers' score for the 1956 Warner Bros. cartoon "Three Little Bops", which we discussed a while back. I found a credits listing on Wikipedia which you may take with a grain of salt as you should anything on Wikipedia.

The Shorty Rogers group was actually a sextet. At times the pigs are seen playing several different instruments depending on the scene.

Shorty Rogers is playing trumpet. That's the easy one.

Pete Jolly is playing piano, and Barney Kessel is definitely the guitarist.

The other instruments are a little more vague. The baritone sax is either Pepper Adams or Jimmy Giuffre (of "Four Brothers" fame). Drums may be Stan Levey or Shelly Manne; my money's on Manne just because of the whose West Coast Jazz brotherhood. (Manne's drumming is also heard on DePatie-Freleng cartoons of the late 60's.) Bass may be Red Mitchell or Red Callender, just call him Red.

And Milt Franklyn did slate the session - I finally tracked down the music-only tracks and he does indeed bellow "Production number 1429, the 'Three Little Bops'."

More on Dave Rose

Here is some more information on former Warner Bros. layout artist Dave Rose, who passed away in 2006 at the age of 95...

http://articles.latimes.com/2006/mar/11/local/me-rose11

Must Be A Slow Day At The Home...

What makes this one funny is that Warner Bros. once actually had an artist on staff named Dave Rose, who later became a respected courtroom illustrator.

Cartoon Time!

Some of the Warner Bros. cartoons of the early-mid 1930's are interesting at best. This one is actually on the good side. It's called "Sittin' On A Backyard Fence" and it's a 1933 Merrie Melodie, produced by Leon Schlesinger shortly after the departure of Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising as producers. It's only the second Schlesinger-produced MM, after "I've Got To Sing A Torch Song". By this time the song "I Think You're Ducky" became the Merrie Melodies signature tune (replacing "Get Happy"), and this cartoon features a much longer arrangement of same.

Sittin on a Back Yard Fence
Uploaded by MatthewHunter

Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald, in the "Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies" guidebook published some 20 years ago (really!), took special note of the girl cat in the closing title, saying "So Long Folks" with what was described as "grotesque" mouth action. It's not all that bad, actually, and she does pose quite cutely at the end of her brief recitation. Thanks to Matthew Hunter, one of the Net's flamekeepers of WB cartoons, for posting this one.

Clampett vs. The World

About ten years before he died, Bob Clampett seemed to be everywhere, promoting (and some say puffing up) his role in creating the Warner Bros. cartoons, wearing those jackets Sody made for him and that Roy Orbison haircut. And all the other creators were up in arms.

None was more so literate on the matter than Chuck Jones. And one day in 1975, as Clampett-soaked projects like "Bugs Bunny Superstar" and "Camera Three: The Boys From Termite Terrace" clogged the psyche of adolescent cartoon fans, he decided to vent to Tex Avery. (Tex, by the way, would have celebrated his 100th birthday last week.) Jim Engel, longtime cartoon and comics fan, has scanned a copy of the letter with Tex's notations on Scott Shaw!'s Oddball Cartoons website. It's interesting reading and you get a good picture of the cameraderie most of the WB cartoonists shared. You've read the excerpts, now get the whole picture.

Warren Batchelder 1917-2007

I don't keep my ear to the animation grapevine as I once did, but I can't let the passing back in February of former Warner Bros. and DePatie-Freleng animator and director Warren Batchelder slip by. He died back on February 12 just a couple of months shy of his 90th birthday. He's a guy who's just got a lot of entries in my animation pages here at davemackey.com. He was one of the undersung greats of the industry.

Born on April 18, 1917 in Los Angeles, Warren Batchelder had been hanging around Warner Bros. as an assistant, most notably with Virgil Ross, since at least the mid-1930's, but it wasn't until 1958 that he was promoted to full animator in the Robert McKimson unit. His greatest glories were ahead as he was one of the primary animators at Friz Freleng's studio for its entire history, getting hundreds of credits on Pink Panther, Inspector and Tijuana Toads cartoons and all their various TV shows.

Marvel Productions was his next stop where he was director on many of their series including "G.I. Joe" and "Jem". There was even a brief stop at Warner Bros. where he worked on episodes of "Tiny Toon Adventures" as a character layout artist. Batchelder stayed active in animation for about another decade after that, finally putting the pencils away in 2002.

Cut To The Chase

Someone at DePatie-Freleng must have thought spy films were good fodder for cartoon plots, and this forms the basis of the final theatrical Road Runner cartoon, "Sugar And Spies" (1966). Still not even close to the finesse of the Jones efforts, this is better than the Rudy Larriva cartoons talked about earlier on this blog. Directed by Robert McKimson and actually made on the DePatie-Freleng lot by the regular DePatie-Freleng crew, it's one of the few DFE cartoons to have an actual score (as opposed to stock cues) by Walter Greene, whose composing skills were given more of a workout over at Walter Lantz. I apologize for the Spanish soundtrack... don't quite know how to get that off. But the intrusions are blissfully few. Here it is. (Thanks to Harry for helping me fix the autoplay problem)

A Black Mark In Warner Bros. Cartoon History

Perhaps the only Warner Bros. cartoons not worthy of the name were the Road Runner cartoons produced by Format Films (acting as subcontactor for DePatie-Freleng Enterprises) under the mis-direction of Rudy Larriva. (They were bracketed by two far better cartoons actually produced at DePatie-Freleng with Bob McKimson directing.)

As his April Fool's joke, animation scholar Thad Komorowski has given us a pretty good overview of why Larriva's work is so rank. Sure, Larriva had at least one of Chuck Jones' animators aboard (Bob Bransford), but the other artists - which at times included even the great Virgil Ross - couldn't make a silk purse out of a coyote's ear. To borrow from my WB filmography, "Watch these cartoons and you'll know that WB censored the wrong 11 films!"

Larriva Road Runner
Uploaded by thadk

Friz Followup

Reading over the other blog posts generated by Friz Freleng's centennial yesterday (some say he's older, but I'm sticking by that 1906 birth date), I direct you to this insightful post about the 1956 cartoon "Three Little Bops", written from the standpoint of jazz history.

I never really gave any thought to the music in that cartoon being anything other than bop, but it really isn't Charlie Parker-Dizzy Gillespie style bop. As performed by Shorty Rogers and his band, it's more small-group West Coast uptempo blues. Stalling or Franklyn would have just massacred the music style (just imagine Franklyn slating the recording session... "PRODUCTION NUMBER FOURTEEN TWENTY-NINE!"), and the fresh approach to the soundtrack (using Stan Freberg instead of Mel Blanc to sing the song) really helped make it a unique cartoon.

Happy 100th Birthday, Friz Freleng

On August 21, 1906, Isadore Freleng was born. In an era when the greats of animation are slowly slipping into obscurity, the name and works of Friz Freleng endure. As one of the very few men whose tenure with Warner Bros. Animation spanned from the beginning to the end of the studio (except for a brief respite at M-G-M), Freleng adapted to the style of the day, whether it was dancing and singing rubber-hose characters designed to be as much like Mickey Mouse as the law allowed, or the sophisticated character comedy of later years. Of course, after WB closed down, Freleng formed his own studio and his own stable of characters, and even kept ties to the WB characters, producing a brace of "gee-we-should-never-have-closed-the-studio" theatricals in the mid-1960's, and then producing works for a revival of the characters in the 1980's. Freleng remained the studio's elder statesman well into the 1990's, when ill health eventually curtailed his activities, until his death attributed to natural causes on May 26, 1995.

We join the blogoverse in celebrating the man in his works, and our contribution is an in-depth look at what Freleng termed one of the most "dangerous" cartoons he ever made.




Released in the Looney Tunes series on April 30, 1949, it is important to first put this cartoon in proper historical perspective. Across the hall, Chuck Jones had been plotting the first Road Runner cartoon, "Fast and Furry-ous" concurrent with the production of this picture. The reason Freleng termed this picture "dangerous" (in an interview with Greg Ford) was that the cartoon essentially had one gag: Yosemite Sam wants to see a high diving act, so instead of the advertised talent, he shoves his sixguns at Bugs Bunny and tries to make him go off the deep end. However there is some turnabout and Sam winds up taking the dive. This is much like the structure of the Road Runner pictures: you know the Road Runner's never going to get caught and the Coyote is going to be somehow impaled, immolated, or destroyed in some fashion. However, in Freleng's picture, Bugs is a much more active participant in Sam's dives; things just happen to the Coyote because they do.

It does take Freleng some footage to get to the meat of the situation: a traveling carnival, with Bugs as carny barker, advertising Fearless Freep, the high diving sensation. Yosemite Sam takes more tickets than he needs (paying in cash, unbelievably) and takes a seat inside. The background painting of Paul Julian deserves mention for always appropriately setting the scene.






Through some quirk, Fearless Freep is delayed getting into town and so Bugs must reluctantly announce the cancellation, which ires Sam. He aims to see some high diving, so it's up to the platform for Bugs.








Bugs craftily pivots the diving board and feigns a dive, having changed into turn-of-the-century swimwear. But it's Sam who's off the deep end has he makes his first descent, with Bugs taking a seat in the audience to watch the action.











Bugs' trickery is now aided by liberal application of our old friend, Cartoon Physics, in the two gags that follow. First, Bugs manages to catapult Sam off the platform end of the diving board, but Bugs can't let poor old Sam dive into an empty tank. He throws down a bucket of water, which manages to pass Sam on the way down and settle into the tub. In spite of Bugs' best efforts to provide a safe landing, Sam misses the mark...







Then Bugs, hanging upside down on the underside of the diving board, manages to successfully convince Sam that he's actually upside down, and he takes the plunge once more...







From this point in the picture, now that Freleng has established the basic premise - that Bugs is never going to take the dive - he can be a little faster and wilder with the gags. There's the "I dare you to step over this line" bit, which I believe was taken from Bob Clampett's "Buckaroo Bugs", an "Open The Door, Richard" bit, and a fake "they went thataway" bit with Bugs in Indian dress.









Eventually, all Freleng needs to do from this point on is show that whatever Bugs does, Sam will dive and ascend the ladder once more for more medicine. This gag shows Freleng's sense of timing, his major asset as an animation director, as Freleng repeats the gag faster each time (with the same musical cues) until there's a delay in Sam's fall...






...because Bugs is now tied to the diving board, with Sam sawing it off. But with Cartoon Physics dictating the order of the universe here, Sam's entire platform falls. Bugs ends the cartoon with the classic line, "I know dat dis defies the law of gravity...but, I never studied law!" That's All, Folks!




All of Freleng's animators (including swing animator Pete Burness, a recent addition to the crew) rise to the occasion here and submit great action scenes. This is rightly one of Freleng's greatest moments in the Sam-Bugs battles, with Sam being a relatively recent discovery (having first appeared in 1944's "Hare Trigger"). More were to come (cartoons like "Mutiny On The Bunny", "Big House Bunny", "Sahara Hare" and "Bunker Hill Bunny"), but this boiled everything down to essentials.

Go to the "Hell On Frisco Bay" blog for more links to Friz fans on this, his 100th birthday.