The Cagey Canary: A Late-Blooming Hybrid

Original release date: 11/22/1941

The surviving copy is a Blue Ribbon reissue from October 11, 1947. 

The original title card has surfaced, and shows no director credit, as is typical for a Leon Schlesinger production released after a director quit or was fired.

You can see a good-quality (tho' time-compressed) version of this cartoon HERE. No DVD or Blu-Ray release of this cartoon  yet exists.

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A pretty good (and mostly mute) predator/prey comedy, The Cagey Canary feels more like a Friz Freleng cartoon than Avery's work. Freleng would soon release a similar cartoon, Double Chaser, as he worked his way toward Tweetie Pie, his Oscar-winning 1947 classic. If the credits of this original title card are at all reliable, Michael Maltese provided the story for this short. Its tit-for-tat humor, variations on a central (and threatening) action and what dialogue it has syncs up to Maltese's work with Freleng. It's less talky than Maltese's writing for Chuck Jones, but its structure and its character dynamics are accomplished. 

Maltese filtered through the detached chess-match of Avery's comedic eye, it again shows how close these late Schlesinger cartoons approach the look and feel of Avery's M-G-M classics. His drawing style is still buried deep within Robert McKimson's character designs. With their tendency towards better animation, the added bells and whistles slow Avery's timing down--with one gag taking a hell of a long time to get across. Let's wade in and have a look-see...

The Bug Parade: Trusting One's Comedic Insects

Release date: 10/11/41

The version we see is the Blue Ribbon re-issue of 7/12/52

Availability: NONE

You can watch a better-than-average TV version HERE.

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The original credits for this cartoon may or may not have had Fred Avery listed as supervisor. Like many Warner Brothers cartoons, this one lost its original credits when reissued 11 years after its first run, at which time Avery was winding down his time at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Bug Parade was the last thing on his mind then, unless he happened to go see a movie in mid-July 1952 and saw it as part of the program.

Bug Parade was probably titled The Bug Parade in its 1941 release, in a reference to the 1925 silent war film The Big Parade, King Vidor's epic drama of the First World War. The punny title hung on a cartoon with no connection to that cast-of-bazillions film. It would have gotten a laugh from older theatergoers who might have seen the original run, or the film's 1931 reissue with a musical score. 

We open with a complex display of insect transit, as our narrator, who sounds like Robert C. Bruce but may not be him, comments in that sunny, condescending tone we've come to expect.

"The Garden of the Moon," a winsome tune by Harry Warren, Al Dubin and Johnny Mercer (and from the 1938 picture of the same name) underscores this ground-level pageant. Narrator promises us of "little-known facts in the lives of these tiny creatures."

The Crackpot Quail: A Repressed Razz-berry and a Screwball Experiment

Release date: 2/15/41 (according to BCDB)

This cartoon is in the public domain, and has no official DVD or BR release. It may be on some PD releases, but I don't know of any specific discs. Despite its PD status, it was quasi-remastered in the 1990s and shows up on Boomerang.

You may view a crisp Boomerang-sourced print of this cartoon HERE.

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Fred Avery's time at the Leon Schlesinger studio was growing short. By the final months of 1940, he had made significant innovations to studio animation: faster pace and timing, breaking the fourth wall in a more intimate way, harder-hitting humor (much of it sourced from radio shows, movies and other popular culture of the day) and the development of the screwball character. Add to that Avery's debut of the topical spot-gag cartoon, which used deliberately corny humor as a weapon, and, via a sardonic narrator, bridged the experience between filmmaker and spectator, and his body of work is as game-changing as the Walt Disney studio's.

Having recently crested with the impeccable A Wild Hare, Avery had no further heights to reach with Schlesinger. His cartoons of the 1941 season maintain a high technical quality. The worst ones have some nugget to be be mined later in his career (e.g. the hair-in-projector-gate gag of Aviation Vacation). Avery was ready and willing for a more rewarding berth in the world of animation. He would reach that goal by 1941's end, after a brief stint at Paramount, with M-G-M--the glossiest movie factory in Tinseltown. Known for their frothy musicals, "important" big-budget literary adaptations and costume dramas, feather-light comedies and their early championing of movie franchises (Calling Dr. Kildare!!!), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer first released Ub Iwerks' Flip the Frog cartoons and then lured Hugh Harman and Rudolph Ising from the early Warners animation studio.

The Haunted Mouse: Return to Monochrome Has Mixed Results for Avery Unit (with guest commentator Devon Baxter)

Release date: 2/15/1941 (according to BCDb)

DVD-Blu-Ray Availability: none

You may view or download the complete version of this cartoon HERE.

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A big thank-you to Devon Baxter, Cartoon Research columnist and budding film restoration person, who kept on me to finally get this post, started far too long ago, finished. His comments pepper this look at a troubled production.

1941 begins with the Avery unit's first black and white cartoon since 1937's Porky's Garden. In this period, all of Leon Schlesinger's directors took turns making monochrome Looney Tunes.

This was apparently to help the studio meet its release requirements for the year. As well, less Technicolor footage lowered the outlay of money. Most of these '41 cartoons are in the public domain. When they came up for copyright renewal, the powers-that-were possibly passed on the trouble. What could black and white cartoons do for them in the late 1960s?

There are some fine cartoons in this batch. Friz Freleng helmed some high-quality Porky Pig episodes. As my friend Thad K. has noted, they're substantially better than the late black and whites of Bob Clampett, who let Porky become a mindless figurehead. Freleng's black and whites are highly amusing and well-made.

These would be the only black-and-white cartoons of Chuck Jones' directorial career. He made a few outstanding Looney Tunes, including Joe Glow the Firefly and some Porkys. Avery served a hitch in the Looney Tunes trenches, and had been away from the series since 1937. His two B&W shorts of '41 gave us the transcendental Porky's Preview and this beautifully animated, problematic one-shot.

The Haunted Mouse is a failure as a cartoon; a fatal flaw in its storyline, plus unsympathetic characters, leads nowhere. This isn't the first time Avery has made do with a sub-par storyline. It's a surprise to see Michael Maltese's name as storyman. His scenarios for Friz Freleng and Chuck Jones are among the most solid of the mature-period WB cartoons. Maltese's scenarios are usually bullet-proof. This cartoon seems like an experiment--doing something without insurance of its success. Such risks could be better taken in a lower-budget black and white cartoon.

Cancer treatment and this guy (at left) have kept me pre-occupied. I'm in the middle of restoring Cecil Jensen's classic absurdist comic strip Elmo, which I intend to self-publish by the end of this year.

I am on the home-stretch of this blog project. It makes sense to finish it. When I decided to examine each one of Tex Avery's Warner Brothers cartoons--to establish some kind of critical exploration of a neglected and mis-judged body of films--I knew there would be some rough going. It's more pleasurable to write about films I admire and consider successful. But we learn from mistakes--our own and others'--and there is value in examining why something doesn't work.

With the sound off, The Haunted Mouse is a thing of beauty. Lush, atmospheric backgrounds and nuanced animation from such talents as Robert McKimson, Virgil Ross and Rod Scribner are state-of-the-art 1940 work. We do miss Carl Stalling's moody score if we omit the audio track--an essential component of these cartoons.

We'll go through it with sight and sound, warts and all. Ready?

Steinbeck Literary and Screen Classic Inspires Black Comedy; Of Fox and Hounds Celebrates the Dark Comedy of Short-Term Memory

Release date: 12/7/1940 (according to BCDb)

DVD-Blu-Ray Availability: none

You may view the complete version of this cartoon HERE.

If you would like to see a nice print of Lewis Milestone's 1939 film (discussed in-depth here), click HERE to download it. Thanks to Devon Baxter for supplying this unusually nice version of a film lost in PD limbo.

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The Avery unit's last cartoon of 1940 was inspired by the 1939 Hal Roach-produced film of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Directed by Lewis Milestone, who helmed films as dissimilar as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Ocean's 11 (1960), the movie, for its pastoral settings, is a fore-runner to the film noir sensibility. Its main characters, George and Lennie, are pre-destined to suffering, trouble and tragedy. They first appear in Milestone's version two steps ahead of a lynch mob, running for their lives and hopping a freight train to temporarily escape death.

Lon Chaney, Jr. and Burgess Meredith in roles of a lifetime

We next see them aboard a bus, and the characters and their relationship are deftly established. George Milton (played by Burgess Meredith) is a confident, world-weary know-it-all. Had his life circumstances been better, George might have been a wheeler-dealer. Instead, he's an itenerant laborer saddled with Lennie Small (Lon Chaney, in a breakout role that should have led to bigger things, but never really did).

Lennie was described by a junior high school classmate, c. 1975, as a "ree-tard." He was sent to the principal's office for this outburst, which was too much by '70s standards [altho' racial and cultural epithets were still alive and well in American pop culture] and, I presume, chastened for this statement.

Lennie has issues; due to a traumatic head injury, he lacks the ability to reason and remember. He's eerily reminiscent of a person with Alzheimer's. Save a few strong memories, Lennie can't hang onto to any event for more than a few minutes. We see him have a distressing moment. He reaches in his front shirt pocket for his work permit, can't find it, and panics. Easygoing George reassures him; he's got both their permits. Would he, for a minute, entrust Lennie with such an important slip of paper?

George and Lennie are 86d from the bus by a vexed driver (played, uncredited, by Eddie Dunn, a veteran actor and a familiar face from Hollywood Westerns and occasional classic films like The Great Dictator and The Bank Dick) and face a 10-mile walk, under the merciless California desert sun, to the ranch where they'll strain their bodies hoisting bags of grain in exchange for three hots and a cot.

They decide to camp out in a wooded area. There, George forces Lennie to hand over a dead bird, which he heaves away in disgust. Lennie likes to pet small animals--it obviously calms his general sense of ill-being. George complains about having had to take away a dead mouse a few days earlier.

After their meal of canned beans, Lennie exhorts George to repeat a favorite fantasy: that, someday, the two of them will settle down, and be well-off. They'll have a small farm of their own, and Lennie will have the job of taking care of the rabbits. "Tell me about the rabbits, George," Chaney's Lennie says, with all the hope in the world showing in his glazed, innocent eyes.

Wacky Wildlife Brings Late 1940 Spot-Gag 'Trifecta' to a Close

Release date: 11/9/1940 (according to BCDb)
DVD-Blu-Ray Availability: none

You may view the complete version of this cartoon HERE.

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Yes, we're still in spot-gag mode. That's three in a row. I just want you to realize how I must sometimes suffer for my art!

I kid the Avery spot-gag cartoons. Having to study and review them has given me a grudging respect for them. As time-capsules of the development of Hollywood studio animation, and of the film-to-film progression of one of its great directors, these cartoons have great value. Entertainment-wise, ehh. At their best, they're a well-oiled joke machine. We may be able to second-guess their every move, but they remain likable, to a point.

We are fast reaching the point of no return for the spot-gag cartoons. In 1941, this tacit series takes a prolonged nose-dive, despite a couple of forward-reaching comedic ideas.

Once I get this entry done, I can move on to Of Fox and Hounds, which is one of my favorite Avery cartoons. So there's that.

Light-Hearted Holiday Highlights: About What You'd Expect, But Amusing

Release date: 10/12/1940 (according to BCDb)
DVD-Blu-Ray Availability: Bugs Bunny's Cupid Capers (WHV, 2010)

You may view the complete version of this cartoon HERE.

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Yes, we're still in spot-gag mode. This cartoon sits higher on the bell curve than the teeth-gnashers the Avery unit will put out as our hero nears the end of his time with the Leon Schlesinger animation studio.

Neither terrible or ground-breaking, it's professional cartoon product, and offers some amusing bits, including its clever presentation of the title card:

Ceiling Hero: Stale Material Gets a More Sophisticated Treatment

Release date: 8/24/1940 (according to BCDb)
DVD-Blu-Ray Availability: none

You may view the complete version of this cartoon HERE.

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After the creative and cinematic triumph of A Wild Hare, Avery might have felt exhausted, and relied on a familiar fallback--the spot-gag cartoon. We see this pattern throughout his latter career at Leon Schlesinger's studio: masterpiece/dud/masterpiece/dud.

Despite Avery's growing confidence and finesse as a movie-maker, he had a hard time with winning streaks. Some of this was borne of his self-challenge to try new things, take risks and better what he'd done before. How the spot-gag format inspired him is a mystery. It was a familiar port to rest while he charged himself up for his next superior effort.

Ceiling Hero offers nothing new in terms of content. The gags are mostly cornball, with two shining moments of inspiration. Despite its lack of yocks, the cartoon impresses with its forthright, composed and cool-handed air. We are closer to the style that Avery will use in his best M-G-M pictures. Gone is the gawkiness of 1937/8; the show-off who practically mashes his gags in the audience's face. Avery still had a bit of that in his system, and it shows up in a few of his early M-G-M shorts. Ceiling Hero looks ahead to the spot-gag cartoons Avery will do at the end of the decade. House of Tomorrow, Car of Tomorrow and TV of Tomorrow peddle deliberately stale gags with a poker face, with a few innovative and genuinely successful vignettes here and there.

A Star is Born (After Some Growing Pains): Bugs Bunny Emerges in A Wild Hare

Release date: 7/27/1940 (according to BCDb)
DVD-Blu-Ray Availability: Looney Tunes Platinum Collection: Volume 2 (available in both formats)

You may view the complete version of this cartoon HERE.

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PREFACE: This will be the longest, most involved chapter in this blog. It marks the fifth year of this quixotic ode to one of my favorite filmmakers.

When I started this blog in 2013, I assumed I'd breeze through Tex Avery's Warner Brothers cartoons in a year or two. Life had different plans for me. With luck, I'll reach the end here by 2023, assuming the free Internet, blogs and computers still exist, and we're not talking into sentient sticks and beaming our thoughts into some shared cephalopodic mind-screen.

I have been mesmerized by animation since infancy. The first motion picture I saw was a revival of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in Tallahassee, Florida in 1965. My grandmother later delighted in recalling my sheer terror at moments in the film, but I wasn't traumatized--just fascinated and compelled to see more, at a point when I might not have been able to discern live-action footage from hand-drawn animation.

Television had loads of limited-animation programming, but, as I discovered, early in the morning, local stations showed older cartoons. They looked, sounded and felt different. Like Snow White, they convinced me more of real-life movement than the mechanical walk cycles of The Flintstones, or the illustrated radio of Rocky and Bullwinkle.

The cartoons that interested me most came from a large package of Warner Brothers shorts purchased by Associated Artists Productions. This image, and not the iconic Warner Brothers rings, opened the cartoons I saw on early morning and afternoon TV broadcasts:

My family didn't get a color TV until 1976, so my earliest views of these, and the classic M-G-M cartoon library, plus Famous Studios, Terrytoons, Walter Lantz and the odd Disney short, were in grainy, low-rez black and white.

As a child, I had no clear idea how old these cartoons were. I knew they preceded my birth, and that the Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons--plus the other contemporary ventures into limited animation that dominated broadcast time--were more recent. No reference books existed, and there was no way to summon up a cartoon at a moment's notice. 

Local TV stations randomly ran their 16 millimeter prints of these films, three to four in a half-hour time slot. Cartoon endings were regularly cut off if the show went into overtime (i.e., exceeded the time alloted to ads). More than once, film broke during a live broadcast. Said cartoon would often next be seen missing a hunk of footage, causing an interruption like a skip on a vinyl record. 

These cartoons were time-fillers to pad out afternoon and wee-hour programming, sell advertising space to (usually) local merchants and give children something to stare at, and thus keep out of trouble/their parents' lives. 

Few people, aside from kids, cared about these broadcasts. The television stations cared about the ads that they packed in-between these shorts. A passing adult might chuckle in remembrance of seeing such cartoon fare in their childhood. And there must have been older animation enthusiasts who had some inkling of knowledge of the art form's history, and who watched these crummy broadcasts as a means to see these elusive films.

That's what I became in my latter years of high school. The golden hours of 3 to 5 PM offered a chance to see x number of cartoons daily--at this time, a mix of Warners, M-G-M and Walter Lantz material, programmed with no rhyme or reason. By then. I'd gleaned first insights behind how these remarkable films came to be--mostly misinformation, but at this time (circa 1978) any info was welcome (if later refuted by proven fact). 

It became easier to connect the dots: William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, producers of so much TV dreck, did those beautifully-animated Tom and Jerry shorts of the 1940s! Animators who worked for Disney also worked for M-G-M, Lantz and Warner Brothers!

One early godsend was the January-February 1975 issue of Film Comment with a large section on classic Hollywood cartoons--a suite of articles that coalesced with the critical thinking I'd begun about these films. The discovery of this issue, in 1979, gave me a sense of purpose in my interest in animation. These were films worth thinking about and studying. They weren't expressly made for children. They had value as containers of American popular culture and history.

Circus Today: Okay, okay! (with guest commentator Devon Baxter)

Release date: 6/22/1940 (according to BCDb)
DVD-Blu-Ray Availability: NONE

You may view the complete version of this cartoon HERE. It has some audio garbage at the start; apologies for the watermarks.

Dailymotion has been acting up lately, but this is the only extant online version I could find (that didn't seem suspicious)...

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It may come as a shock to some of you to see a new post here. People have been inquiring about about when I'll be doing the next post on this blog. I'm flattered to know there are folks out there who anticipate reading my two cents on the early works of Tex Avery. Thank you.

Well, since I have a reward in the next cartoon after this, and since my old chum Devon Baxter (whose weekly column on the Cartoon Research website you are reading, aren't you? Hmmm?) offered some guest-commentator notes, I'll saddle up the old bronc and get through yet another Avery unit spot-gag cartoon.

Circus Today is one of the better efforts in this vein--there aren't many spots where I gag--and has some compelling in-jokes. Well, leave us get started...    

No narrator! This cartoon opens with an effective use of sound and visuals to convey the setting and mood. Don Brodie* gets us in the proper festive spirit as a carnival barker, spiels over this lovely circus artwork...

...and dissolves to the barker drawing a crowd. This is a significant step up from the prior spot-gag cartoons. Though Robert C. Bruce's tolerant, bemused narrative voice works well in the earlier cartoons, it's refreshing to see Avery and his writers having enough confidence to let go of that crutch.

A Gander at Mother Goose Is Fine in Small Doses

Release date: 5/25/1940 (according to BCDb)
DVD-Blu-Ray Availability: Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol. 5 DVD set, Disc 2

You may view the complete version of this cartoon HERE.

Life has kept me away from this blog, and my quixotic goal of completing it. At the rate I'm going, it may be 2025 before I'm finished--assuming that blogs, the free Internet and my sanity still exist at that future date.

A Gander at Mother Goose and its successor, Circus Today, are the calm before the creative storm for Mr. Avery. After these spot-gag efforts, his next work will change the rules of Hollywood animation--to the extent that the film, seen out of context, might not pass as anything special to the casual viewer. And you're not the casual viewer, or else you'd be looking for expensive sneakers on eBay instead of visiting this blog. So welcome to this obscure, toasty corner of the world.

A jolly swing-tinged arrangement of "Mutiny in the Nursery," the Harry Warren/Johnny Mercer collaboration that first showed up in the 1938 film Going Places, leads us into the cartoon proper--after, of course, a rare appearance by the rainbow-rings WB logo:

A thing of beauty.

 Avery tosses his first spitball into the balcony.

Robert C. Bruce, the long-suffering, ever-patient father figure who chaperones us for most of Avery's spot-gag pictures, chimes in with some warm, reassuring twaddle about turning back the pages of time and reliving cherished memories of our collective childhood days. Lovely but deceptive images back up this bogus introduction, as do Stalling's syrupy strings.

The Bear's Tale: Splintered Shards of a Fractured Fairy-Tale

Release date: 4/13/1940 (according to BCDb)
DVD-Blu-Ray Availability: Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol. 5 DVD set

You may view the complete version of this cartoon HERE.

Still riding high, Avery & Co. return to one of the director's pet projects--trashing Disney-style fairy-tale cartoons. Light on narrative (much like Uncle Tom's Bungalow and Little Red Walking Hood), The Bear's Tale is a fourth-wall demolition derby, with the director adding his gleeful voice work to a spicy, chaotic stew.

I'd like to know who really wrote this cartoon. It's far too sophisticated, cool calm and collected to have come from the likes of "Bugs" Hardaway. I assume this title card is a typical example of Leon Schlesinger's rotating credit system.

The cartoon manages to avoid actual animation for about a minute, via novel credits that make maximal use of still images. Pages keep turning, as narrator Robert C. Bruce fools us into getting all snuggly and comfortable--as does the music of Carl W. Stalling, who was by now a master of easing us in via familiar snatches of classical and popular tunes.

 Avery kids journeyman director Mervin LeRoy, who helmed everything from Little Caesar (1930) to The Bad Seed (1956), and had a hand in a long list of enjoyable classic Hollywood product.

The Early Worm Gets The Bird: 1940's Inauspicious, Racist-Lite Kickoff

Release date: 1/13/1940 (according to BCDb)
DVD-Blu-Ray Availability: none

You may view the uncensored version of this cartoon HERE.

For its first narrative cartoon since Dangerous Dan McFoo, the Fred Avery unit reprises the territory of the earlier (and better) The Sneezing Weasel. Ambition and pace are slowed down, and racial caricatures inform its characters. After four spot-gag cartoons in a row, the notion of a "real" cartoon seems welcome and appealing. This film has a few isolated moments of wit and sharp pacing, but is hampered by dullness and a general lack of inspiration.

The Avery unit has some triumphs just down the road--The Bear's Tale, A Wild Hare and Of Fox and Hounds--and elements of those three films are weakly forecast here. Perhaps it had been so long since Avery and unit had tried to tell a through-story, with no interruptions or side-trips, that they would have made hash of anything they tried.

If nothing else, Early Worm is a sort of fond look back at the Avery unit's triumphs of 1937 and '38, when its blend of meta-story, increasing tempo and more confident, expressive animation announced the arrival of something new to studio cartoons.

Early Worm was among the first of the Warner Brothers "Blue Ribbon" re-issues in the fall of 1943. It was re-reissued in 1952, which suggests, inexplicably, that it was an audience favorite.

The opening is common to Avery's story cartoons of the late 1930s: an atmospheric multiplane exterior, set to music that establishes the mood and place. Stephen Foster's 1851 minstrel song "Old Folks at Home," more often known as "Swanee River," gets us through this gag-free introduction and tells us this is the Deep South--the cartoon version of it, at least.

It might also serve as a tip-off that we're about to see caricatures of black dialect; Foster's song, told from the POV of an Afro-American slave, uses the mush-mouthed likes of "ebber" and "eb'rywhere," among other ethnic corruptions, to get its bizarre sentiments of love for "de ole plantation" and de slavery system across.

We dissolve to the interior of the Blackbird home. Three children say their prayers as their adoring Mammy looks on, delighted at their goodness and grace. An Avery standard--the quick P.S. adorned with fast physical action--makes a lightly humorous tag.

Once the lights are out, one of the kids reveals an obsessive need to be different-- a la the parrot hero of 1937's I Wanna Be a Sailor, or Owl Jolson in 1936's I Love to Singa. He is obsessed with a book called The Early Bird Gets the Worm, which is his version of The Anarchist's Cookbook. He wakes one of his brothers to preach the gospel.

He's voiced by a sped-up but 100% recognizable Mel Blanc, who gives him a standard, if expressive, stock Negro dialect.

(Mother's voice is beautifully rendered by Sara Berner, whose versatility, like Blanc's, is easy to take for granted. She imbues her few moments here with genuine presence and warmth.)

Screwball Football: Cavorting Sports Retorts

Release date: 12/16/1939 (according to BCDb)
DVD-Blu-Ray Availability: none

You may view the uncensored version of this cartoon HERE.

More spot gags? As if we have a choice. This one has a welcome looseness, and is less reliant on deliberately stinky puns and other verbal-humor quips.

Thanks to this not being reissued, and thus shorn of its elaborate original titles, we can enjoy an unusual approach, via animated silhouettes. There's a funny gag, and everything:

These credits have more laughs than the entirety of, say, A Day at the Zoo, so this is off to a promising start--despite its being a sports cartoon. Not being a sports person, and finding sports, as-is, already funny, I am prone to groan when an athletic theme dominates an animated film.

Smile When You Say 'Flounder:' Fresh Fish

Release date: 11/4/1939 (according to BCDb)
DVD-Blu-Ray Availability: nada
You may view a nice-looking copy of this cartoon (with an embedded logo) HERE.

Perhaps I'm softening, or weakening under the spell of these Avery spot-gag cartoons, but they don't seem as egregious as I anticipated. They can be stale, but it's a deliberate staleness, a reveling in the joy of telling a bad or corny joke.

These aren't Avery's most enjoyable or memorable cartoons, but they do offer evidence of the shreds of progress in his path to becoming the most innovative and well-known non-Disney director of Hollywood cartoons.

The long delay in posting this analysis is due to the temporary misplacement of my set of complete Warner Brothers cartoons from a sudden move this past January. I am happy to say the set has been recovered, and I'll try to get through the rest of this spot-gag period quickly and painlessly.

By the time of Fresh Fish, an easy formula rules the Avery-directed spot gag cartoons. Robert C. Bruce is the affable, mildly sarcastic emcee; Mel Blanc and Carl Stalling supply invaluable audio input, and a talent pool of animators with a growing skillset turn out stable, functionial-to-impressive work. The Warners cartoons begin to have the vibe of a finely-tuned machine: each part does its work with due diligence, and each part works with its neighbors in concert.

The lone variant, by this time, is the content of each cartoon. Avery's time at the Leon Schlesinger studios demonstrates the power of this variant. With good material, Avery and crew could create an instant classic cartoon. With formula stuff or a flawed basic theme, the same group of talented people, capable of far greater things, could turn out a trifle. No one was going to remember these things, so if they turned out good, great; if not, well, let's try to make the next one better.

Land of the Midnight Fun: Smooth Sailing on a Ship of Fools

Release date: 9/23/1939 (according to BCDb)
DVD-Blu-Ray Availability: as an extra on the Warners Home Video DVD of Allegheny Uprising.
You may view the uncensored version of this cartoon (with Cartoon Network logo) HERE.

Here's something to be happy about: A Tex Avery travelogue spot-gag cartoon that's funny, well thought-out, and beautifully drawn.

Land of the Midnight Fun feels like the result of a Termite Terrace think-tank session, in which the goal was to make one of these popular topical gag cartoons with clarity, solvency and some genuine wit. By sticking to one narrative incident (a cruise to Alaska), rather than a shotgun-spray of unconnected gags. LotMF is cohesive, appealing and endearing. Though Avery never depended on a strong narrative, it surely doesn't hurt him. Having a sturdy foundation upon which to gag, and confound the viewer, is common to his best early cartoons.

Yes, there are some bad puns--those poor-on-purpose items that are part of the spirit of these spot-gaggers. But Avery is wise enough, from the experience of having made a few of these, to let his natural comedic and cinematic inclinations steer this ship.

The title sequence announces something out of the norm:

Dangerous Dan McFoo: Inching Towards Mastery

Release date: 7/15/1939 (according to BCDb)
DVD-Blu-Ray Availability: an extra on the WHV DVD of Dodge City; and an extra on the French collection of Avery's M-G-M cartoons

You may view this cartoon HERE. Kudos to this blog's official pal, Devon Baxter, for providing this best-there-is version for us to view.

Two years after the release of this cartoon, Tex Avery will be at M-G-M. There he will make the body of cartoons most consider his best work. Few of his later Warner Brothers cartoons anticipate the vibe of his M-G-M work quite like this one.


Comparisons are unavoidable to the later work, as Avery sorta-remade this cartoon in 1944 as:

We're going to study the earlier work on its own merits today.

Thugs With Dirty Mugs: An Avery Masterpiece-- And a Staggering Strangulation of the Gangster Genre

Release date: 5/6/1939 (according to BCDb)
DVD-Blu-Ray Availability: Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol. Three (WHV)

You may view this cartoon HERE. (Warning--the volume control on Critical Commons videos is hidden--it's on the right side of the screen. It only appears if your mouse/finger lingers over it. Take a moment to find the volume slider:this one is LOUD!)

A stellar example of what the Fred Avery unit could produce, when inspiration and skill intersected, this cartoon is one of the director's early masterpieces. It's also a study in economy, with sequences that avoid animation and thus allow its new footage to shine with special effects and expressive, elaborate draftsmanship.

A parody of Warner Brothers' genre-defining gangster and crime movies--a staple of the late-Depression movie-going experience--was a solid idea. By spring of 1939, audiences had viewed over a decade's worth of talkie crime movies. Warners had a big one coming in the fall of 1939--The Roaring Twenties, which co-starred established James Cagney and brink-of-stardom Humphrey Bogart.

Some of these films, like Rouben Mamoulian's City Streets and Edward L. Cahn's Afraid To Talk, are impressive, moody and still of great interest. Much of the Warners/First National efforts are solid entertainments, although given to formula by the middle of the 1930s.

Long story short: this genre demanded a meta-spoof, and Avery gave it to his audience. From music to montage to atmosphere, Thugs With Dirty Mugs is both an effective satire of the gangster film and a formal romp through the biases of Hollywood movie-making.

As would a typical WB picture, we begin with "credits" that show the main characters, culled from apropos footage seen again later in the film. Other cartoons had done this gag, including Avery's, but the device sets up a delicious anticipation--and leaves no doubts as to its coming attractions:*

The screen shots are from the gorgeous restored version seen on the second disc of Warner Home Video's Looney Tunes Golden Collection III. The vibrancy of these restorations makes the viewer wish all the important early Avery cartoons had been given this royal treatment.