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.

The Sneezing Weasel: Takin' Care of Business, Cartoon-Style

RELEASE DATE: March 12, 1938 (according to the Big Cartoon Database)
DVD/BLU-RAY AVAILABILITY:
none at present

You can watch this cartoon  HERE. Enjoy!


1938 is the year Warner Brothers' cartoons begin to feel like Warner Brothers cartoons. All the key players were present--including some who would depart (Friz Freleng, Frank Tashlin) then return in stronger form.

In the meantime, cartoons had to be made, and a yearly schedule fulfilled. Our hero, Fred "Tex" Avery, continues his pattern of a breakthrough cartoon followed by several misfires/near misses. The Sneezing Weasel is one of those also-rans: a warehouse for half-developed concepts that its creator would refine, uplift and transcend in his more acclaimed M-G-M period.

The tentative feel of the mid-1930s Warner cartoons is almost gone. In its place is a brash, cheerful strut. This confidence was sufficient to create the illusion of entertainment, regardless of the content and quality of an individual cartoon. In this same manner, the live-action Warner features bluffed their way into audience's hearts, masking weak narratives and wafer-thin characters with a hearty howzitgoin, mac?

Still coasting on the buzz of Little Red Walking Hood, Avery fashions another minor attack on the wishy-washy cartoons of the day. This film's storyline could have been a Hugh Harman/Rudolph Ising M-G-M animated melodrama. It follows a tiresome cookie-cutter narrative that all the cartoon studios, on both coasts, told to sickening excess in the last half of the decade.

Avery isn't phoning it in here, but he is subsumed by the very weakness he satirizes.

Anyhow, he starts with a reminder that this is NOT a Walt Disney production: 

Egghead Rides Again: A Meh Cartoon Enlivened by Irvin [sic] Spence Animation

RELEASE DATE:
7/17/1937 (according to the Big Cartoon Database; IMDb claims a 11/29/1937 release date)

DVD/BLU-RAY AVAILABILITY:
Kid Galahad DVD (part of WHV's Gangsters Collection, v.4)

You can view a mid-1990s Turner print of this cartoon HERE.

The Avery pattern of major film/minor effort rides again! After the game-changing meta-slap of Uncle Tom's Bungalow, this cartoon seems tame and unexceptional. Cheerful, yes. Mildly amusing, for certain. But it's unworthy of Avery and his unit.

The chief joy of Egghead Rides Again is Irv Spence's charming, eccentric animation. His work both looks back and ahead. His drawing style is redolent of the spiky, kinetic look of Ub Iwerks' mid-1930s cartoons. The apparent influence of Grim Natwick informs Spence's way of drawing.