Earlier this month, our friends at Wonders in the Dark set out to honor one of their own–the dearly departed Allan Fish–with an online film festival, for which I was sincerely honored to be invited to participate. I did not know Allan, outside of his online presence, but I nonetheless was in awe of him–of…
It’s (finally) starting to get chilly down here in the South, and that turns our thoughts to … penguins. Okay, not really, but for the purposes of this week’s edition of Saturday Morning Cartoons, let’s just say that’s true as we present you with The Legend of Rockabye Point, featuring the cutest penguin ever. The…
Today we present to you a brief look at the 1947 one-off cartoon short King-Size Canary, an unrelenting bit of frenzied absurdity that may very well be Tex Avery’s masterpiece. King-Size Canary takes all of the typical Avery hallmarks and elevates them to the next insane level. Everything in the cartoon builds continuously, with one uproarious bit after…
“Hello, all you happy people. You know what? I’m the hero.” In the 1943 animated short Dumb-Hounded, Tex Avery debuted a new character, a laconic, quick-witted, slow-talking hound dog. Originally dubbed “Happy Hound” (though this is never explicitly mentioned onscreen), the dog spends the entire cartoon tracking down a wolf who has escaped from jail,…
The 1943 animated short Red Hot Riding Hood begins innocently enough: the insipid narration of an unseen storyteller introduces us to little Red, her sweet grandma, and the big, bad wolf who’s stalking her through the forest. But before the tale can get underway, the characters rebel. The Wolf, breaking the fourth wall, complains to…
When Tex Avery moved from Warner Bros. to MGM in 1941, he announced his arrival with a timely parody that not only took on current world events, but also outright challenged the predominant Walt Disney model of animation. Blitz Wolf, released on August 22, 1942, was not the first cartoon that Avery directed for his…
On July 27, 1940, an unassuming gray rabbit was born in Brooklyn. And from those humble beginnings, he would go on to become one of the most famous anthropomorphic animals to ever grace the silver screen, a legend on par with longtime rodent rival Mickey Mouse. Bane to clumsy hunters, diminutive mustachioed criminals, and greedily…
When Tex Avery began directing animated shorts at Warner Bros. in 1935, he jumped headlong into a demanding production schedule. Though Avery’s was not the only unit producing cartoons for the Warner studio–two other units were headed by Jack King and Ben “Bugs” Hardaway (at least until the return of Friz Freleng, who had defected…
True Classics 