Welcome
to the first Stomp
Tokyo roundtable and my own humble
contribution to the life and times of
Chuck Jones.
Enjoy!
| The
Man, a Few Myths |
| and
a Legendary Body of Work |
When
I first heard that Chuck Jones had passed
away, it saddened me to no end. The last
of the Warner Big Four had gone on to that
great Termite Terrace in the sky. It was
Jones, along with Tex Avery, Bob Clampett
and Friz Freleng, who in a relatively
short amount of time, starting in the late
'40s and running through the 1950s,
produced a ton of animated shorts and
cartoons that were the funniest damn
things ever put on film -- especially
when they’re left alone and uncensored. (AND
DON’T GET ME STARTED ON CENSORING
CARTOON VIOLENCE!) I,
like a lot of you, was brought up on these
old cartoons featuring the wild antics of
Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig
and the rest of the Loony Tunes that kept
us in stitches for years -- no matter how
many times we saw that same anvil fall on
Elmer Fudd’s head, or Daffy’s bill
getting blown off again and again.
While
watching
these cartoons I always saw the
director’s names in the credits but had
the bad habit of lumping them all
together. But as I got older, I began to
distinguish their different styles and
could begin to tell who directed them just
by watching. Avery had his wild takes and
eye-popping antics, while Clampett had a
knack for the surreal and slapstick, and
Freleng was more partial to musicals and
explosions, but what always set Jones
apart from the others was his knack for
characterization and something you don’t
think of when you think of Looney Tunes --
subtlety.
Sure
his cartoons had the anarchy, slapstick
and violence, but it is the characters
that are forever etched in my memory and
what endear them to me. When I dug out a
tape of The Fifty Greatest Cartoons of
All Time (as
compiled by the Cartoon Network)
and watched them again recently, I
noticed that six of the top ten were
directed by Jones -- and four of the top
five. Intrigued, I decided to do a little
research and that's when I finally put it
all together: The man, his characters and
his cartoons, and was floored by their sum
total. And I never realized it, but almost
all of my favorite and most remembered
Warner cartoons can be attributed to Chuck
Jones.
Jones
broke into animation around 1931 as a cel
washer. (He
cleaned and scraped old ink of the
animation cells so they could be reused.)
Moving up the animation ladder, he got a
job directing for Leon Schlesinger whose
studio made cartoons for Warner Bros.
During World War II, the animator did his
part pitching in on a series of Private
Snafu shorts for the department of
defense. (A
few of the shorts were written by Dr.
Seuss himself -- Theodore Geisel.) Eventually,
Schlesinger sold his studio to Warners and
the operation moved on to the Warner lot,
settling into what the animators dubbed Termite
Terrace. Jones, along with Bob
Clampett, another newcomer, was assigned
to Tex Avery’s department, and along
with Freleng shaped and defined the Warner
style and made household names out of Bugs
Bunny, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. And for a
period of about 15 years, America went
through a golden age of animation.
But
all good things must come to an end. As
Jones, Clampett and Avery moved on to
rival studios or independent projects,
Warner’s shut down their animation
department in 1962.
(Another victim of studio cutbacks in the
'60s as they combated a new thing called
television.)
Freleng tried to keep the studio together
as an independent company, and Warner’s
quickly realized their mistake and started
making cartoons again, but the magic was
gone.
Jones
moved on to MGM and tried his hand at Tom
& Jerry cartoons.
I’m not the biggest fan of his work
during this period, but that can be
attributed to not liking Tom &
Jerry no matter who’s directing them.
The exception, of course, was The
Dot and the Line
for which he won an Academy Award. He also
teamed up with Dr. Seuss again for the
holiday staple How
the Grinch Stole Christmas,
but these were notable exceptions. Jones
eventually started playing with his old
characters again, but just couldn’t
quite recapture the biting edge that made
them so hilarious. The cartoons were
watered down and pale imitations of what
came before -- and frankly, some of his
character redesigns stunk.
A
nice piece of Jones trivia is that
during his career he worked for all the
big animations studios at one time or
another: Warners, Disney, MGM and the
Walter Lantz studios.
Okay,
now that I probably made you mad with
those comments, I’ll keep going. Not all
of Jones’ classic cartoons work for me
either. I don’t care for Pepe le Pew,
and if you’ve seen one Road Runner
cartoon, you’ve seen them all.
There
was also some grumbling that Jones was
getting (and
some say claiming)
too much credit for what went on at
Termite Terrace those many years ago. And
it’s been suggested for years that there
was a less then friendly feud between
Clampett and Jones, and this caused
Clampett to leave Warners first. I don’t
necessarily agree with that accusation,
it’s just that Jones outlived his
contemporaries (Avery
died in 1980, Clampett in ‘84 and
Freleng in ‘94.)
In this era of 24-hour cartoon networks,
nostalgia-iconography, and lionizing what
we enjoyed so much in childhood (and
in this case, deservedly so)
Jones was the only one left to take a bow.
But
it is depressing when you think about it;
that most of our favorite Warner Cartoons
are more than 50-years old. With the
possible exception of Jay Ward’s Rocky
and Bullwinkle, nothing has even come
close to matching the longevity, anarchy,
hilarity and biting genius that went on in
that studio.
And
that, my friends, is just sad.
| His
Cartoons and Characters |
| (And
Watch Out for the Falling Anvils...) |
Chuck
Jones made some great cartoons with Bugs,
Daffy and Porky Pig like The Scarlet
Pumpernickel with all its cameos, and Rabbit
Seasoning where Elmer Fudd, despite
some pronoun trouble, must decide on
whether to shoot Daffy now (fire!)
or later (Shoot
me now! Shoot me now!) Another
favorite of mine is Rocket Squad.
That’s the one where Daffy and Porky do
a Dragnet spoof with a sci-fi
twist. Duck Dodgers, Hair
Raising Hair, and What’s Opera
Doc -- the list could go on and on.
But his best, and arguable one of the
greatest cartoons of all time, was Duck
Amuck.
Starring
Daffy Duck in what appears to be a
swashbuckling epic, but the animator
doesn’t want to cooperate. As things go
awry, Daffy breaks down the fourth wall
and talks to the animator who proceeds to
torment him incessantly by sabotaging the
backgrounds, soundtrack and props. Daffy
tries to adapt to the new situations but
can’t keep up. Run through the wringer
and raked over the coals with a hideous
makeover, the duck keeps on trying:
Daffy
tries to hula dance in the arctic, is
dropped in the drink, faces a doppelganger,
and violently fights off a fade to black.
When he’s finally pushed past the
breaking point, the animator puts him in
an airplane. Daffy is excited until a
mountain range magically springs up in his
path. As he bails out, the animator
changes his parachute into an anvil -- and
he plummets out of frame and lands with
clanging thud. Dazed and confused, he
bangs on the anvil with a hammer while
singing "Under the Chestnut
Tree." The artist still isn’t
done with him and changes the anvil to a
mortar shell. Daffy bangs away until it
explodes. When
duck recovers and demands to know who is
responsible for this, the camera zooms out
revealing that the tormenting animator is
a certain rascally rabbit.
It
was Jones who turned Daffy Duck from a
cackling lunatic to the greedy, paranoid
duck he is today, and this cartoon
completed the conversion. Making the
cartoon up as they went along, Jones
started with the first scene and hit upon
the idea of what would happen if the
character ran out of background. You
can see Jones was already starting to
experiment with sound effects and
animation beyond the norm. I get the
biggest kick when Daffy strums that guitar
and it sounds like a machine gun. When
Daffy tries it again, he gets even more
bizarre results. Things get so surreal
Daffy is afraid to speak, terrified by
what might come out of his mouth. Now, even
though he is an animated duck, Daffy’s performance
is incredible, and if an animated
character can be brilliant, then he is
brilliant here. It is a testament to these
cartoons and their creators that we forget
that they are cartoon characters.
These characters are so human with their
fallibility and eccentricities, something
Disney just couldn’t quite grasp, that
makes them so great because we can
identify with them. And Daffy is the
character that most people identify with
-- with
the disaster prone Coyote probably coming
in second.
His aspirations don’t match his talent,
but he keeps trying. He gets frustrated
and gives in to fits of temper when things
don’t go his way. He is decevious,
cowardly and more concerned with wealth
and fame than his own well being. He is
the most human.
But
Jones didn’t need to rely on the
well-known characters for success and came
up with plenty of his own. The
schizophrenic singing frog in One
Froggy Evening was his creation (and
he had nothing to do with it becoming a
pitch man-er-frog for the WB.)
He also gave us Marvin the Martian, Claude
the Cat, the hugging and squeezing
Abominable Bombidable and Gossamer -- the
shaggy, tennis-shoe wearing monster. In
fact, most of my favorite Warner Cartoons
have nothing to with the Warner staples. (And
Bugs Bunny is remarkably absent from my
top ten except for
Rabbit Seasoning and
several cameos.) To keep this thing
relatively short, I'll narrow it down to
my top three:
Coming
in at number three in the countdown are
the two shorts featuring the little known
Ralphie Phillips. Ralph is a young boy
whose imagination had the habit of running
away with him, and Ralph would get so lost
in these daydreams that he would actually
start to act them out -- until someone
snapped him out of it, usually leaving him
in a very embarrassing situation.
In
From A to Z-z-z-z, Ralph (voiced
by Dick Beals) is stuck in school
and longs to be anywhere else. While the
other students drone out their
multiplication tables, Ralph drifts off.
When he’s called to the board to solve a
problem, he assimilates into the
chalkboard and seizes the penmanship
letters and turns them into secret weapons
to deal with the problem, literally, until
his teacher (voiced by Bea
Benadret) snaps him out of it. The
day continues and Ralph has to fight
through a batch of red Indians to deliver
a note for the teacher, save a sunken Navy
sub while fighting off a saber-toothed
tiger shark, and teaches the heavyweight
champion of the world a thing or two in
the boxing ring. As he wins the bout and
the bell rings, the teacher snaps him out
of it again. The bell was really the
recess bell, and when Ralph heads outside,
he morphs one more time into MacArthur
vowing that "I shall return."
In
Boyhood Dayze, Ralph is stuck at
home in his room, but the four walls
can’t hold him. Soon, he’s off to the
jungles to fight tigers, or facing
intrigue in the strangest of places. Despite
his injuries, he saves the world from
alien invasion in his trusty rocket ship.
Each adventure ends with him waking up
tangled in his covers. Then a real menace
opens the door, but it’s only dad saying
he can go outside and play now.
Ralph’s
cartoons can be attributed to the
popularity of Walter Mitty, a character
from James Thurber’s The
Secret Life of Walter Mitty,
and subject of a pretty funny movie
starring Danny Kaye. Mitty, an older man
whose life isn’t very exciting, lets his
imagination run away with him, too,
putting him in all kinds of outlandish
situations where he always got to play the
hero. Ralph’s fantasies aren’t any
different. He is brave and fearless and
not the shy and clumsy boy he is in real
life. The animation is wild and over the
top, trying to match the unlimited
boundaries of a young boy’s imagination.
And there are some great subtle touches
here. I get a kick out of how Ralph
corrects the Navy Captain’s grammar, but
corrects it wrong. As I watch them today,
all I can think of is how much I miss Bill
Watterson’s wonderful and dead on
depiction of boyhood imaginations running
amok in Calvin and Hobbes. That
comic was so funny because it was so true.
Calvin was a kid who acted like a kid --
not a little adult. He couldn’t solve
word problems, but could tell you that an
Allosaurous lived during the Jurassic and
not the Triassic period of dinosaurs. And
I really miss that kid and his tiger pal. (Who's
up for a game of Calvinball?)
Coming
in at number two in our countdown is the
riotous adventures of the highly
dysfunctional Three Bears Clan --
Pa (short
in stature, and a shorter fuse on his
temper),
Ma (always
doting, always oblivious)
and Baby Junior (big
in stature, but short on brains.) The
trio made their debut in Bugs Bunny and
the Three Bears. Their house devoid of
food, Pa (voiced by Billy Bletcher)
hits upon the idea of re-enacting the
story of Goldilocks to lure her
into the house so they’ll have something
to eat. Famished, they put a rush job on
the porridge bit and evacuate the premises
so Goldilocks will show up. When
Bugs shows up instead, and realizes the
bears intentions, he plays along and has
some fun. Pa’s attempts to get the
rabbit in the cooking pot are sabotaged by
the incompetent, but well meaning Junior (voiced
by Stan Freeberg). Meanwhile, Ma (voiced
by Benadret) has swooned for the
rabbit and the fairy tale quickly spins
out of control.
The
trio returns in What’s Brewin', Bruin.
Winter has arrived and they try to settle
in to hibernate. In a perfect example of
the slow burn, Pa can’t sleep due to his
family and ambient noises. As his temper
tantrum bubbles to a boil, he finally
breaks but by the time he gets everything
tied down and sealed up Spring has sprung
until his rage scares it away. Next
came the Bee-Deviled Bear. With
their stores of honey depleted, Pa enlists
Junior’s help and they try to retrieve
some honey from a hive of bees -- with the
expected disastrous results. The kicker
comes when Ma reveals they have a huge
stash of honey hidden away in the
cupboards. I tell you, Pa Bear can’t
win.
In
Bear Feat, Pa reads an
advertisement that the Mingling Bros.
Circus is looking for a new bear act.
Junior thinks it’s a great idea, and for
the rest of the short tries to follow
Pa’s instructions for different acts
that usually result in grievous bodily
harm for Pa. He’s smushed, crushed and
flung through the air -- and that’s only
when Junior tries to save him. Now a mass
of bandages and bruises, Ma points out to
Pa that the newspaper ad is dated 1928. The
last short is the best: A Bear For
Punishment sees more grief dumped on
Pa as Ma and Junior celebrate father’s
day. See Ma doing a hilarious song and
dance routine. See Junior recite a poem
dedicated to his father after accidentally
filling his pipe with gunpowder. When the
short ends with a wild patriotic musical
number dedicated to father’s all over
the country, you'll be standing up and
cheering.
When
I talk about great characters -- this is
what I’m talking about. The Three
Bears are the perfect blend of
realized characters on paper matched
perfectly with voice actors. Bletcher’s
rage, Freeberg’s dopey simpleton and
Benadret’s nagging drawl couldn’t fit
the characters any better. (And
I do a dead on Baby Junior impersonation.)
You
don’t see these cartoons as much as you
used to because of all the implied family
violence. Pa loses his temper a lot with
his wife and kid, and does take a few
swings at them, but he usually misses
doing more damage to himself. I remind
everyone that these shorts were made in
the '50s. So when older people tell you
family life was better in the good old
days, don’t believe them.
Which
brings me to my favorite cartoon of all
time, Feed The Kitty.
The
cartoon opens with a large bulldog finding
a little kitten in an alley. When the dog
barks ferociously at it, the kitten is
oblivious to the danger and purrs and rubs
lovingly up to the dog. Completely
disarmed, the dog watches as the kitten
crawls up onto his back and settles in for
a nap. He takes a closer look and the
kitten gives him a quick smooch on the
nose. The brutish dog is smitten and his
heart melts. Tucking the kitten in with
his fur, he takes her home, walking gently
so not to wake her up. When
he gets home, his mistress confronts him
and scolds Marc Anthony for all the junk
he’s been dragging into the house, and
warns that if he brings in one more thing
he’s in deep trouble. Mayhem ensues as
he tries to hide his precious kitten from
her. Completely oblivious to the chaos she
is causing, Marc Anthony tries to
discipline the kitten but can’t quite
get his point across.
As
the cartoon speeds to the climax, the
kitten accidentally falls into a bowl of
cookie batter. Marc Anthony tries
desperately to save her from the blender
but his antics only get him kicked
outside. Where he watches in horror
through a window as the batter is blended,
rolled out flat and punched and perforated
with a cookie-cutter. Breaking down into
uncontrollable sobs, he starts bawling...Time
passes, but he’s still blubbering when
his mistress lets him back inside. She
tries to cheer him up by giving him a
cookie. A kitten shaped cookie. This
starts the waterworks again and he gently
places the cookie on his back just like
the real kitten, and breaks down sobbing
again. Then, too his joy, the real kitten
appears (she
bailed out of the batter bowl before the
blender was turned on.)
He hugs and squeezes and showers her with
kisses, but is caught red-handed. The dog
begs to keep his kitty and the mistress
relents only after he promises to take
care of her and keep it out of mischief. Marc
Anthony swears to this, and begins to
scold the kitten again by shaking his
finger at her -- but the kitty thinks
he’s playing. Anthony hugs his little
friend, and then the kitten crawls on to
his back, curls up and goes back to sleep.
Feed
the Kitty brings me to tears every
time I watch it -- it strikes me that
funny. Of course, it hits a little too
close to home. I too found a little black
kitten and brought her home. She too was
oblivious to the mayhem and destruction
she was causing, but then she would jump
in my lap and start purring like a
chainsaw, then head butt me, all would be
forgiven. What
gets me here is the feeling and pathos
that Marc Anthony is able to generate and
convey in this short. His mugging, wincing
and cringing are first rate examples that
cartoons can indeed emote with the best
actors and actresses. When he thinks
he’s watching the gruesome death of his
kitten, the resulting breakdown will have
you laughing -- but will also break your
heart (even
though we know the kitten is okay.)
We are also moved by his sheer joy when he
finds that the kitten is alive.
Most
of Chuck Jones' cartoons are that funny,
but let’s be fair, he had a lot of help.
Credit must be given to his right hand
man, writer Michael Maltese. A lot of the
gags can be credited to him. Credit must
also be given to the wonderful voice
talents of Mel Blanc and those mentioned
already. People also tend to overlook the
set and background designs of Maurice
Noble and countless others. And we can’t
forget the most forgotten ingredient to
the success of all Warner Cartoons -- the
musical stylings of composer Carl Stalling.
But
it was Chuck’s guiding hand that made
these animated character's more human, and
made these cartoons classics.
I
really do hope that there is a Termite
Terrace in heaven, and Chuck, Tex,
Bob, Friz and Mel have reunited, are
running amok, and keeping everybody in
stitches.
Unfortunately,
for us back on Earth, that IS all folks.
|
