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THE DOVER BOYS
Rating: 6/7
Hooray! Just when you thought he'd have to wash cels again, Chuck Jones brings out his first major classic. I don't know what influenced Chuck but he must have gone to some very bizarre sources to obtain his ideas for this feast of angular shapes and smear animation. The main characters (the Dover Boys themselves and Doris Standpipe) are flat rather than curvy, predicting the future of animation (i.e. UPA and Hanna-Barberra). But let's not blame him for limited animation - without this cartoon the precedent might never have been set and the demise of animation might have been a more sudden, more terrifying process.
The animation here is only limited by direct expression, rather than cost cutting. Smear animation, where the characters glide from one end to another in a blurry motion, make the uptight movements extremely giddy. There's also plenty of animation where only one or two significant parts of the character are actually moving (re: the boys biking) and plenty of full animation where required.
The plot is supposed to be a take on one of those Gay 90's dime novels (the 1890's stupid) which means the standard boy/girl/villian conflict, only with Dan Backslide and his opening scene where Mel Blanc cries in a whiney, crunchy tone (think Yosemitie Sam without the accent crossed with the WB version of Hitler) summing up Dan's personality in a monologue interrupted with a few literal animations of Dan's self-admitted personality quirks (He says the Dover Boys drive him to drink, then he dashes to the barstool and lushes away). And it's just so funny when he goes, "I HATE TOM! I HATE DICK! I HATE LARRY!" clenching his fists and lowering his back with each yelping.
The story development after that takes every technique I've described (Smear animation, well-timed meanderings) and expands upon or uses them in other ways. It's not just stylization and smear animation that make this stuff great, it's also the crazy story development (When the Dover Boys witness Doris' abduction, they do anything besides what you'd expect, and the plot twists before you learn their sluggishness only makes it funnier) and the little contrasts (Doris doesn't look like she needs help, despite her screaming). The snide sense of humor makes it a winner.
Well, mostly a winner. I would give Dover Boys a higher rating but it feels like a mad scientists' experiment rather than a warm, heartfelt experience. Also, it really annoys me when Tom goes, "Hey, we're getting in a rut!" It's almost on par with the classic, "There's an unwritten law that when a cartoon character steps off a cliff..." in how a bit of useless dialogue can ruin a good gag.
*MY FAVORITE DUCK*
Rating: 7/7
My favorite Chuck Jones cartoon! Not an obvious choice. I’m not offering this dissenting opinion just to look cool. This is how I really feel.
I’m under the impression that The Dover Boys is the only 1940's Chuck Jones cartoon anyone cares about. For some reason, everybody seems to forget that Chuck did some very nice cartoons well before Scarlet Pumpernickel or anything like that. Like this one. Maybe there’s an undiscovered enclave of Jones fans who agree with me.
I can understand why this gem is overlooked. No Maurice Nobel and Phillip DeGuard backgrounds. No pretentious stuff like What’s Opera Doc?. No interactive fourth wall breaking like in Duck Amuck. But even in the 40’s, Chuck Jones showed the same aesthetic sense he showed in his classic period (not to mention Michael Maltese is on board as always). Even now he's adept at playing his character's personality-filled movements off big terrarium-like environments. I watch this cartoon and recognize the same tricks he’s pulled off time and time again in all those 50’s cartoons everyone praises so much, yet he’s done it here first and better.
That’s not to say My Favorite Duck utterly destroys every Chuck Jones effort that comes after. Through the years there've been gags, ideas, and minor touches that surpass individual aspects of MFD, but on the whole it's a better developed cartoon. Every time I watch it I go frigging mad with laughter. I can’t even watch What’s Opera Doc? three times in a one week period without getting a little bored.
The premise of MFD isn’t anything special. No Opera, no self-conscious show-biz, no outer space nonsense, it’s just antagonizing slapstick between Porky and Daffy. Although Chuck Jones clearly had his own inimitable style, he did borrow some things from Tex Avery and Bob Clampett. Diving into the sky from under the water sounds like a gag Tex Avery would formulate. But Avery would handle it by hammering out little build-up tricks and hoping all the surrounding gags pile together to create the proper effect. Chuck Jones glides his victim through an elaborate environment, gives him time to realize he’s up in the air, then has him flash a very pathetic facial expression before falling into the water.
Facial expressions, such as Daffy’s straight-edged look of surprise and fear as he backs away from Porky’s gun (Bob Clampett must have been proud of that angle when he saw the film), and Porky’s angry glace at the audience during the tent sequence (with Jones’ patented cutesy big black eyes) add some personality to the gags they support. I can imagine Bob Camp taking inspiration from Chuck Jones, but Bob Camp elevated the use of facial expressions by making them a gag's main draw, sometimes even the whole gag. Chuck doesn’t rely on striking facial poses nearly as often and even then they're only used for icing the gags.
The scenery is mainly a forest/lake setting, but most of the land action takes place in open plains. Either way, the shrubbery is colored very oddly with sugary-sprinkled textures that remind me of gumdrops. Very tasty. Even the ordinary colored objects contrast the unnatural colors well enough. No, it’s not the uncanny genius of the Nobel/DeGuard environments, but it’s still attractive and works very well for Chuck’s gag mechanics.
Gags and their build-up sequences are mainly confined to one scene, but some build-up material spills over into further scenes to add effectiveness to later gags (the scene where Porky blows up the tree smacks of the diving scene in this way). Daffy’s obnoxious hindering of Porky’s tent pitching is funny enough, but throw on these wide-spread movements of Porky and Daffy throughout the same shot and we get hilarity. Then throw on Porky’s inopportune location for pitching his tent (while Daffy watches on), and his eventual realization of how bad his location is, and you have the culmination of one of the most delicately built-up gags ever witnessed in a cartoon. That’s one trick Chuck liked to pull off. He never made a complex gag piece itself together all at once, do its thing, then buzz off, like Robert Clampett, and he never took little gags, splice them together, and machine gun them at you like Tex Avery. Instead he’d build a little gag to begin with, and then devoted time to elaborate upon it until things are out of control. Which works wonders here.
One of the best closing gags I ever did see is to be found in My Favorite Duck. Let’s just say Chuck used an unusual technique he blatantly recycled for a later cartoon everyone deifies. The sequence involves a very funny mispronunciation gag, and ends with proof he’s never had any love for Daffy. He always let Daffy have it in the end, but here he punishes Daffy for being his usual zany self, even if he’s a far cry from the jerk of the 50’s.
In a couple of places, the animation really kicks. After the gag where Daffy swims up to Porky singing along in a mocking way (ripped off from Clampett’s Wacky Wabbit, but still effective), Jones employed his “woo-hoo” shtick better than Avery ever did, with intricate animation of the duck gliding on water. Just look at all the directions he speeds around within that one background frame. And on the reprise of the gag, the zaniness is stretched even tighter. The rest of the animation isn’t so memorable, save Daffy’s spinning fists at the closing gag and Porky’s facial posing in a few spots.
I love Chuck’s use of Daffy on top of everything else. He’s antagonistic, and a bit of an asshole, but not the selfish jerk Jones would make him in the 50’s. Think Avery’s Daffy combined with Clampett’s Daffy, who is zany, but also amicable. And Porky? He’s his usual unassuming stuttering self.
I’ll have to explain why this only gets the second highest rating. When I watch a classic John K or Bob Clampett cartoon, there's always a new detail to discover, a new angle for me to look at things, and a newly shuffled order in which the gags make me laugh. Not only that, but these two can resonate with me in other ways besides laughter. You can watch MFD over and over again to study exactly what Chuck is doing, but you’ll get the same out of it every time. But it is totally consistent all the way through, perfectly developed, and never gets boring even on the 357th viewing. So a 14 seems like the best score to give out.
I still can’t believe this one is so overlooked. All these lengthy lists of favorite Chuck Jones cartoons and not a single one mentions MFD. Everything Jones has done in this cartoon was spread out and elaborated for his 50’s material, but here it’s all neatly compressed for your viewing pleasure. If you don’t need to be overwhelmed by some elaborate gimmick, you’ll wanna find this cartoon – tape it off the TV, buy the Golden Age of Looney Tunes LD boxset, find some random VHS - and let Chuck’s genius rush over you. There’s nothing quite so overwhelming as genius planning, and this one’s got it in spades.
CASE OF THE MISSING HARE
Rating: 5/7
Chuck gets a better grip on Bugs, giving him one of his first arrogant opponents, a magician who defiles his home and insults him with a pie, forcing Bugs to wreak vengence in the name of dignity. Bugs invades his act and ruins his hat-pulling trick, dresses up like a sailor boy and sabotages his sword trick, and baits him all over the stage with gravity-defying movements. At one point they get into a blurry swordfight which Bugs abandons and goes over to the balcony to cheer on his opponent swiping himself. As usual, kolerful backgroundz.
TO DUCK OR NOT TO DUCK
Rating: 5/7
A silhouette of a realistic hunter welcomes us to this gloomy setting where Daffy does ground-based leg movements in the air like tip-toeing and miming a bike ride and making wise-cracks about hunters. He probably doesn't believe his own pathos when confronting Elmer and swiping his clothes but it's still a nice anti-hunting rant the cartoonists themselves probably didn't take seriously (when has there ever been a vegetarian cartoonist?).
Soon after Daffy pushes Elmer into well...into a game. It doesn't last very long, quite frankly, never goes beyond the establishing of the rules, but there's some funny scenes where Laramore (Elmer's dog) is booed off the bench and Daffy assaults Elmer while explaining the rules. Mel Blanc does his best to imitate Tex Avery's laugh...well, he tried.
FLOP GOES THE WEASEL
Rating: 5/7
A black chicken goes out to get a worm for her expected baby while he's abducted by a weasel, who proceeds to fool the chick by imitating his accent and wearing a bandanna. Bizarre moments like the chick sending morse code while in the egg and the weasel emerging from a rolling rug caught up in his stuff provide a few snickers, but it's more fun to watch than funny. The stylized colors are fun to look at and the weasel's animation has some expressive extra shots of motion which is above average for early Jones animation, which was usually just fluid.
SUPER RABBIT
Rating: 4/7
Life's too short, and there are too many good cartoons for me to watch this any more. To be honest, I think Chuck might have been stoned when he decided to parody Captain Marvel with Bugs Bunny (if you don't know who Captain Marvel is, he's the first honest-to-goodness Doctor Occult rip-off). Bugs' entry into Texas and all gags revolving around Cottontail Smith's hatred of rabbits are the only aspects of the cartoon I enjoy watching. The rest of the gags are among Bugs' lamest attempts to undermine the intelligence of his opponents (leading them in a cheer which comes awkwardly out of left-field) and well, his superpowers. It was something different, but it didn't work.
THE UNBEARABLE BEAR
Rating: 6/7
The other big achievment of Chuck Jones' early career. I'm easily impressed when more than three characters are satisfactorily developed over the course of seven minutes (see Fair and Wormer and The Shell Shocked Egg) but Unbearable Bear develops four characters outstandingly and constantly rolls out the gags to keep each one interacting with the others once their roles are established.
The burglar fox - Bad British accent, conniving towards anyone naive, and cowering in the face of adversity. The tipsy bear cop - Bumbling and stupid, highly vigilant once he sobers up. Sniffles - Tries to help everyone to their detriment, blabbers non-stop asking questions about his own answers. Mrs. O'Malley - Doesn't do much except sleepwalk (and slide down the handrail) but her presences adds to the tension as her husband has to avoid waking her later on.
The gags range from merely funny animation such as the cop stumbling in the house and removing his clothes in a drunken stupor to unexpected actions like Sniffles' reckless and overzealous archery assault to sarcasm when the cop passes by the fox to the sleep-walking bear's giant red eye as she glares at her husband. The gags are so varied I've only laughed at things for the first time on the nth viewing, like the mere sight of the Mrs. dragging the fox out to the clothes line.
The obligatory chase scene is worth a look because it ends up more like a game of cat and mouse with the cop finding his wife instead of his target, making it more tense, and since they're running through a house, there are these claustraphobic scenes where they run around the same wall a zillion times and into the next gag. Like Chuck's early cartoons the characters look like gelatin and although many of the actions are funny, the animation isn't head-splitting, but you can count on lots of dreary negative space from John McGrew who illustrated the house in demon red for the walls and eerie blackness for the outdoors. And though you may not realize it there's enough realistic colors in there to make it believable.
It may not have the polish of Chuck's later cartoons but it's not to be forgotten.
THE ARISTO CAT
Rating: 6/7
John McGrew is all over this one, giving us such eye candy as the blue wavy patterns and tiles so distorted they point every which way as the cat panics through the mansion. The light pastel hues, Roman arches, endless bookshelves and white negative space make this one of the eeriest cartoon settings, almost psychedelic except with too much control to suggest Jones and McGrew were taking LSD. Not only are McGrew’s backgrounds the dominant feature, this is the only cartoon I know of where the plot, gags, and characters are well-developed and still take a backseat to the backgrounds. Imagine watching Stimpy’s Invention for, above all else, the pukey swirl art from the lab scene where Stimpy’s wearing goggles.
You could easily argue that the backgrounds are a distraction, but that’s what so great – Once you get past the endless rows of pastel, the other features turn out to be excellent, and there’re other innovations besides the backgrounds. It may be the first psychodrama in animation – Although the camel from Porky in Egypt might be the first time the animation goes raving nuts along with the character, this takes you through a well-planned psychological breakdown, even if only for a few scenes.
It also introduces two new mice, Hubie and Bertie, who are unlike any one else up to this point. The polar opposite of Sniffles, Hu and Boid are cynical, manipulative, and sadistic, and they exploit any situation to their advantage, using the cat’s naiveté for their own amusement and sending him to his death at the hands of a bulldog (With a funny gag where the cat and dog compare mouth sizes). Of course this is the tip of the iceberg compared with what they do in Hypo-Chondri Cat.
Although Chuck expanded on Hu and Bertie, he never used this disconcerting combination of features again, and that alone makes it worth watching. The only reason I don’t rank it as an all time classic is that I’m not sure what direction it really wants to take – It just ditches the cat’s breakdown as soon as it picks up steam and it gets really funny at the end before stopping suddenly. Even though the ending is cliché, they managed to make up for it with a mind-splitting gag.
WACKIKI WABBIT
Rating: 5/7
A tour de force of John McGrew backgrounds at various angles (gotta love the wavy pattern). And the water rising and dropping behind the raft genuinely makes me seasick. Two guys stranded on a desert island want to eat Bugs Bunny, who distracts them with his cunning and tribal dance moves. The funniest scene has Bugs dangling a chicken cadaver over the two morons and taunting them from afar. For once it is Chuck who comes up with a gag Bob Clampett would reuse (in Old Grey Hare), Bugs switching places with the two dudes while wishing them goodbye.
FIN 'N' CATTY
Rating: 4/7
A basic conflict: Cat hates water, loves fish, fish loves water, hates cat. The cat prissily rushes to a paper towel every time he gets doused, urging him to think of new ways to get the fish and stay dry. The big visual gag is the cat sucking the fish from one bowel to another via a tube, taking the little fish castle and rocks with him, which is clever but falls short of Avery's casually going over-the-top, as do the various positions the cat scrunches his way into while caught in the fly paper. Indeed, the cartoon is very watchable since the calm scenes are balanced out with frenetic ones but the gags leave me flat. The absurd ending may win you over, though.
INKI AND THE MYNAH BIRD
Rating: 4/7
Another Inki cartoon, hooray. Refer to the Inki and the Lion review, although the lion is now taller, dumber looking, and not as gruff (in other words, more cartoony, much as I hate that term) but no less vicious. I should mention that his first encounter with Inki is full of delicately animated maneuvers and that the characters have a bizarre way of disappearing and reappearing...Just check out that dust cloud scene.
TOM TURK AND DAFFY
Rating: 6/7
Despite the fact that the Chuck we know and love hasn't arrived yet, this is another excellent outing. It may still look sludgy but Porky has some really pissed off rubbery faces, with one pupil overshadowing the other and little eyeballs eyeing Daffy intently, that look like the inspiration for Bob Camp. There's also a Turkey who comes close to acting like a Bob Clampett character with his simple monologue ("Hide me! Save me! I'm too young to die!").
Daffy's in the middle of building a snowman when he comes on begging for help, practically squashing him into the snow while Daffy's eyeballs bounce and rotate. He's determined to do the right thing but as Porky walks away, really far away, he's still asking questions about the side dishes for his turkey dinner in a tense interplay between close-ups of Daffy's devil-horned head and far away shots of Porky walking into the distance. Porky ends up chasing Daffy instead and what ensues is one of Chuck's best laid-out chase scenes.
They start by running up and down a succession of hills, a mesmerizing bit of animation. Snowballs hit Porky and Daffy's in one of them ready with a mallet. Frozen water hits Porky making a gong sound effect (Other scenes have a startled Daffy vibrating to an off-frame sound effect). Daffy freezes himself and gives Porky an massive shock. He plays toll keeper and tricks Porky into paying to cross the bridge, which leads to a massive frenzy of mountainous runs and metaphoric morphs. At the end, Daffy begs the Turkey for help, resulting in hyperactive replays of early scenes.
BUGS BUNNY AND THE THREE BEARS
Rating: 5/7
I saw the other Three Bears cartoons before I saw this one, and it is weird having them compete with Bugs for screen time. Chuck and crew made the most endearing personalities out of incognito fairy-tale bears, with good natured, unassuming "Ma", braindead "Junior", and grumpy "Pa". They are heavily underdeveloped compared to later cartoons (just see Ma's disgraceful behavior at the end) and their designs aren't quite finished, but they have their moments. Mainly when Junior irritates Pa.
Bugs' role is to take the place of Goldilocks so they can eat him, and they lure him in with carrot soup rather than porridge, a "clever" twist on the old fairy-tale (in other words, good friggin' thing they abandoned this set-up in later cartoons). Bugs himself doesn't do much other than flirt with Ma bear and some other double takes. The funniest moment is when he bellows for katchup.
THE WEAKLY REPORTER
Rating: 3/7
A Tex Avery-style documentary posing as a newsreel about the average American helping the war effort. Avery made such a cartoon look easier than it actually is. It's not just that the gags are topical; lots of topical gags are funny, like the Queen in Coal Black hoarding sugar and tires. It's that the pay-offs don't have any "oomphf" - Using a periscope so you can see over your sticker-covered windshield, an off-frame revelation that turns out to be a lady in a welding mask, and several gags where the characters get worked up over the accessibility of meat turn out to be lame visually.
Actually, the problem might be that they totally rely on their topic without any sort of distortion or exaggeration, or even just a teensy, slight degree of a twist, unless you consider it a twist to pay to sniff meat. The other problem is that so many scenes are crammed in. Even the worst documentary by Avery was still well-paced and not overloaded, while I have to force myself to pay attention to this.
Two excellent gags are my reward - The gender-swapping taxi driver and the rescue of the tire, just like the rescue in Screwball Football. I also like how it alternates between normal animation and deco (some scenes emphasize the color with almost bare faces). If nothing else, the textures look good.
ANGEL PUSS
Rating: ()
FROM HAND TO MOUSE
Rating: 5/7
One of the few Chuck Jones cartoons from this time that went for the repetitive, LOL-funny jugular. The mouse's drive for survival and adventure gets him getting caught by Leo the lion and he has to trick him repeatedly to let him escape, each time coming up with a new and elaborate scheme. Every time the mouse escapes the lion does a "dooooooooooooooh" and vibrates his head as his facial muscles tighten up.
The development is snappy and sparse with all the elements (the mouse getting caught, giving a speech, the lion's reply, etc.) mixed and matched to play off the last repetition, with the mouse taking bigger risks just to gloat and coming up with crazier schemes to get loose (dressing up as a lion, guess whether it fools Leo or not).
Even the boring ape scene is justified since it gives the mouse an excuse to mock the lion.
LOST AND FOUNDLING
Rating: 6/7
An egg rolls into Sniffles' mousehole after narrowly escaping death more than once, like falling between the boards of a bridge before a truck can ride over it. It illustrates how Chuck Jones can come up with the most unlikely plot and make it charming, showing Sniffles' devotion to taking care of his foster child.
The contrast between the bird's innocence as a chick and his mean-spirited actions as he plans to eat Sniffles can be heartbreaking, just as his sinister scheming can strike you due to his apparent mental deficiency, like when he turns Sniffles' attempts to stay awake against him so that he falls asleep.
Sniffles himself catches me with his devotion to the bird conflicting with his caution when he learns the hawk's his natural predator. It's the resolution of this conflict that makes it one of the most emotionally-charged cartoons from Jones. And it has a message about over-coming your nature (there, I said it).
ODOR-ABLE KITTY
Rating: 5/7
It's the first Pepe LePew cartoon and Chuck hasn't refined his personal style, so we have to settle for characters that are more incognito than intimate - for example, Pepe has a family that shows up for one gag and drops the French accent around them (even though it's likely that his later incarnations are genuinely french).
There's a ton of fun to be had anyway, not only for the above-said gag but for the male cat Pepe goes after who paints himself like a skunk, who throws a dummy cat off a watertower to fake him out and does cute "stiffen with a look of fear as his ass rocks over a picket fence" takes.
Later Pepe cartoons are better, though. Refined colors, backgrounds and characters stylized to the point of suffocation, and sexy Penelope hop cycles. Mrrrrow mrrrrow, I'm going through puberty all over again.
TRAP HAPPY PORKY
Rating: 5/7
Were it not for the animation this would be pretty bland. Porky's wild thrashing in bed looks like several Porkys animated at once, and the sights of him dashing up and down the staircase and over the hills to the city just totally pulls the ripcord.
The most inspired gags come from the mice wreaking havoc on Porky's stuff...and I can see how someone might laugh at the zonked cats crooning, especially the orange one who chimes in offkey, but that takes up almost half the cartoon! And anyway, those cats kicking him out are too close to Kitty Kornered for comfort.
On the bright side, the animation does make it really really worth watching. And the story is a good rewrite of some fable I read in elementary school about the king who couldn't get rid of the cat he brought in to get rid of the mouse (so he brought in a dog...and so on until he brought in a eunuch to get rid of the overstuffed concubine).
Hey, wanna know what's frigged-up? I thought this was an Arthur Davis cartoon when I reviewed it! Silly me...
HARE CONDITIONED
Rating: 5/7
This is the only Bugs cartoon I know of where I feel his life is really in danger, for something as tawdry as a stuffed animal no less. He spends the day hopping around at a pet store in-front-of a camp site backdrop, then comes face to face with a cruel manager who plans to stuff him. Bugs poses on the mound until he realizes he's about be killed and lures the villian into a chase that he interrupts for a sinister laugh. They run in and out of different departments (which somehow have the same entrance) in different vechicles. Bugs takes him on a wild romp of elevator gags full of double takes, reciprocal takes, wide persepctives, and frenzied runs up flights of stairs.
FRESH AIRDALE
Rating: 5/7
Oh geez...All the "racist" caricatures in the world can't live up to this controversy. It's mean-spirited and down-right pissy, and I have a hard time watching the cat rubbing his shoulder in self-satisfaction only to get threatened by his owner, not to mention the dog almost letting the burglar break in his owner's house, all for a bone.
The story is well-constructed and the dog is good at faking his emotions, not to mention some other nasty takes where he frowns and plots his next deception. It doesn't have me laughing, but it does have me wondering what neurosis drives the dog to stick up for the cat only to kick him off the lawn, and it does leave me feeling sorry for the cat who never catches on until it's too late.
Jones must have had a message for the audience here. I can't speculate on what that might be (Bob Clampett sucks? Just kidding.) but it's a rather unhumorous cartoon focused on telling its story. The only thing that comes close to making me laugh is the parade (with its "Good Ol' Shep" flag) but that's not the point. I can't seriously hate the cartoon because it's so welldone, but man, it's so nasty!
HARE TONIC
Rating: 5/7
Don't Elmer and Bugs look syrupy in here? They're stuck between the original designs and Chuck's streamlined, cutesy appearance. Their facial expressions aren't very convincing, either. It's like whoever did the model sheet only imagined what an angry face or a smug face should look like, without actually knowing it.
But that's okay. You know, I just realized Chuck Jones never did a cartoon with Elmer hunting Bugs until the 1950's, and even then it was to parody the concept. First he did Elmer's Pet Rabbit where he adopts Bugs and now Hare Tonic where Elmer buys him to make rabbit stew. At least he had some other ideas besides hunting cartoons.
Anyway, this cartoon feels calculated (well, every cartoon is calculated in some way but this one screams it). First Bugs impersonates a radio announcer warning listeners of "Rabbititus" then he does all sorts of things to taunt Elmer, who is now scared of catching the disease from rabbits. This leads through several sequences where Bugs impersonates a doctor, pretends to be Elmer's reflection, fakes symptoms of Rabbititus, etc.
I could write a book on what happens in this cartoon, the sequences are so elaborately worked out. Despite the effort, the cartoon isn't that great - you can see everything coming, after all, and the material's not as inspired as other Jones efforts. It's funny how Bugs impersonates a radio voice (and even neater when you realize Mel Blanc is doing a voice within a voice) but the idea itself isn't far out.
Funny stuff includes Bugs shoving Elmer in the basket (and then mocking Elmer), disguising himself as "Dr. Killpatient", and doing a Russian dance as part of some examination. You gotta respect the amount of ideas squeezed in here.
QUENTIN QUAIL
Rating: 5/7
If there’s anything especially good or especially bad about this Chuck Jones cartoon, I couldn’t tell you what it is. It’s just another Chuck Jones cartoon with idiosyncratic characters and backgrounds. The gags might be funny sometimes, but there’s no incentive for you to watch it over and over again. As usual, the father quail and the daughter quail both sport Chuck’s patented black oval eyes and an “in your face” demeanor. Not that they’re necessarily looking at your face, they’re just a little more self-conscious than quails with generic personalities would have. These two are obviously caricatures of something, with the daughter quail smacking of some radio personality called “Baby Snooks”, and the father quail, well, I couldn’t tell you what he is.
Naturally, they run around in a forest filled with Chuck’s patented surreal fruity colors trying to catch a worm. Sometimes the gags are funny, and sometimes they aren’t. It all depends on the mood you watch the cartoon in. You gotta be in that kind of mood to laugh at it. If you aren’t, it won’t do the mood altering for you. It would take something like My Favorite Duck to do that.
The gags where “Toots” hits her dad are predictable. Like I said, if you’re in the mood, you’ll laugh. There are many gags where the second party hits the person they didn’t intend to hit. At least there’s an unexpected twist when the worm holds the pin under the falling quail. The vibrating animation when the quail bounces repeatedly against the tree before falling is also fun to watch. It’s gags like these that make me glad we have these old cartoons. I just saw a couple second rate 60’s Looney Tunes on CN and they all had gags that were so predictable I could have made myself laugh harder by sitting cross-legged in a padded room (not to mention they had about one gag every three minutes, and they’re only seven minutes long!).
The sequence involving the crow utilizes slow and fast horizontal panning and sudden timing for when the crow returns to beat the dad up. Don’t cartoon characters know that when they make fun of the person they just fooled their victim will suddenly come back for retribution? Silly cartoon characters. A couple more nice bits of sudden timing are “toots” grabbing the worm and “daddy” rebounding off the rubber band with his arm stretched out and his fist clenched. That rubber band setup is positioned at a really memorable diagonal view.
That’s about it. Oh, and I like Toot’s voice. Obviously it was done by a male, who probably wasn’t Mel Blanc, but she’s got an amusing bratty tone and a creaky pitch. The ending gag is pretty good too, although I really wish she would have eaten the damn worm.
HUSH MY MOUSE
Rating: 4/7
Another cat-and-mouse plot with some overused celebrity personalities (Edward G. Robinson and Lenny). Sniffles doesn't annoy me a bit, but then again his blabber, which is used in moderation, isn't funny at all. Strangely he displays a sadistic streak not found in his other cartoons.
Unfortunately, while it is fun to watch Sniffles do incredibly mean things to the cat trying to kill him (such as putting the cat's hand in a bag so he thinks it's food and putting his hat on a dog bone so the cat thinks it's Sniffles), the gags feel so regurgitated they're not funny. The entire dog sequence, aside from being a bit meandering, as though they ran out of ideas to fill the cartoon, goes off without a single moment of true enjoyability, and the closing gag is a painfully unfunny pun with such an accent in vocal delivery I can only think they did it to make the deadline.
So whatever, at least it's not Sniffles Takes a Trip. I can relax to it while it's on, but I probably won't to watch it again. It's also the last Sniffles cartoon. Bye, Sniff.
HAIR-RAISING-HARE
Rating: 5/7
I’ve always had trouble thinking of what to write for this one. Bugs runs away from a giant red furry monster called Hugo (Even though his official name is Gossamer, I think) and stops occasionally to out-wit the witless monster. Sometimes Hugo gets a good idea like dressing up as a suit of armor or pretending to be a carpet and Bugs ends up outwitting him anyway. There’s a Peter Lorre scientist and a robotic female rabbit. The mad scientist castle is scary, especially that dark staircase. It’s funny when Bugs sounds like a prissy gossip getting her hair done. I’m on auto-pilot writing a laundry list.
THE EAGER BEAVER
Rating: 6/7
I shudder to think how much this would suck in 1940, but in 1946 Chuck Jones’ brain was spinning at 4000 rpm with shiny aluminum bicycle wheels and there are no sharp objects on the road. Otherwise a large cast of beavers charged with building a dam would be handled with cut-a-ways to some furball smashing his bucktooth on the tree bark for three minutes worth of screen time and maybe a scene where a beaver’s axe is stolen by a gopher and he spends another three minutes getting it back, which leaves us a minute to watch the dam break and conclude with two beavers staring blankly at each other and then staring blankly at the audience.
Instead we get one speedy scene of beavers running and chopping and losing out against their environment. The speed factor is so high the bunch of TNT that blows up everything below the tree high on the mountain and leaves the poor beaver standing bewildered on the roots doesn’t even wait for the fuse to burn before exploding, it just goes boom. So great is the speed the beavers run over miles of hills and reach their destination in nanoseconds. So fast is the speed a beaver can get in a few chops in between the other beaver chopping like mad on the same tree.
Worthy of note is how seamlessly the gags trade off between a group of beavers and an individual, and most of them are funny (The very first gag doesn’t really grab…just a basic contradiction between the beavers and the narrator, but at least the narrator shuts up for good before the first half-minute). Sure is a long way from The Mighty Hunters which kinda attempted to juggle a large cast with a few individuals and came off flat.
More stuff I like: The irritating foreman who gets squished, the ‘eager beaver’ (Who becomes the default star of the picture) irritating his bigger bros so much one starts off sounding calm and screams him up to the mountain, the bird using Porky’s voice (Even Porky never physically hindered himself by stuttering), and the simple fact that it twists and climaxes, instead of relegating itself to a sequence of spot-gags. Another forgotten classic.
FAIR AND WORM-ER
Rating: 5/7
It's like he saw a few Tom and Jerry cartoons and though, I can make a better chase cartoon than that. So he went all out...dog catcher vs. dog vs. cat vs. worm vs. bird. And amazingly enough, it all works. Although the animals are not going to endear themselves like a lasting Warner Bros. character (i.e. Cool Cat), their development is satisfactory and great pains are taken to ensure each one gets some interaction with the other, like the worm moving his missle target to save the cat or the bird deciding to help the dog. The results are dumb "thought" balloons, double-takes before running off frame and leaving behind some body parts, swirly running animation backed by string crescendos, scenes of the major players clustered together, now-you-seen-'im-now-you-don't animation, and a mouse's sarcastic response to the dog catcher's wife, which was made into a running gag. The only dud is the bridge scene, which is an experiment with sound and doesn't provide us with anything the visuals did not.
ROUGHLY SPEAKING
Rating: ()
SCENT-IMENTAL OVER YOU
Rating: 5/7
Chuck is still playing with the idea of Pepe, but it's worth it for his first major love speech. I just crack up when he says, "Ze Spring flowers that bloom in ze spring", although that "aaaah" stuff is a little grating. Pepe runs backwards in-front-of the scrawny chihuahua "Playing hard to get", reusing a gag from Buckaroo Bugs (I'm only glad to see such animation again, I don't mean to imply Chuck ripped anybody off). The ending puzzles me, but I like puzzling endings, so that's fine.
INKI AT THE CIRCUS
Rating: 4/7
Last cartoon with Inki and the Minah bird for awhile, so far as I know (I think there was another Inki cartoon in the 50s). This takes place at a circus (natch) with a couple of dogs replacing the lion, both out to get Inki’s bone.
Most of the scenes look good, choreography-wise, but there’s too much of this symmetrical pacing that wreaked havoc on early Jones films. I’m not hardly amused when Inki and the dog tip-toe in synch, even with the trombones frantically pattering for background noise. One gag that comes close to funny is when Inki and the dog both light a stick of dynamite, and they nod in triumph after it explodes, not even noticing the other guy is right in-front-of him. And even this adheres to the double-choreography I don’t care for.
What the early Inki cartoons really had were subtle expressions and reactions, while this is extremely lazy with the gag development. The scenes are interesting to watch for the movement, but I rarely laugh at them. I mean, when Inki bounces high into the air keeping the bird aloft I just think it was more intense when Disney did it (Ever see that really complex tightrope sequence in Mickey’s Circus?). Stare at it and admire the flow of the scenes, but don’t plan on busting a diaphragm. The Minah bird’s escape from the vault is cool, though.
A PEST IN THE HOUSE
Rating: 5/7
One dimensional set-up: Daffy’s the bellboy, Elmer’s the manager, and the guest will knock Elmer’s lights out if he’s ever disturbed. The obnox-o-meter on Daffy is up to 11, so high he rants about peace and quiet while disturbing the guest (Who’s voiced by Arthur Q. Bryan using his real voice, which is kinda neat ‘cuz he gets to threaten himself) and actually gets him to play bellboy in a drowsy stupor. The guest puts on some really twisted po’ed faces and you can feel the dread whenever he wakes up angry. There isn’t much else to it, though the set-up is run into the ground a bit when Elmer gets involved beyond standing at the counter and taking punches.
HOUSE-HUNTING MICE
Rating: 5/7
Woah, a Hubie and Bertie cartoon where they don't play mind-tricks. Instead they move into a "House of Tomorrow" with self-loading phonograph (uh...I'll put on my own records thank you), automated laundry, and robotic janitor. There's a ridiculous laundry sequence here, a fade out to the next ridiculous event there...you know the drill. The funniest gags end in "Boid, c'mere" but the endless manipulations of the janitor robot are also fun, especially how it reacts to its own automated nature (culminating in all the broken records it has to pick up).
LITTLE ORPHAN AIRDALE
Rating: 5/7
Charile Dog, who's always trying to get himself adopted, makes his debut here. It's one of the few Clampett concepts Jones actually improves on - Charlie is a more fleshed-out personality, while Clampett's obnoxious dog was more incognito.
The beginning has some really funny gags where the dog imitates people walking around, eventually sticking with the dog mimicking a bunch of them in succession without crosscutting to the actual targets. What you see works with what goes on off-frame.
One scene in Porky's apartment has the dog advertising his ability to chase cats, with which he goes off to find one much to Porky's apathy, until a bunch of barking and meowing is heard from outside the apartment door, causing Porky to cringe and twitch in rhythm with the shouting. Another "implication" gag has Charlie garnering sympathy by whispering in the pig's ear, only to blow it when he gives his gender away (I know what he says to Porky but the gag is more fun if you don't know, believe me).
Other gags rely more on Charlie's acting - with the cutting and the accent on certain movements. Since this aspect of the character has been done better, I'll wait until a later cartoon to discuss it.
A FEATHER IN HIS HARE
Rating: 5/7
Finally, a Chuck Jones Bugs Bunny with brisk pacing and no anal retentive gag set-ups. Instead of trying to be clever, he just lets loose with one endless befuddling, condescending, or sarcastic action from Bugs, hiding in the Indian's quiver and throwing his voice, pretending not to be a rabbit, and scalping him with a mallet concealed in a swiss-army knife. Chuck couldn't resist throwing in a few gags typical of his weaker 40's self, however, and both Bugs and the Indian get an extended family by the story's end. It's so touching when they collapse on each other.
WHAT'S BREWIN', BRUIN?
Rating: 5/7
Chuck's three bears become characters in their own right, and among other things, the newfound heights to which Papa Bear expresses his anger prooves that shackling Bugs to them would be a mistake. His sensitivity to his family's noticable habits and his ever-ready willingness to discipline Junior makes him the perfect contrast to his gentle, level-headed wife. Was this Chuck's ideal view of the All-American family? Or the All-American family he wouldn't want to live in?
When they hibernate for the winter, Papa Bear is kept awake (and angry) with distractions ranging from his son to his wife to...his son. Each time he has to get up and hit his son or plug a leak or hit his son or barricade the window or hit his son or run from his wife or hit his son with a mallet...yeah, don't go calling a foster home, it's just a cartoon you know. Junior's passive when he could easily crush his dad, and his expressions make it funny when he gets bopped.
Especially notable is the star scene, and what Papa bear does with the brush after junior hands it to him. BTW, look out for the baby's chart. I don't know why, but I think it's funny.
RABBIT PUNCH
Rating: 5/7
Scrawny Bugs is pitted against a bulky oaf. There's nothing but eerie blackness outside the boxing ring, and all sorts of props show up from the side, including rairoad tracks. Bugs does everything from sucker punching to taking control of the match by playing announcer to walking on the ring in disguise. It's so charming when he displays his lack of muscle and how he gets himself into the fight in the first place.
HAREDEVIL HARE
Rating: 4/7
This introduces Marvin the Martain and his infamous plot to blow up the earth, a concept that would be refined later as the gags don't support the setting and could have been done in a hunting cartoon.
In what is atypical for Jones, esp. in this period all of the best gags are verbal ones - Bugs coaxing the dog and musing what a romantic evening it is right after goading the big stick of dynamite out of him have nothing but clever dialogue and seem to take up the bulk of the action.
There is practically nothing in the way of visuals - Marvin's walk cycle could be recreated by wiggling your first two fingers and none of the subtleties Jones would develop in character expression or interaction are present. I suspect he cringed when he saw what a generic Lenny-wannabe he made the dog into, as opposed to the dignified, bumbling mutt he became later on.
If anything makes it worth watching, it's Bugs' slow realization that Marvin poses a deadly threat, and the sheer spectacle of the moon and what Bugs does to it. It's not a bad cartoon, but it looks pitiful stuffed at the end of the first Golden Age boxset after following three bonafide Clampett classics (I'm laying it on a bit thick, aren't I).
YOU WERE NEVER DOCKIER
Rating: ()
DAFFY DILLY
Rating: ()
MY BUNNY LIES OVER THE SEA
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SCAREDY CAT
Rating: ()