Rating: 6/7

Magical Maestro is a unique, potentially-classic premise along the lines of Bad Luck Blackie and The Cat That Hated People, and like those cartoons the gags manage to convey the unique premise behind the cartoon without bringing it up to the level of spectacular. I mean, it is a classic, but not in a way Drag-A-Long Droopy is. Why is it that some of Avery’s best cartoons don’t have special set-ups or gimmicks, but the ones that do don’t have the content to back it up? Of course the high rating means I really enjoy the cartoon, but at the same time it drives me nuts with how it could have been better. I can’t think of any way to make it better and maybe Tex couldn’t either, but I can still feel there’s room for improvement.

Let me just get the major problem I have with Magical Maestro out of the way, then I’ll start gushing praise as always. The problems is, I always expect the cartoon to build into something more than it became. It keeps promising to go somewhere – and it lands on a plateau and just drags there. All of the gags mainly stem from a single theme, and Tex only provided so many variations on that theme. So while the cartoon will string you along for awhile, coaxing laughter out of you at key moments, it’ll come to a screeching halt when a gag disappears as suddenly as it appeared or doesn’t quite expand on the theme in a startling fashion.

Enough of that already. The genius premise has a magician out for revenge on an opera singer who snubbed him – the set-up is perfect, from when the magician embarrasses himself in-front-of the singer with a scattershot dance routine (a last ditch attempt to impress) to the sinister grin forming on his face when he sees a poster of the singer and pictures himself taking the conductor’s place. It just so happens the magician has a wand that can make anything happen, and Tex used the idea for this wand with such taste that his comedy genius really shines through. The magician removes the conductor and disguises himself like him (using the wand of course) and then proceeds to cause all kinds of embarrassments to befall the singer during his concert, from making rabbits appear on his arms to changing his wardrobe to altering his appearance and voice. And for some reason an unruly audience member helps him out by throwing things at the singer.

The disappointing gags are usually footage rambling off one sudden transformation after another, without giving it time to develop into something interesting – but the best gags don’t just rely on the transformation itself, they’re complemented with a funny vocal modulation from the singer or a funny bit of animation on the singer’s part (like when his clothes become a football uniform and he runs to the side) and what’s more, they add to the overall impact of the gags surrounding them. My favorite gag is when he’s hit with ink, turning him into a black-face caricature, and squashed by an anvil, turning him into a black-face with a low voice.

This cartoon also starts to slide more into UPA-territory. Most of the designs are still fat bodies with less animation, but some of the backgrounds as well as the rabbits are more stylized.

Rating: 5/7

In this cartoon, cars are sentient and their parts and physical actions are metaphors for human life. Imagine a cab drying its tears with windshield wipers or leaping off its axel-rods in a fit of joy and you get the idea. To be honest, the rating is more out of respect than love, as the idea of inanimate objects acting like humans has never appealed to me. Having said that, I love how the little cab is designed, with its cute eyes attached to the windshield, and the animation for the cabs is really good. It has a rubbery quality which accents their movements, not steal attention like the wild, flailing rubbery-ness found in Bob Clampett cartoons. It’s amazing they could do that kind of animation in the mid-50’s.

Not all of the scenes are full of gags – most of them are dedicated to developing the story, and you have to take it or leave it. The main plot is junior going against his father’s wishes by planning to convert himself into a hot rod, and this leads to more personification gags, naturally, with the best one, the father cab slapping junior’s rear-end concealed in the trunk among them.

Unsurprisingly, it’s not the personification gags I love the most, but the gags that come in the form of junior speeding on the road past another object (usually a vehicle but not always), and altering its state. He knocks a pig and a chicken into the air and they come down as stake and eggs, for example, and guess what the ice truck turns into?

This is mostly a story cartoon, though. The conclusion is nice and Junior’s scheme to trick his dad into thinking he chose to be a taxi cab is quite sinister, so let’s leave it at that.

Rating: 6/7

Another classic gag theme (if not spectacularly classic, if you get my drift) with a wrap-around set-up and some additional characterization and gags to hammer the comedy into your brain. The set-up has a dog-pound worker (who is two-faced) send one of his dogs to guard a bear’s house – and a rival dog sneaking ahead of him attempting to steal the job. Now the bear is a very abrasive fellow who doesn’t like noise but makes plenty himself, and the rival dog tries to get Spike fired by coaxing noise out of him.

Most of the gags rely on Spike running through the panoramic snow (with his figure disappearing behind the hill for a split second) and letting out whatever sound he was forced to make inside the cabin. This means several “cut-and-paste” actions with his anatomy (like sticking his tongue out, way out) and doing the impossible like walking on his butt cheeks. All of this is augmented with the usual impeccable timing and stiff-yet-wild animation (and the sound effect while the dog runs up the hill is to die for).

The other kinds of gags are no slouch – when the bear goes to sleep we get to see how exaggerated the set-up of his “bed” is, and then he falls asleep for a split second before abruptly waking up, walking out of the room and saying goodnight to Spike! And he gets mad at Spike for saying goodnight back to him! I love the Bear’s voice, too. It’s a very thick southern accent and no matter how loud he yells it never gets abrasive.

Rating: 4/7

I didn’t like this premise to begin with, and it has even less gags and story development than One Cab’s Family. But it compensates well enough, and it only scores a point less for its lack of content, plus the lack of novelty value. There’s nothing immediately wrong with this cartoon, so you won’t see me condemning it.

But it does rip-off the structure of One Cab’s Family almost to the letter. The little jet’s role isn’t accented as much as the little cab’s, but his dad still resents him for being something different from what he is (even though this time it’s not junior’s fault) and he still gets saved by his son. I do like John the plane’s tantrum when he finds out his son is a jet – his voices goes very high without becoming abrasive. The scenes of the little jet flying back and forth and annoying his dad and the General plane mysteriously vanishing are also quite good.

Other than that we have the derivative material where the jet flies through the scenery altering the shape of things, only in some cases their new form is not even vaguely related to what it used to be. You’d never guess what the watermelon was if you haven’t seen the cartoon (hint: think of something watermelon-shaped that flies). Once again these are my favorite gags in the cartoon.

Rating: 4/7

Avery finally figured out how to make his cheater spot gag cartoons interesting – or maybe this one was just a fluke, because the next cartoon in this vein would be the worst thing he’s ever done. But this one is good, so let’s talk about it instead. Considering how low this is on artistic ambition, many of the gags are laugh-out-loud funny and their sequencing makes sense, unlike the other cheater cartoons. The gags have little interchangeable themes to distinguish each one, so that they cluster together and prep you for the next gag, instead of droning on like Car of Tomorrow.

The “themes” include television cabinets with mutated shapes for unorthodox uses, varying shapes and sizes for the TV screens, and live-action footage interacting with the animated foreground. I’m not too keen on describing all of the gags – most of them make me laugh at random points just because I let them touch certain corners of my brain (like the fishing gag that I can only laugh at when I dwell on how absurd it is that the guy at the desk gets pulled into the TV and THERE’S NO ELECTRONICS INSIDE). The gag I’m most fond of is when a television shoots down a plane with a concealed automatic gun – and the film pans sideways to more planes lying around with their pilots inside, bewildered eyes and all.

The only drawback to the cartoon is that it tends to ramble – the gags become more predictable and monotonous after awhile, but that doesn’t really affect the rating. With so many well-done scenes segueing into each other this may be my favorite Tex documentary ever.

Rating: 6/7

Tex Avery cartoons had become a bit stagnant art-wise. The designers and layout artists were still thinking early 40’s when it was clear the animation budget couldn’t support the fat, 3D, roundish bodies. The old-look was still being used, but with less frames of animation. Instead of looking modern, the cartoons had begun to look cheaper. It would take an injection of new blood to put these cartoons on the cutting edge, to make them look stylized and give us designs and scenery that would work with the economical animation. That’s where Ed Benedict comes in.

In case you don’t know who Ed Benedict is, he’s the guy who designed Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound, Fred Flinstone, Barney Rubble, and most characters from the Hanna-Barberra TV cartoons of the late 50’s/early 60’s. He didn’t create the concepts for the characters, just their visual appearance. Although Ed also worked as a layout artist himself his primary role, like any designer, was to dictate what the characters would look like for the other layout artists and animators, therefore his influence on the actual cartoons his designs appeared in was minimal. That’s why you have to look at his still artwork to fully appreciate it.

Take his original design of Yogi Bear (as seen in the eighth issue of Animation Blast) – his twin halves do not resemble each other in the slightest, yet there is a controlled way of thought behind the two sides contrasting each other. There is not a single part on Yogi that runs parallel to one another, even his nose and head don’t run parallel to the ground. Even Yogi’s eyes are a marvel – they don’t form a perfect circle, or a perfect oval; they’re round at a glance, but the shape is delicately varied all around the eye. You might shrug your shoulders, but I could never spend time just admiring the little twerp from Time Squad, with his perfectly circular eyes like I could with Ed’s design of Yogi. And the amazing part is that Ed captured some very human-like facial expressions in these challenging angles and asymmetries – with just a single curved line going across Yogi’s head (that still enforces Benedict’s design philosophy) you learn more about Yogi’s character than you ever could watching him in action.

Now let’s talk about the cartoon. Though this marks the official entrance of Ed, he didn’t have as much impact on the cartoon as the ones that came after it. He came in too late to design the characters (I guess whoever the usually used did that), but since Avery recognized his sensibility with this kind of stylized animation, he allowed him to make suggestions on the film which hadn’t been shot yet. Ed’s contributions were pretty much limited to making the fence in the background look like a real fence, changing some colors in the sky, etc., but if you look at this cartoon and the next one, you can see how important he really was when designing at full throttle. The wolf in here looks like a blob (though not without a certain charm of his own), while the wolf in the next cartoon looks like a fully-realized community of shapes working in harmony.

The color textures (by Vera Ohman) are bright, pastelish, and brings the scenery to life. Droopy’s brothers (and this is one cartoon where I don’t resent him having brothers) look downright goofy with their perpendicular eyeballs. Droopy’s eyeballs are perpendicular as well, but instead of looking insane, he looks calm, collected, and apathetic, almost like his old self mixed with the cynical wit of Bugs Bunny.

And then there’s the wolf. He might appear to be an ordinary 2D figure at first glance, but the sharp contrast in his eyes (one being bigger than the other and having a weird circle in it) makes him a joy to look at. You should crack up, as I do, when he spends his early scenes creeping through the scenery, ferociously decimating Droopy’s brothers’ houses with a wild expression in his eyes and his fangs exposed, only to turn to the audience after failing to blow down Droopy’s house and says, in a southern accent (Daws Butler’s Huckleberry Hound voice, in fact), “Now there’s a mighty well-built dog house, man.” The wolf’s personality through the rest of the cartoon develops this tact further.

It’s the wolf’s clueless, yet easy-going demeanor that pushes what could have been ordinary gags to hilarious levels, as is his playing off Droopy (who in turn plays off his brothers’ cluelessness to a T ). When the wolf continually bounces up and down a wooden plank, receiving a bludgeoning from Droopy each time, the smooth timing combined with Droopy’s apathetic face makes this gag work wonders beyond what he hits the wolf with (which is quite ordinary anyway). It ends with a teapot stuck on the wolf’s head with dynamite inside, and his stumbling around before it blows up is mighty funny with his clumsy walk and dopey dialog. Even better is how he looks when it blows – instead of a black face, his head is warped into a crumpled shape, a wonderful use of limited animation artwork.

The look of the cartoon contributes a lot to its success, but the personality developments of Droopy and the wolf play a huge role as well. It’s a shame that Ed’s influence wasn’t what it could have been, but his contribution to the next cartoon is quite significant, and it just so happens to be one of the my favorite cartoons ever…

Rating: 7/7

It’s not the last enjoyable cartoon from Tex Avery, but it is his last major hurrah, and it’s nothing short of a miracle that he pulled this out so late in his career. Or maybe not – this is Tex Avery we’re talking about. Like so many films of this caliber, Drag-A-Long might not grab you at first – there are visual gags, but they aren’t as outlandish as the ones from Magical Maestro, for example, or the gags where Junior whizzes by or runs into an object to change its shape in One Cab’s Family. But instead of hooking your attention with one simple plot, making you laugh for awhile with some good gags, and riding off into the sunset, the cartoon contains many things you can latch onto, and it’s held together by a complex plot (complex for cartoons, that is; most entertainment in general, really).

The plot brings Droopy the sheep herder into conflict with the wolf, who doesn’t want Sheep grazing on his cattle farm. This leads to a crazy chase scene, a frenetic shootout, and a wild finale where Droopy’s sheep and the wolf’s cows stampede into each other. In fact, thinking back to all the cartoons I’ve rated 15 on this site, they all make highly successful attempts at having an untrivial plot, and they tend to alternate between quiet, low-key sections and loud, deliberately classic ones before culminating in a wild frenzy, only to throw on one more loud moment just when you think they will end quietly. Drag-A-Long follows that pattern more or less.

In addition to having a plot that makes you care about the events happening, Drag-A-Long is also the ultimate piece of limited animation. That’s hardly a fair assessment I suppose, since we’re still dealing with theatrical budgets and not assembly-line production for TV, but everyone in the business bar maybe Disney had to deal with budget constraints, and Tex Avery still did one of his best cartoons under these conditions. John Didrik Johnson outdid himself this time – the backgrounds are watercolor (I suppose), but the textures resemble the oils from the old WB cartoons so that it looks near-photorealistic, but not stylized like the cartoon that came before it. The characters may look flat and two-dimensional, but their shapes lend themselves to the animation and their own textures, which are brighter than the backgrounds, look handsome placed against it.

It makes sense of course that the best looking cartoon of the era also has animation most suited to its central idea – the lush full animation may be gone but now the animators have done their job so that every frame works for the whole composition and doesn’t leave you space for wanting more frames. It works for the most part because they knew just want to animate with what few frames they had to work with. The wolf’s walk cycle when he first confronts Droopy is a far cry from the flailing rubber of Rod Scribner, but there’s enough variety in the movements of his legs and feet, as well as a good rhythm for that movement, that it’s not only fun to watch, it might take your mind off the gag they’re trying to show you. Just look at how his legs cross over each other (and admire Ed’s asymmetry in the legs while you’re at it) and how he starts walking on his ankles. That’s gorgeous.

As for the gags themselves, they don’t try to be outlandish, they just work. Their segueing into the plot is seamless, since most of the events which advance the cartoon are the gags themselves, instead of the plot going out of its way to throw a gag at you. The scene progressions are a roller coaster ride (and all good roller coasters slowly lift you up the ramp on a conveyor chain before the frenzy starts, don’t they?) with most scenes breaking on a really funny note (like the Wolf’s eyes spinning around as he crashes into the side of a mountain). The gags usually don’t consist of anything immediately outlandish visually, and when they do, it’s only after an environment where they won’t be the only draw has been established (the rocks transforming into statues would have been the main draw of the footage had it been in a “Screwy” cartoon, but in this case it’s more important that the wolf is running for his life from Droopy). Instead, the gags are absurd scenarios (like Droopy constantly one-upping the Wolf in a sharp shooting match, with Droopy’s skills distorting the laws of physics, and the wolf isn’t too shabby either. Pay attention to what he does with the fly.) or certain actions by the characters where they can’t learn from their mistakes (the wolf constantly trying to mount his horse in the saloon, until he finally gives up and does something even more hilarious in resignation). Each and every gag is an idiosyncratic comedy routine unto itself, and you’ll wonder why no one thought of these before Avery. Of course only Avery could have thought of them because only he could have made them work.

Take for example the gunfight between Droopy and the wolf – Droopy pulls out one gun after another, letting them go in midair where they hover in place and continually fire at the wolf. I used to not find this gag funny – after all, it’s nothing but a bunch of guns floating in the air. How can that be funny? Until I made this connection – the guns are held in place by Droopy’s attitude. He has to be better than anyone at everything no matter what the evidence to the contrary, and once you prove to the wolf you’re a sharper sight with the gun, how are you gonna prove you can out-shoot him in a duel? It doesn’t take intricate, 24 fps animation to make entertainment, it just takes creativity.

Tex Avery was a self-critical man who never thought he was good enough and always strived to top the last thing he did. Well he succeeded here. He proved you can create masterpieces with limited resources. This may or may not be his best accomplishment, but it’s more impressive that he pulled this off in an era with fewer resources available (though the guys working on this stuff had more experience by this time, the greatest resource all). Drag-A-Long never tries to be special; it’s just packed full of solid, solid content. Films like this make me feel better about the direction the industry was taking, and though it would prove disastrous within a decade or so, let it be said that it wasn’t a foolish mistake from the start.

Rating: 6/7

Drag-A-Long Droopy is a tough act to follow, but this does a respectable job. The problem with writing this review is that it works for the same reasons as the last two cartoons. The wolf from Three Little Pups returns, still with the excellent Daws Butler voice, and Ed added a little zest to him – check out the contrast in his two eyes, and those hick-looking mouth poses are to kill for. The barren, bright pastelish look of TLP is back, but I honestly don’t mind. A little drab looking I suppose, but it doesn’t interfere with the cartoon in the slightest.

The plot has gone back to a repetitive set-up supported by gag scenes. There is a little bit of development that prevents the set-up from becoming monotonous, like the wolf’s fading willingness to take care of the goat, and the many situations the goat survives which brings him right back to the wolf get mighty and mightier absurd. What’s even more absurd are the things he eats, and some of the after-effects (pieces of things he ate defying the laws of gravity, changing his shape, etc.).

Most of the gags are great there’s not a single standout, but a couple really do it for me: The goat eating the cartoon itself, because of the wolf’s reaction shot, and the goat eating horse, because of the revenge-mimicry enacted by the horse upon the wolf.

Rating: 6/7

I was pretty disappointed with this one. While it promises us with another Drag-A-Long Droopy, the story structure is more rote (there is plot development, but it’s not as driving as Drag-A-Long) and it’s clear that when a gag comes on, the only thing you can do is focus on that gag and laugh at it, or not. All the different layers that made the other Western so spectacular just aren’t there. Then again, I really can’t blame it – Avery still refuses to be creatively spent and besides, Drag-A-Long itself never promised to be one of the best cartoons ever; it just delivered on the material.

At least the self-recycling isn’t as disgusting as with Chuck Jones, since Tex put new twists on the old gags that were solid enough to justify the reuse. The sentient gun gags are fabulous, with the cattle rustler getting shot in the hand and having his gun act like a whipped puppy, which makes the bandit treat it like a horse with a broken leg. There’s also the Indian ambush which turns into a merry-go-round (no, really, you have to see that one. Why didn’t Bob Clampett come up with a gag like that for that Porky cartoon with Injun Joe?). My favorite gag in here is the way the bandit gets the boulder off the cliff – not only does it put a very surreal twist on the scenery, it’s also incredibly self-defeating.

Besides the new visual gags, it’s more or less a retread of Drag-A-Long. Even the same wolf design is used (with a new hat and different characterization, but similar looking). As you can imagine, it all culminates in a shoot-out between Droopy and the wolf, and though the shoot-out is played out differently, it’s not as thrilling. It comes off here like the obligatory climax to a standard western plot. The one good thing is when Droopy’s son takes over (you’ll see what I mean, and yes, you have to see it). It’s almost as if Droopy’s confidence magically transferred to his son to make him succeed despite all odds (and that animation of the wolf recoiling in terror at the kid is really good).

Rating: 3/7

Avery hated to make cheaters like this, but even the other …of Tomorrow cartoons had some good gags and other redeeming features to elevate them above their weightless plots. I hate to give a rating this low to a five-star director, but this is the only cartoon from Avery I can’t stand to watch.

Let me illustrate for you the formula that every gag follows: The narrator discounts a problem involving the limitations of a farm animal, then it cuts to a graphic still of said farm animal standing by the object it is to merge with to solve the problem. The graphic stills themselves, done by Gene Hazleton, (designer for Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs), are entirely black with the objects illustrated in a medium that gives it a neon-ish look, and they’re more fun to look at than the rest of the cartoon (The characters for the regular footage look like a technical exercise from somebody who doesn’t give a damn).

The result of each gene splicing is shown the scenes following the stills. Most of the gags are unfunny puns your boring relatives would come up with to make your other boring relatives laugh, and their use is not all at justified by the execution. The only thing that saves Farm of Tomorrow from being unwatchable is that it follows the professional film-making standards of the day, but it’s very tedious.

I can throw on an extra point for the graphic stills – they’re fun to look at. Otherwise the cartoon is unstructured, rambling and unfunny, and heck, the two narrators (a female narrator comes in later for some reason) never change their tone of voice. But I don’t resent this cartoon’s existence like I do Games Ren and Stimpy episodes. Every cartoon produced by Avery from this era has been top-notch, so if he had to do this one little stinker to make deadlines (and possibly give his creativity a rest for the serious efforts) it’s easily overlookable.

Rating: 6/7

I remember hating Flea Circus when I first saw it and thought it was the worst Tex Avery cartoon I'd seen so far. As you can tell by the rating, my attitude towards the cartoon improved far and wide. See, the problem wasn't so much what the cartoon gave me as what I expected out of it. I was used to Avery cartoons having a simple plot with ridiculous characters engaging in twisted visual gags. The twisted visuals are kept to a minimum here (though they’re there in moderation) and instead it relies mostly on the plot.

But while people tend to think of Avery as the wild gag man and Clampett as the character guy, I believe Avery can play the same role as well. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the clown’s sadness over his rejection and losing Fifi, as well as his determination to get the fleas back when they disappear. And okay, the plot development might be a tad predictable, but darned if it weren’t so well-handled. I feel happy for the clown when he gets the girl, so it must be doing something right. One thing I really like, is how the scenes moving the cartoon forward alternate between showing the fleas close up and representing them as dots from far away, showing them behaving like a regular human couple. That makes some of the verbal exchanges really entertaining, and it’s fun to see their little bodies handle objects made for humans from far away like that.

If you’re in it for the gags, don’t worry, as there are quite a few of those, mostly in the nonsensical actions of the flea circus. Simply put, they break the laws of physics and do all kinds of things they should not be able to do, and whether it’s a bow made of fleas shooting an arrow made of fleas or the flea swallowing a sword, the ziggy-zaggy animation of them on stage looks hilarious. I still think you can laugh at other moments even if they aren’t blatantly outrageous – the scene where the clown walks around puffing on cigarettes lying on the floor, with his scattershot walk animation to a xylophone sound effect makes me laugh as much as any crazy twisted visual.

It’s really a plot cartoon with gags conservatively sprinkled in, but if you’re willing to let Avery try something different, you may find there’s really nothing wrong with that.

Rating: 6/7

To be honest with you, this really only deserves an overall 10, but I threw on two extra points, one for the fabulous design of Droopy (and a few other characters) and another for the backgrounds. Droopy is now as completely far away from his round self as possible, he reminds me of several sugar cubes stuck together, yet there’s still a cold-but-friendly look in his eyes. Just look at how the opposite ends of his face play off each other in the animation. As for the backgrounds, they’re probably the best looking in a UPA-inspired cartoon ever, especially the inside of Droopy’s house. Since Droopy is incredibly small in the cartoon, Benedict went all out to give us luscious eye candy, with strangely-laid-out furniture of bright, delicious texture. Droopy’s walk cycle as he first comes in is also to die for.

Unfortunately, that’s about as much praise as I can give the cartoon. At least, it never gets monotonous or boring, though it is repetitive. The first several scenes or so are essentially the same thing (Droopy narrowly avoids smashing his record in each one) and the rest of scenes – are again the same thing (Droopy running from the owner of the fleas he stole. The fleas, by the way, happen to be a Dixieland band, and Droopy is their conductor). It’s a cool plot (and I like that Dixieland music), but it never develops into anything that would have you rolling on the floor. The storyline is more interesting than funny.

But there are no real flaws in the cartoon – in fact, a few things besides the art are really good. I love that perspective where Droopy gives the monkey a penny, and the animation of him getting yanked away by the organ grinder is so abruptly stiff it’s flawless. And the transitions from scene-to-scene during the chase are noticeably well-timed. I guess the cartoon doesn’t really deserve a score this high, but I can always focus on the scenery if I get bored, and this is arguably Ed Benedict and Joe Montell’s peak with Avery, so…

Rating: 5/7

Another documentary cartoon, but this one’s different. It takes “Ed” (Ed Benedict’s self-caricature?) through a year-round hunting trip, starting with duck season and ending with deer season. Normally I’m not too crazy about Benedict’s skinny human characters, since they resemble generic Hanna-Barberra characters a bit too much for my tastes (and this one looks like George Jetson to boot), but his design gave the animators opportunities for some emotional expressions as well as fun bits of animation involving his nose and mouth. Check out those surprised looks on his face when the other hunters usurp his territory or the fish ask him where the kid went. I also really like it when the “horse-power” boat speeds by him and he looks at it away from the viewer – it makes me wonder if he’s flashing another “WTF” expression.

I can’t say too much about the gags I haven’t already. There are crazy physical twists like the elephant gun, amusing inanities like the duck calls, non-sequiturs like the mother-in-law still conscious so she can look mad over getting shot, and things like the fish looking at the audience in surprise because a guy’s head is inside him. I could spend time going through all my favorite gags and explain why I like them so, but that shouldn’t be necessary. I do have do at least one, though – when the big guy walks out of the water, with his apparent apathy to Ed’s sinking in the water, there’s no way it would work as a gag if he didn’t walk through the scenery long enough so you could soak in the image and get the laughter out of your system.

I was probably wrong about TV of Tomorrow being Avery’s best documentary, but it’s really hard to choose. This is more focused and only a couple of the scenes are indistinct, but TV had a more strikingly original theme and a few of the gags were stronger (nothing beats the plane gag). But that’s okay, they can occupy the same slot of quality.

Rating: 5/7

Eh…not too fond of this one. Like most Avery cartoons First Bad Man is at least funny the first time you watch it, but the more I watch it over, the more boring it becomes. It’s a tale of Texas – in the prehistory times. This actually reminds me of the set-up from the lackluster Ren and Stimpy cartoon Galoot Wranglers (elements from an era in the wrong period) but I shouldn’t have to tell you that this works better than anything from Games Animations. We don’t have tedious narration for one thing, and the timing actually varies throughout (Tex knows just when to abruptly cut to the next part of his gag, you know what I mean? In that Ren and Stimpy cartoon you could see the payoff of each gag coming right after the narration sets it up, and they all seemed to come after the same amount of delay).

But comparing Tex to Games Animations is somewhat unflattering, so let me get back to the cartoon. The main reason the gags become stale with each repeated viewing is that they’re based on one or two themes – the narrator (fellow by the name of Tex Ritter) names off the various places the cavemen go into, each one with a doorway shaped to fit that place (like a carving of a woman for the burlesque house). Watching these gags for the umpteenth time doesn’t do anything for me.

There are a couple of exciting moments, like when Bad Man Dan starts wreaking havoc, riding his dinosaur and shooting everything in sight. But even still, the resultant gags fall short of uproariously funny due to their obviousness – you can decipher most of these cavemen puns if you’re tuned to Avery’s way of thinking. The best gag comes at the end, with Dan proving he can beat Father Time himself. There’s nothing wrong with this cartoon you know, it just doesn’t push itself beyond one-off viewing material.

Rating: 5/7

At this point it looks like Avery doesn’t give a damn anymore, but Avery not giving a damn is still better than what most cartoon directors can do at the peak of their artistic prowess. This actually could have been a 12, but I rounded it down due to looking incredibly cheap (and that cat looks so unlike the general illustrative philosophy he doesn’t belong in the foreground), Droopy’s voice is awful, and this is Avery’s worst case of self-recycling yet, almost approaching Chuck Jones level. There are two, count ‘em two gags that were lifting directly from Rock-A-Bye Bear - one of the bandits balances dynamite on his tongue and sticks it out so the sheriff won’t hear the explosion, the other one is the burping gag. And the rest of the gags still heavily borrow from Rock-A-Bye.

Actually, I have fond memories of this cartoon. It’s one of the first Avery cartoons I saw when I was getting heavily into animation, and I laughed my ass off but good. Now I just watch it and go “eh”. That’s what happens when you put things in perspective, but this is still the cartoon that got me into Avery, and I could easily have done worse. Let me tell you the best thing about the cartoon – Ed Benedict’s model sheet. The drawings of all four characters are perfect compositions, and if when you find this thing you’ll spend lots of time admiring the line work. You can find Droopy and the Sheriff on Animationblast.com where they plug issue 8, but to see them plus the two bandits you gotta get Tex Avery: King of Cartoons or said issue of AB. It’s worth it (geez, they’re both worth it for the model sheet alone!).

As for the rest of the cartoon, read my Rock-A-Bye bear description and you’ll get the gist. Some of the gags are better, but there’s less variety (it is ONLY the characters running outside to make noise, nothing else), there’s no hill for the characters to vanish behind for a split second when they run outside, and the ending is very lame. But it’s still fun to watch.

Rating: 5/7

And so a great legacy of animation comes to a close (*tear rolls down cheek*). Tex apparently didn’t want to do anything special for his last cartoon, as this is a pretty normal film (normal for him anyway) but it’s very funny to watch the first few times, and even when you don’t laugh there are pretty colors and layouts to keep you entertained.

Speaking of layouts, I’m pretty impressed with the TV sequence, where the convict hides in a television carcass and has to perform every TV show for the warden so he doesn’t get caught. If these gags showed up in a show like Bonkers, they would suck, but thanks to the layouts (and of course the general demeanor where the emphasis is on doing, not saying funny things) the dog puts on a good and convincing show. He plays multiple characters by charging past the screen, ducking down and immediately changing disguises, and it’s quite odd that it fools the Warden (although I wonder if he is fooled – his comment at the end indicates he notices they’re all the same guy and doesn’t care).

That’s all I have to say about this particular film. After Avery left Hanna and Barberra took over the management of MGM’s animation department and re-released Ventriloquist Cat as Cat’s Meow and Wags To Riches as Millionaire Droopy. The revamped cartoons are totally butchered by being shown in letter-boxed format (these things were not made for letter-boxing!) and re-colored to suit the UPA-style of the day. The color is decent I suppose but again not suitable for the cartoon. They’re still good cartoons but why should you watch them when you can watch the originals?