‘Cock-A-Doodle Dog’ (1951) is a good example. Tex hangs the cartoon on a simple premise he used a number of times—sleep vs. noise. Tired Spike the bulldog tries to stop a scrawny rooster from obsessively crowing so he can get some rest. Since roosters are supposed to crow, Spike doesn’t have a chance in his effort to change the natural order of things.
Toward the end of the cartoon, Spike throws a cake of soap at the rooster, who swallows it. The rooster blows a huge soap bubble which floats into Spike’s dog house. You can see a nail on the wall. You know what’s going to happen—the bubble will burst and loud crowing will come out of it to wake up Spike—but you don’t know what kind of crazy take Tex is going to pull off. Here’s just one of the drawings.
There’s a gravity gag I really like, where the rooster and Spike back into each other, then start walking up into the sky as their feet touch each other. Finally, the two realise what’s happened. In ‘Ventriloquist Cat’ (1950), Avery uses a fright gag with the cat’s fur standing on end. He does the same thing with the rooster here (feathers standing on end?).
The animators are Avery’s truncated ‘50s MGM crew—Mike Lah, Walt Clinton and Grant Simmons.
Kevin Langley looked at this cartoon 4½ years ago and you can read his post here.
Tex's love of the "Two characters defying gravity by going up while next to each other" gag dates all the way back to the marching soldiers in 1938's "The Penguin Parade".
ReplyDeleteAnd by the 1950s, the Avery-style cartoon had a long enough pedigree so that it was harder to surprise the audience with what was least expected, since the audience by then had been trained to expect something unexpected. As Michael Barrier noted about Jones' Road Runner cartoons of the 1950s, the audience knew the end gag was the coyote would fail; the fun was in trying to figure out how the coyote would fail -- the same applies here with Tex's reaction shots.
J.L., that's the reason I never watched the Roadrunner cartoons when I was a kid. They all turned out the same, so I went to get something to eat.
ReplyDeleteI had the same problem with the Daffy-Bugs-Elmer cartoons. Daffy's beak gets blown off. OK, I've seen that. Do something else. Fortunately with them, something else would happen to keep my interest.
I'd reach my tolerance level if any of the characters who came into their own in the 1950s (RR, Pepe, Hippety Hopper, Speedy) would get multiple airings in a 60- or 90-minute show during the week or on Saturday mornings. We're not talking Famous Studios-level 1950s repetition here, but all of those series were best watched in limited doses.
ReplyDeleteAvery's preference for one-shots and/or very malleable characters meant his storylines in the non-blackout gag shorts tended to be more unique, even if some of his gags and reaction takes were reused (which isn't to say MGM didn't suffer the repetition bug -- while the Tom & Jerrys of the 1940s have beautiful animation and great reaction shots, you pretty much know how all those shorts are going to end, too. It wasn't until the animation started declining around 1954 that Hanna-Barbera started varying the endings of their shorts, which at least gave the T&Js some variety in their final years, since the short might actually iris out with Tom coming out on top).