The Loose Nut Explosion

Shamus Culhane goes for a couple of interesting impact effects in “The Loose Nut” (1945), starring his anti-social version of Woody Woodpecker. One scene has Woody in a steamroller chasing after a construction worker. Woody crashes through the door of the shack where the guy is hiding. Then the impact.

Culhane and his background artist, Terry Lind, came up with a long, bizarre drawing with squiggles and Saturn. Culhane panned left to right along the drawing, frame by frame, cutting away to blank cards of different colours, close-ups of different parts of the steam-roller, or explosion-looking drawings.

I haven’t clipped together the whole background because it’s really long, but this is about 2/3rds of it. You can click to enlarge it.



Here are some of the other drawings that were in the sequence. One close-up of the construction worker is turned to emphasise the impact.





Culhane does it again in the climax of the cartoon, minus the Saturn and squiggles, but using blank colour cards, character drawings and explosion drawings, and re-using the character drawings with different solid-colour backgrounds.