Friday, 3 May 2013

Johnny Jet's Parentage

One of the unanswered questions of cartoons is—if Little Johnny Jet’s mother and father are propeller planes, how did his mother give birth to a jet?



Tex Avery’s animators in this one are Walt Clinton, Grant Simmons, Mike Lah and Bob Bentley, with Ray Patterson borrowed from the Hanna-Barbera unit.

Interestingly, the picture on the cereal box in the frame above is reminiscent of the background drawing of “silver spoon” kid in Avery’s earlier “Symphony in Slang,” which was designed by Tom Oreb, though Johnny Johnsen would have done the backgrounds in both.
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2 comments:

  1. J Lee3 May 2013 at 08:50

    Obviously Tex was an evolutionist...

    To me, Oscar-nominated or not, this has always felt like a bit of a forced follow-up to "One Cab's Family". That may have been based off of Friz's old "Streamline Greta Green", but Avery was able to revise and improve that story, in part because of how much his style of cartoon had improved from 1937 to 1951. "Jet" tries to cover similar ground, but doesn't really have the same sort of conflict because Junior is born as a jet, instead of choosing to be a hot-rod over a taxi, (or choosing a taxi over a touring car in Freleng's original).

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  2. Yowp11 May 2014 at 15:41

    Well, the conflict is in the head of the father plane. His child is not born to be the way he wanted (and is, in fact, superior to the father) but dad comes to accept and embrace it by the end of the picture.

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