Praise has been heaped on Preston Blair in many animation books, magazines and web sites for his masterful work in bringing Red to life in various cartoons. We’ve never posted some of the frames here, though. So let’s rectify that. These are from “The Shooting of Dan McGoo.”
The lyrics talk of a soldier or marine. Red acts out the parts.
The balletic leg movements and the intricate finger and hand movements are truly worth studying. And Tex Avery’s a smart enough director to give viewers a visual contrast by cutting away to the wolf and his impossible reactions. Avery has the spotlight following Red on stage which must have taken an awful lot of planning.
Ed Love and Ray Abrams are the other credited animators.
Had Avery stayed at Warners, kept his 1941 animation crew intact and had the same inclination/inspiration to do the Red parody to begin with, it would have been interesting to wonder visually how it would have turned out (say, with Bob McKimson on Red and either Rod Scribner or Virgil Ross on the wolf -- going by the work on So White for Clampett's "Coal Black", the crew by late 1942 could animate the same sexy female form as Blair and Tex's new unit could).
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