Homer is Not Tex

Happy Homer Brightman tries a Tex Avery gag in “The Great Who-Dood-It,” a 1952 Woody Woodpecker cartoon.

We’ve all seen how Wolfie tries to escape from Droopy by jumping in a cab, then onto a train, then onto a plane, etc. only to reach his destination, discover Droopy’s there, and fill the screen with an outrageous take. Well, in this story, Buzz Buzzard takes a locked trunk (supposedly with Woody Woodpecker in it) and runs onto a train to catch a plane, then ride a motor scooter to the edge of a pier and drop the trunk in the water. He returns (via reused animation) to where he started, and hears Woody laugh. He turns to look. Here are the first five drawings.



The difference between this and an Avery gag—well, there are a lot of them in the execution of the animation if you really want to delve into it—is we can see Woody’s not really in the trunk as Buzz runs off with it. Brightman came from Disney so there had to be a logical explanation for what was happening on screen. Avery would never explain why Droopy was always where the wolf tried to hide from him. That’s just the way it was (to me, it was a case of cartoon law where the Bad Guy Always Loses, the same law that inflicted violence on Wile E. Coyote).

This is the first Lantz cartoon where Brightman got a story credit, and also Don Patterson’s first cartoon as a director. Patterson went on to better things in his brief directorial career. Brightman, I understand, got laughs in story meetings. Tex Avery got them on the screen.