Monday 20 July 2015

They're Nuts

Whether it was characters reading title cards, stopping the action and demanding the credit roll or hatching out of nuts and then beginning the plot, Tex Avery found unique ways to open his cartoons.

The nut-hatching (the characters are “nuts,” get it?) begins after the credits appear in the 1937 Merrie Melodie “Daffy Duck and Egghead,” while Carl Stalling plays “Here We Go Gathering Nuts in May” behind the action. Daffy does two takes when he sees Egghead, who fires at the fleeing duck. Could this be an Irv Spence scene?



The “nuts” pun may have come from writer Bugs Hardaway, who loved obvious stuff like that. Virgil Ross gets the animation credit.

Incidentally, the music over the title card is “‘Cause My Baby Says It’s So” by Warren and Dubin from the 1937 movie “The Singing Marine.”
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2 comments:

  1. J Lee20 July 2015 at 07:46

    Warners had just started using unique title cards for their cartoons during the previous release season instead of placing the titles over the MM and LT main title backgrounds, so I was surprised when the restored version arrived to see that Avery used the concentric circles for the titles, and didn't place them over the walnuts before doing a dissolve to them 'hatching' Daffy and Egghead (the cartoons with and without unique title cards seems to be pretty random for the next year or so; it's hard to tell with the Blue Ribbon re-releases, but "Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur" is the last available WB effort that didn't offer a unique card for the opening titles).

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  2. Mark Kausler20 July 2015 at 13:05

    Yup, Yowp, that's Irv Spence animating the "nuts" main title.

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