Monday, 7 September 2015

That Makes Me Mad

Tex Avery’s influence wasn’t far away in Mike Lah’s Oscar-nominated One Droopy Knight (1957). It owes a lot to Señor Droopy (1949), and the climax gag is partly lifted from Homesteader Droopy (1954) and partly from other Avery cartoons where a character cracks up into pieces.

A dragon draws a moustache on a picture of Droopy’s beloved princess. “That makes me mad,” exclaims our hero, who proceeds to beat up the dragon. Finally, he snaps off the dragon’s tail (it is hollow) and bashes him with it. These frames tell the story.



For ripping off Avery, Homer Brightman gets a story credit. The animators credited are Irv Spence, Bill Schipek, Herman Cohen and Ken Southworth, with Ed Benedict designing a great-looking dragon.
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1 comment:

  1. J Lee7 September 2015 at 19:51

    The other irony being Bightman and Lah got an Academy Award nomination out of it, where Avery's original never got a sniff of the Oscars (Tex only had two nominations in 11 years at Metro, with the second "Little Johnny Jet" being Tex's borrowing of his own "One Cab's Family" story line, which in turn was borrowed from Friz Freleng's "Streamline Gretta Green" -- after all that borrowing, there's kind of a symmetry in that "One Droopy Knight" lost out at the '58 Oscars to a Freleng cartoon).

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