Billy Boy Backgrounds

The 1950s brought different ways of drawing characters and settings in animated cartoons, and the major theatrical studios and commercial houses started stylising their art.

For years, Tex Avery’s background artist was Johnny Johnsen, who went with him from Warner Bros. to MGM. His style was very traditional, quite different than what you find in Avery’s Billy Boy, released in 1954.



By the way, if you look closely, you’ll notice the day/night shots of the farm are not the same. Same with the day/night artwork of the railway tracks.



The style—note the flat table against the wall—is very similar to what you’d find in some of the early Hanna-Barbera TV cartoons.



So was Johnson responsible for these, merely following Ed Benedict’s layouts? Johnson painted the backgrounds for Drag-a-long Droopy (Prod. 271), the cartoon which went into production immediately before this one. But neither Billy Boy (Prod. 272) nor Avery’s next cartoon, TV of Tomorrow (Prod. 274), have a background artist credit. Johnsen worked on the next cartoon, Homesteader Droopy (Prod. 276), but then Joe Montell’s name shows up on the next Avery production, the stylised Farm of Tomorrow (Prod. 278).

Is it possible Montell was at the studio and worked uncredited? Could it be Vera Ohman, whose name starts appearing around this time? Or was it someone else never credited at MGM? It’s hard to say, but my bet is that Montell is responsible for the backgrounds in this cartoon. He later moved on to the John Sutherland studio, then went to Hanna-Barbera before moving to Mexico to work on cartoons for Jay Ward Productions.