Pantry Panic Backgrounds

Pantry Panic (1941) was made by the Walter Lantz studio about the time background artist Ed Kiechle left to work on the main Universal lot. I don’t think he did the backgrounds for this cartoon; I think they’re Fred Brunish’s, but I can’t be positive. The table with food looks like one of Brunish’s watercolours. Background artists weren’t listed until 1944 after Shamus Culhane arrived to direct; Phil De Guard was handling the backgrounds as Brunish was doing war work for the studio.

There are a few overlays on some of the background art below, and a couple of characters, but I wanted to give you the idea of the settings in the frames. There’s an excellent array of colours on some.



This cartoon has Alex Lovy and Les Kline as Lantz’s credited animators on this. La Verne Harding, Frank Tipper and Hal Mason were also animating at the studio around this time.