Thursday 25 April 2019

Taking the Scissors to Tex

Some kids who watched Warner Bros. cartoons in the black-and-white TV days saw them over and over so many times, they had them memorised.

That’s why I was very surprised when I read Joe Adamson’s wonderful book “Tex Avery, King of Cartoons” that there was a gag in Cross-Country Detours where the narrator announces “Here is a frog croaking.” The frog then kills himself.



Tex and writer Rich Hogan add a quick follow-up gag.



What was surprising was I had never seen this gag in all the years I had watched the cartoon. The local station cut it.

Remember, this is before ridiculous network edicts about editing out gun violence. This is the only example I can think of where the local station chopped something out of a cartoon.

Perhaps kids had bigger connections to frogs back then. How many old comedy shows or short films do boys have frogs? In my case, there was a small swamp behind the house across the street. We could catch tadpoles. You could hear the frogs at night. 50 years later, the area is filled in and is a condo development. The land is too valuable to be a swamp.

Johnny Johnsen’s panorama backgrounds are a highlight of this short, along with the lizard stripping scene (which our local station aired).

3 comments:

  1. The first time I saw this back in the 1960's...it was so surprising, and caught me so totally off guard..I laughed uncontrollably. The slide made even funnier. Starting to laugh all over again!!!

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  2. Two words: "Frog Baseball" (Beavis & Butt-Head's debut short).

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  3. Growing up in NYC, WNEW (Ch. 5) made lots of cuts in it's pre-48 Warners package, and had banned both the Censored 11 and any overtly-World War II themed cartoons by the early 1960s. But the frog croaking joke stayed in (as did the various "Now I've seen everything" suicide gags Bob Clampett and Warren Foster liked).

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