Turning Chicken

One of the great things about the Fleischer cartoons of the 1920s and early ‘30s is characters would morph into something else. Their shapes would change, using simple line drawings.

How different were things later on. Even the MGM studio, which had money to spend the time making those types of drawings, copped out in Wild and Woolfy (1945), another wolf-Red-Droopy cartoon.

Here, bad guy Wolfy points his six-shooter at a big hombre in a bar. He becomes a chicken. But instead of changing shapes, Tex Avery has his animator superimpose chicken animation and fade out the hombre animation (Walter Lantz did the same thing in Hot Noon, a 1953 Woody Woodpecker cartoon.



There’s an effort at perspective as the chicken runs out of the foreground and out of the cartoon. The sound of the old tune "Chicken Reel" is in the background.



Ed Love, Ray Abrams and Preston Blair are the animators. Bill Thompson was still away on military service in the Chicago area so he’s not Droopy in this one.