Blitz Wolf Background

There’s a pan shot near the start of The Blitz Wolf (1942) from the ersatz Practical Pig’s trench through the blue-ish forest and ending on a black battle ground with scarlet skies. I can’t snip it together from frames in the cartoon because it appears Jack Stevens or whoever was operating the camera darkened the scene at the pan continued. The colours don’t match. And a tree and its branches are on an overlay that is panned at a different rate than the background.

However, here’s a part of it, showing the house of sticks, the house of straw, and the edge of the forest (the large leaves are on the overlay).



Tex attracted a lot of loyalty. When he left Lantz for the Leon Schlesinger studio, animators Virgil Ross, Sid Sutherland and Cecil Surry went with him. When he left Schlesinger for MGM, writer Rich Hogan and background artist Johnny Johnsen joined him (Hogan tried to get out of his contract early to go to Metro). You see Johnsen’s work in this cartoon and, as far as I know, all of Avery’s shorts in the 1940s.