Here are a couple of examples from Tex Avery’s I'm Cold, a pretty funny Chilly Willy cartoon. The plot is simple. Chilly tries to steal furs to keep warm. A guard dog tries to stop him. In one scene, Chilly is inside a bear fur, toodling along toward the door.
The fur passes over the guard dog. The fur continues on its journey and reveals the dog has grabbed Chilly.
How can the fur move on its own? Because in a Tex Avery cartoon, anything can happen.
In another scene, the dog tosses a bundle of furs into storage, pulls a lock out of his mouth and locks the door.
How can a dog go around with a lock in its mouth? Because in a Tex Avery cartoon.... well, you know the rest. Tex liked surprise laughter and said he wanted to do something the audience would least expect. You wouldn’t expect a lock to be in a dog’s mouth, would you?
Both scenes are animated by Don Patterson. Ray Abrams and La Verne Harding also receive animation credits. Clarence Wheeler, who gets bashed in some circles, did a nice job with this short; Avery seems to have brought out the best in him.
Wheeler seemed more open to matching the music to the individual gags and reactions on-screen, which is what Avery fought Scott Bradley over for years. So even through the music's sparse, it adds to the visual imagery. The later weaker music matches the weaker gags he got from Paul Smith and, to a lesser extent, Alex Lovy (it also mirrors the William Lava experience in the final days of the original Warners' studio -- the quality of his scores rose and fell based on the quality of gags he had to work with, and by 1962-63, there weren't that many good WB cartoons coming out anymore).
ReplyDeleteGood observation! Wheeler scores are very good on very good cartoons... not so much later on.
DeleteWish they had kept those tiny eyes on Smedley. He's a lot funnier that way.
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