Buckaroo Bugs Backgrounds

Bob Clampett saved a pile of work for his animators in Buckaroo Bugs. Other than a bit of effects animation, about the first 25 seconds of the cartoon is a camera is taken up panning and moving into and out of background art.

The camera zips back and forth as Mel Blanc, Bob Bruce and a female voice yell about the Masked Marauder.



What’d the Marauder get? All the cartoons from the town’s Victory Garden. There’s a slow pan over a background drawing setting up the situation.



Director Bob Clampett’s anonymous background and layout artist give us a couple of up shots. I can’t snip the scene together because a tree is on an overlay in the foreground and panned at a different rate than the background. Clampett does a fair bit of that during the cartoon.



Clampett and storyman Lou Lilly use Red Skelton’s Sheriff Deadeye as a model for Red Hot Rider, and end the short with another radio reference, the catchphrase of the quiz show Take It Or Leave It