This time, the camera quickly pans down the same mountain with broken tree limbs. Except Willoughby doesn’t crash-land.
“Ya know,” he tells us with a large, floppy tongue, “I ain’t so dumb,” then rests up as the iris closes.
The titles in Of Fox and Hounds give the draft numbers of the writer and animator. It’s late 1940 and American involvement in the war is about to escalate.
55 or so years ago, this was probably the most-shown Avery cartoon on the channel I watched that incessantly aired Warners cartoons. I still like it. And I ain’t so dumb.
Outside of "Little Tinker" this one probably has the sweetest ending of any of Avery's cartoons. He really did love his dumb animal characters, which was the difference here and, along with the ensuing "Crackpot Quail", between the Bugs-like antagonists in those cartoons and Tex's rabbit vs. Elmer a short time earlier. In "A Wild Hare" Avery set things up to where the audience's sympathies were with the rabbit; in this cartoon and the follow-up, the audience's sympathies are all with Willoughby.
ReplyDeleteThe story couldn't be put together any better. Everything in the cartoon sets up the final gag which, as Avery liked to do, switches to something unexpected.
DeleteHis slower Warners pacing, as in A Wild Hare, is perfect for this cartoon. He allows the set-up to sink in.
That's why I found it odd reading Joe Adamson's book on Avery back in the mid-70s that he simply brushed off this cartoon as merely being Tex using the same gag three times. The payoff only works if the gag is used twice beforehand, to get the audience accustomed to the idea that Willoughby is dumb enough to keep jumping over the rail fence and the outcome is going to be he crashes at the bottom of the cliff.
DeleteIf Avery doesn't love his big, dumb dog he doesn't go through all this, and when you look at all the cartoons that followed which locked onto the same type of character, the payoff and handling of Willoughby must have worked for a bunch of other people in the cartoon business, let alone the theater audiences.