Tuesday 5 May 2020

Runaway Rocks

The First Bad Man (from the cartoon of the same name) scares away homesteaders. This being set in the Stone Age, the homesteaders live in a rock.



They hear the sound of the bad guy.



The gag here is the husband and wife get inside their “home” and are able to lift it and run away into the distance.



The camera sits on a shot of the background. What’s director Tex Avery got planned now? Ah, an outhouse gag.



Outhouse gags show up in Bosko and Flip the Frog cartoons, but I don’t know when Avery first used one.

Tex told author Joe Adamson the cartoon “wasn’t bad.” Part of the cartoon uses the same basic concept as The Flintstones: modern day living is transposed into the Stone Age. Ed Benedict designed the characters in both this cartoon and the Hanna-Barbera TV series, though the latter went through Dick Bickenbach and some other hands before ending up on the screen.

By the time this cartoon was released in 1955, Avery had been gone from MGM for more than two years and, in fact, was out of theatrical animation for good.

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