Detouring America Backgrounds

Johnny Johnsen brings us cityscapes and nature-scapes (is that a word?) in Detouring America, a 1939 Tex Avery travelogue. Avery was more cinematic at Warners than at MGM. I don’t recall getting this many angles in his Metro cartoons.

There are overlays galore in this short. The buildings in the immediate foreground are examples in the first two frames. There’s a great pan going up the Empire State building that, unfortunately, can not be edited together included here.



There are tree overlays and a cactus overlay. I wanted to clip together the Arctic pan but couldn’t get the colours to match, so you only get a portion of it.



Johnny Johnsen was an artist for a number of newspapers in various states. He was born in Colorado on July 23, 1885 and died Feb 7, 1974 in Los Angeles. He left Warners soon after Avery did and joined him at MGM.