“There was this Tasmanian Devil of mine,” director Bob McKimson once recalled. “The executive at the studio, Ed Selzer, said to stop making them, that this character was too obnoxious. So after two of them I stopped. Then one day, Jack Warner called him in and demanded, “What happened to the Tasmanian Devil?” Warner fumed that he’d better tell me to make more because there were boxes and boxes of letters coming in about the character. So, I made about three more after that.”
McKimson, it seems, liked trying out new characters, so he developed the Devil character some time before his unit was disbanded for a year starting in February 1953. But it’s not because he had been to a zoo and looked at one. In fact, he had never seen one. His son Bob Jr. has related how the animal’s name came up in a crossword puzzle, then asked the people in his unit to come up with a possible design for one. He melded them together and came up, thanks as well to a story written by Sid Marcus, with a character that caught the attention of movie-house cartoon lovers.
There’s no indication that Bob McKimson, who died in 1977, ever saw a Tasmanian Devil. But another McKimson did.
Chuck was one of the four animators in his brother’s unit who worked on the first Devil short, Devil May Hare (released in 1954). Jump ahead several decades, when historians started writing favourably about the Warners cartoons, fans enthusiastically devoured any information (and cartoons) they could find in that pre-internet era, and companies started selling re-creations of cels of the shorts. Some of the animation old-timers were around to go on publicity tours for them. Chuck McKimson was one (his older brother Tom went with him on occasion).
So it was that Chuck McKimson ended up in Australia and came face-to-face with you-know-what. And in Tasmania, too.
The Age newspaper in Melbourne witnessed the historic meeting and wrote a couple of stories. First up is one from April 28, 1998. The story is a little presumptuous claiming McKimson and Chuck Jones “are the last survivors of a golden age of animation.” For one, there was Bob Givens who was the layout artist on that first Tasmanian Devil cartoon.
Art for Fudd and profit; ANIMATION:
For the men of "Termite Palace", working for Warner Brothers wasn't work. It was art.
By GREG BURCHALL
They called the place "Termite Terrace"; the run-down building on the edge of the Warner Brothers' film studio lot where, every day, a group of artists met to flay, stretch, clobber, slice, dice, perforate and blow up some of cinema's most endearingly durable characters.
"It was great fun, it wasn't like going to work at all," recalls animator Charles "Chuck" McKimson.
"And we certainly weren't thinking that what we were doing was art."
McKimson and his brothers Bob and Tom, were, with Chuck Jones, Fritz Freleng [sic] and Bob Clampett, part of the legendary Warners' animation team that turned out a string of classic cartoons in the 1930s, '40s and '50s that featured such timeless characters as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Elmer Fudd, Speedy Gonzales and the Tasmanian Devil.
While the characters live on in re-run land, McKimson and Jones are the last survivors of a golden age of animation that, in its visual wit and subversive scenarios, still gives The Simpsons and Ren and Stimpy a Road Runner-paced run for their money. But it's a catch-up game for the merchandising money.
Buying and selling original animation art work - characters hand-painted on to clear plastic cells, storyboards and limited-edition prints - has become big business over the past 15 years.
For early collectors, it was simply a matter of exploring Warner Brothers' dumpsters. The studio burned most of its orginal artwork in the '60s to make way for more storage space.
Most of the available artwork comes from the links created for the re-release of the 'toons on TV.
"We threw out tons of the stuff," says McKimson.
"We never imagined anyone would ever want it.
"We never even thought the films and characters would have such a long life. We were just going from picture to picture and having a good time."
Luckily, the McKimsons were quite the hoarders and a lot of their personal art has been preserved, including the pen-and-ink originals of an unpublished children's book from 1931.
Robert McKimson junior now runs the family business, which has the exclusive licensing rights to the Warner Brothers' characters.
"I'm the 10-per-center, I'm not creative in the way Dad, Tom and Chuck were," he laughs. "They were natural-born artists who were drawn to animation, which was a new, exciting medium back in the '30s.
"The jam sessions, where they would sit around the office, throwing ideas at each other were the stuff of legend."
Out of such a session came the Tasmanian Devil. McKimson confirms that it was born of the need to introduce a new character, "but we'd just about drawn every other animal under the sun". Crossword puzzle fanatic Robert senior had recently come across a reference to the aggro marsupial. "We did a lot of research on that one, we all went away and did some drawings and pretty much came up with a similar-looking thing," says McKimson. "The boss didn't like it much, said it was too mean - no charm - nothing for the kids. Well, we never made any of those pictures for kids, we made them for adults. Fact was, we made them for ourselves."
The Devil's manic personality attracted its own following, however, and another four classic films were created around it.
The work was labor-intensive, involving 14 months of writing, recording, drawing, inking, painting and photographing to produce one six-to-seven minute cartoon. McKimson says a room of about 50 women were kept busy with the paints, as the artists churned out up to 25 feet of animation a week.
"Today's animation is fine for what it is," says McKimson. "Labor costs being what they are, you'll never see that much work going into the art again. What the computer can achieve now is amazing, but still fairly limited.
"We'd really get involved with those characters while we were drawing them."
* A Celebration: the Magical Art of Warner Bros. is at Silver K Fine Art Gallery, 1092 High Street, Armadale, until 24 May. Charles McKimson will meet fans and sign work there on 9 May from 1-4pm.
Chuck McKimson stopped in several other Australian states (Melbourne is in Victoria), including Tasmania. His meeting with the Devil was published in The Age on April 30th and reprinted in other Australian papers.
Animator meets the devil he didn't know
By ANDREW DARBY
Animator Charles McKimson was a little wary about getting close to a Tasmanian devil for the first time since he helped give it fame as an American cartoon character.
"So that's it?" he said at Hobart's Bonorong wildlife centre yesterday as a male devil snarled over a female that it then scruffed by the neck and dragged into a nuptial hollow log.
Mr McKimson stared, trying to reconcile the squat brown marsupial in the pit with the character he created with pen and ink for Warner Brothers cartoons.
"Ours is a nasty little character," he mused. Which seemed true of the real thing. The wildlife park's owner, Robert Douglas, said: "The jaw has 10 times the power of a pit bull terrier. It could snap a finger off. But it's very, very cowardly."
"Here," Mr Douglas said to Mr McKimson as he held up the female he had hand-reared. "You can pat it."
Mr McKimson, 83 and a Los Angeleno, understands the art of survival. It took a while for him to accept Mr Douglas's reassurance that the female was "a nice little girl". When they came close, she stared, Mr McKimson stared . . . and the devil turned away to snuggle into Mr Douglas's shirt.
In 1953 Warner Brothers was looking for a new character as a foil for that Oscar-winning rabbit, Bugs Bunny. Mr McKimson's brother Bob came up with the strangely named marsupial that had stuck in his mind as a crossword clue. Both Warners animators, they looked it up in a book, and with a combination of five drawings settled on the slavering monster that occasionally whirls through Bugs's life.
Mr McKimson agrees that Taz the Devil is a somewhat two-dimensional character, doing little more than snarling and spinning. Still, he says Taz is the second most popular cartoon character in the Warner Brothers stable.
That fame may spread further as the Tasmanian Government is negotiating with Warners to use the character in tourism promotions.
Mr Douglas and Mr McKimson agreed the cartoon character was just about correct. "All that noise is spot on," Mr Douglas said.
One other thing was absolutely right. The furry scraps of meat Mr McKimson watched them snarl and spit over were bits of rabbit.
To make a long story short, Chuck McKimson never returned to his brother’s unit when it was resurrected in early 1954. He found work as art director for Whitman Publishing, which had lines of books and comics, leaving in 1960 to become animation director for Creston Studio’s ill-fated Calvin and the Colonel prime-time cartoon series. The show was on the air, then off, then on again. McKimson stuck with it for all 26 episodes before being hired by Pacific Title. He died in 1999.
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