Gold Diggers Pan

Before Screwy Squirrel (1944) and A Wild Hare (1940), with its woodsy opening, Tex Avery loved to start his cartoons with a long left-to-right pan over scenery.

In fact, he did it in the first cartoon he directed, Gold Diggers of ‘49.

Avery’s cinematography has the shot starting in almost darkness. The camera is focused on cacti. As the camera pans, the setting comes into the clear and Avery stops to move in on a calendar in a covered wagon, then a sign on a saloon with the word “GOLD” crossed out and, finally, on a general store. Unfortunately, the colour isn't consistent so we can't snip it together into a long drawings. We'll give you bits of it.

Unlike later pans, objects in the foreground move at the pace as the background. Later, Avery would have foreground items on cels shot at a different speed than the background to the an illusion of depth.

There’s an all-star roster on the opening credits with animation credits given to Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett and the score to future Oscar-winner Bernie Brown. Unfortunately, the background painter is not mentioned. It would be a few more years before layout and background artists got screen scredit.

By the way, Leonard Maltin’s Of Mice and Magic and the Beck and Friedwald book on the Warners cartoons both state this short was released on January 6, 1936. I cannot find evidence that is true. I’ve found indesputable evidence to the contrary. The Copyright Catalogue says the cartoon was copyrighted on January 6th, but the Motion Picture Herald of November 9, 1935 has a review of it by a small-town theatre manager. There are a number of theatre ads in newspapers of November 1935 announcing the cartoon was playing (the one to the right is from a Vermont paper of November 7), and the Motion Picture Herald of November 8th has a review from a theatre manager, so I reject the idea this cartoon was first released in 1936.

The Women's University Club in Los Angeles reviewed the film. "Poor. Not for children," it says. Oh, well. It liked Iwerks' Balloon Land.