Thursday 20 October 2022

Spike Cracks Up

Tex Avery wasn’t above re-using gags, and he did it several times in The Chump Champ (1950).

This is one of Avery’s Droopy/Spike competition cartoons where, naturally, Spike cheats but stillgets the worst of it.

In this sequence, Spike loads an anvil in a punching bag, hoping Droopy will smash his hand when batting it around. I like how Spike slithers away like a snake.



Naturally, the anvil has no effect. Naturally, Spike responds by confidently testing the bag for himself.



Impact close-up.



Now the familiar gag. Spike cracks up like a piece of broken china. The pieces fall to the ground. After a brief pause, more of him cracks up.



Rich Hogan is Avery’s gagman in this cartoon, with Mike Lah, Walt Clinton and Grant Simmons receiving animation screen credit.

6 comments:

  1. Site-related issue: I've noticed the blog links are now longer on the "upper right" of the page, but now down at the bottom of the page; is anyone else having this issue? Was there a recent change to the page?

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    1. EO, I've noticed the very same thing.Wonder what happened.

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    2. It keeps switching for me.

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    3. I have no explanation. I have not been changing the layout.

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    4. I believe it's because of a style glitch of some sort in the "Periscopasaurus" post; notice its footer text ("Posted by Yowp", etc.) is using a slightly larger font size than normal. I expect the front page will display normally once that post is pushed off by newer posts.

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    5. Zachary, I know what causes that and checked my coding. There was an inconsistency which has now been taken care of.

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