Nonsense.
You won’t find wild takes in a Friz Freleng-directed short, but you’ll find a lot of laughs and incredible timing in his best cartoons. He had a good run of them toward the end of the ‘40s.
One of my favourite Bugs Bunny cartoons is Bugs Bunny Rides Again (1948), where Freleng and writers Tedd Pierce and Mike Maltese take the rabbit and Yosemite Sam through a string of Western clichés. There are at least two perfect bits of timing in the short—one when Sam and his horse smash into a brick wall to the strains of the William Tell Overture, and then when Sam high-steps to his right and drops into a mine shaft. Sam’s expression changes in consecutive frames and he’s held at the edge by Freleng just long enough before the fall.
There’s a twist on a Tex Avery-style joke at the opening of the cartoon. It’s the old “traffic” gag, where a traffic signal controls some non-traffic objects; in this case, bullets.
Below are select frames that give you an idea. The bullets obey the traffic signs—except for one little straggler bullet at the end (several of Freleng’s cartoons have a gag that involves a little character following a group of larger characters).
The Freleng unit's animators are Ken Champin, Manny Perez, Virgil Ross and Gerry Chiniquy.
Funny how this cartoon always used to appear on TV with Yosemite Sam's original "And I don't mean Mahatma Gandhi." I never heard the dubbed-in (by Mel Blanc, at least) replacement "And I ain't no mamby-pamby" until Ted Turner got his little red hands on the Warner Bros. library.
ReplyDeleteFriz was a great director. It was people like John K who have slandered his greatness.
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