Let's Use This Radio Catchphrase Again

Tex Avery made some brilliant cartoons. And he made some real disappointments, too.

Falling into the latter category are some of the spot-gag shorts at Warner Bros. Gags are either obvious or hokey. Occasionally, he spruced them up for re-use in later cartoons.

An example is the ending of Ceiling Hero (1940). A test pilot crashes his plane on the tarmac. Narrator Bob Bruce gets all dramatic on us. “What happened? He crashed! This is terrible! Is he hurt? Is he killed?? IS HE KILLED?!??” IS HE????”

While Bruce is completely overwrought and speculating about death, the scene cuts to the dopey-looking pilot drawing on the ground with his finger after crawling from the wreckage. Obviously, he’s not killed.

But Tex and writer Dave Monahan decide to ignore that for the sake of shoehorning in a radio catchphrase as their ultimate gag. Emulating Mr. Kitzel on The Al Pearce Show, the pilot says “Mmmmm...could be!”

Kitzel was funnier when he went over to the Jack Benny show and Avery was funnier when he put a Kitzel-ism in a row of devils meeting Adolf Wolf at the end of The Blitz Wolf (MGM, 1942).

Avery lost the potential for a good gag when Bruce pointed out ice had developed on the wings, and the scene panned over to a polar bear on one of the wings. I was waiting for the bear to make a quip like “Don’t ask how I got up here” but the bear itself was the gag. Oh, well.

Perhaps the most imaginative thing was when the opening titles appeared out of the clouds.

At least Avery laid out the jokes and moved on. In a Lantz or Columbia spot-gag, you get the impression the writer thought the gags were the funniest things on the face of the earth. At his best, Avery gave you a groaner like he was defying you not to laugh at it.

Rod Scribner got the rotating animation credit in this short.