It’s interesting watching how Avery approached certain things, because he never would have done it the same way later at MGM when he picked up the pace.
Here’s an example. In one sequence of Gold Diggers of '49, Beans follows the old western movie cliché of bursting into a saloon and yelling he’s discovered gold. Some of the boozers and the bartenders high-tail outside.
That background drawing is how the scene ends. And Avery aims the camera at it for 2½ seconds. Why? In later years, he and Heck Allen would have come up with a gag (in fact, he did in the 1944 Droopy short The Shooting of Dan McGoo, where the bartender ran off to reveal he was standing in front of the picture of a sexy woman with no body).
Later in the sequence, Avery does come up with a gag, and it’s a variation on one you’ve seen in other cartoons. A barbershop quartet is in the middle of “Sweet Adeline” when Beans yells that gold has been discovered. They run off into the distance, but then realise they haven’t finished their song, so they run back, complete it, and (in re-used animation) zip back into the distance. In the last frame, the spaghetti-armed guy looks like he’s floating in mid-air.
The ending follows the Avery credo of doing something you don’t expect. It may not be as entertaining as many of the shorts he made later, but considering Friz Freleng was stuck in the musical/overcome-the-villain template on the Merrie Melodies, but it was a good start to Avery’s directing career.
I always assumed the bar gag was Avery trying to play with audiances' expectations; many probably thought that the bartenders would come back to quickly finish up their orders like in other cartoons.
ReplyDeleteI didn't think that particular gag had been invented yet. Unless it was in a silent comedy, I can't think of an instance of it before 1935.
DeleteAvery aims the camera at the background art of the vacant bar for 2½ seconds for the gag to register, viz: the "boozers" haven't been guzzling booze, but ice cream parlor stuff: a float, a sundae and even a bottle of milk.
ReplyDeleteYou know, this is so obvious now that you say it, I don't know why I didn't see it. It might have registered with me if the characters looked like hard-bitten boozers.
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