How to Hurt a Tail in Nine Frames

Tex Avery gets credit for picking up the pace of theatrical cartoons in the 1940s, but the artists at MGM were quite capable of fast action before he got there.

In one scene of Wanted: No Master (1939), Count Screwloose races into the bathroom, races out, then races in again. J.R. the Wonder Dog’s tail gets caught behind the door.



The reaction drawings below are all one per frame. I love the exaggerated open mouth. It’s like something in an Avery cartoon.



There’s some really frantic animation as J.R. tries to free his tail. Devon Baxter tells me it its all by Bill Littlejohn. No animators are credited on the film (frames from Mark Kausler).

This short was the product of New York newspaper cartoonist Milt Gross, whose career in the MGM cartoon department lasted from May to September 1938. The California-based animators didn’t hit it off with easterner Gross, and producer Fred Quimby didn’t like his work, either. Pretty soon, Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising were brought back in to stem the turmoil, and wildness in the studio’s cartoons pretty much had to wait for Avery’s arrival.