Bird Butt

Dick Lundy’s last cartoon for MGM, Bird-Brain Bird Dog, includes some familiar bits from Tex Avery’s cartoons, and a really odd cut.

Barney Bear shoots his own large butt after his bird-loving hunting dog drew a little quail on it.



Lundy cuts to a close-up of the damage. In the very next frame, he cuts back to the longer shot, but the difference in the action is pretty jarring. These are consecutive frames.



Without a summary of the scenes from the studio, it’s hard to determine if some action was cut. A cue ends when the scene ends, and a new one starts when the next scene begins, so it’s really tough to say if there’s a cut in the soundtrack. It’s possible.

Grant Simmons, Walt Clinton and Bob Bentley are the credited animators (Mike Lah either didn't work on this or his name was omited) and Johnny Johnsen gets a background credit. Heck Allen and Jack Cosgriff provided the gag, including a variation on Avery's "Timber" routine, and characters stacked on top of each other as in Half Pint Pygmy.

MGM had a backlog of cartoons, and this was one of the shorts on a shelf for a while. Not only was Lundy gone from MGM when this short was released on July 30, 1954 (he told Mark Mayerson he left at the end of October 1951), so was Avery, who had come back only to have his unit disbanded in March 1953.