Out-Foxed Background

Johnny Johnsen has a few long backgrounds in MGM’s Out-Foxed (released in 1949), including a painting with overlays that opens the cartoon and owes its life to the Warners cartoon Of Fox and Hounds (released in 1941).

Here’s another one. My apologies that the colours don’t blend after putting the frames together.



Like Johnsen, The layout artist is uncredited.

The fox is named “Reginald” even Daws Butler’s voice evokes Ronald Colman.

Limited Animation of Tomorrow

As he got further and further into his tenure at MGM, Tex Avery didn’t waste time when pulling gags, and didn’t waste animation if he didn’t have to.

Here’s an example of one of his gags in Car of Tomorrow. It takes up four seconds of screen time, and contains no animation.

Narrator Gil Warren describes various features of futuristic cars at an auto show. There’s a shot of a car. He says “The newest thing in sun visors.” The camera pulls back on Johnny Johnsen’s drawing for the gag.



Full page ads in trade publications in 1951 shouted the cartoon was screened at a sneak preview of An American in Paris at Loew’s 72nd Street in August. There is no mention of Tex Avery. Just Fred Quimby.

In Johnsen’s painting, you’ll notice the bullet nose in the front, influenced by the 1950 Studebaker Champion. The 1949 Ford had a bullet nose as well and the company released a 25-minute, live-action film in June 1952 called Tomorrow Meets Today, which featured futuristic designs. General Motors’ Oldsmobile division came out with a 25-minute live-action shot made by Jam Handy in 1948 called The Car of Tomorrow, Today. (GM was back in 1956 with Your Keys to the Future, made by Dudley Films).

“A cartoon which will delight all motorists,” declared the Motion Picture Herald on Nov. 22, 1952.

There’s no indication who came up with the designs for the cartoon. The animators were Mike Lah, Walt Clinton and Grant Simmons.

Distaff Car of Tomorrow

Tex Avery’s Car of Tomorrow (released in 1951) has some topical gags making fun of the Hudson (step-down car) and the Studebaker (front is same as back), as well as some tried-and-true oldies (mother-in-law).

And the man who brought the world a sexy Red Riding Hood also gave us sex in a car.

Avery and writers Rich Hogan and Roy Williams concoct a sequence about a feminised car, with the clichéd description recited by June Foray. It’s a “stunning Paris creation...in a delicate shade of seashell pink.



The camera cuts to a close-up of the window curtains “in polka-dot Swiss organdy.”



There’s another close-up cut to what looks like pansies in the fender, but the narrator (or, in the ‘50s was she a “narratrix”?) informs us they are “Peruvian poppies.”



Cut to a longer shot of the side of the car with a description of the white lace, and then there’s another cut and a pan-down shot of the front of the car with a plunging neckline gag “revealing almost the entire fan.” This was a time when Faye Emerson “plunging neckline” gags were big.



Avery cuts back to the side view of the car and pans across revealing it has a butt “in a flattering bustle effect.” (He also pulled off a car/butt gag in One Cab's Family).



Background artist Johnny Johnsen saves money for producer Fred Quimby in this sequence. There is no animation at all, just camera movement over his paintings.

This was the second in Avery’s “Of Tomorrow” series, which began with The House of Tomorrow (1949), continued with TV of Tomorrow (1952) and ended with The Farm of Tomorrow (1954).

Big Heel-Watha Background

A pan over a Johnny Johnsen background was a favourite way for Tex Avery to start a cartoon. Generally, there was an overlay of some kind panned at a different speed to add depth.

These are parts of the opening background of Big Heel-Watha (1944). The tall fir trees in front are on an overlay. You can see they’re at different spots over the background, as the camera moves left to right.



I’m not certain about any of the Tex Avery’s MGM layout people at this point. Claude Smith designed characters and he may have done the setting layouts, too, though Avery supervised everything pretty closely.

Ed Love, Preston Blair and Ray Abrams animated the cartoon. The opening narration is by Frank Graham.

Wags To Riches Backgrounds

Johnny Johnsen invents a long living room over which Tex Avery pans in Wags to Riches (1949). I’ve had to break it up because it’s really long.



I have no idea who was doing Tex’s layouts at this point.

Out-Foxed Background

Tex Avery’s Of Fox and Hounds (1940) at Warner Bros. opened with a pan shot of a fox hunting club, with trees, a sign and a stone fence.

Avery’s Out-Foxed (1949) at MGM begins the exact same way.

The foreground trees, stone fence and sign are on an overlay which has been shot differently than the main drawing to add depth, so the frames can’t be clipped together. We’ll have to do them separately.

By comparison, here are some almost equivalent (and unrestored) frames from Hounds. It’s not the exact same background, but must have been used as an inspiration to the second one, which is longer on the right side to accommodate the hounds and the huntsman that arent in the Warner’s short.

Johnny Johnsen was responsible for both background paintings. He was a generation older than Avery. The Los Angeles Times published one of Johnsen’s sketches in its Sunday Arts section on August 6, 1905 with the explanation:

ART NOTES.
The interesting pen-and-ink drawing which we reproduce this week was done by John D. Johnsen, a young Norwegian-American, hardly twenty years of age, who is a student of the Los Angeles School of Art and Design. Mr. Johnson, who has been a student of the school only nine months, shows much more than the usual promise. His work is as vigorous and direct as his own personality. His aim is to become an illustrator, and his quick rendering of courtroom scenes, street; crowds, etc., show much aptitude for a most difficult branch of the illustrator's art. The art world of Los Angeles will watch his development with much interest—for he will soon prove himself a force to be reckoned with.

Johnsen also held a patent on a process to produce colour printing plates, according to the Times of August 30, 1917. You can learn more about him in this post.

Avery’s animators are Mike Lah, Walt Clinton, Bobe Cannon and Grant Simmons. This is the second of five shorts at MGM that Cannon worked on after coming from Disney and before moving on to UPA in 1947.

Little Johnny Jet Backgrounds

Little Johnny Jet and his father roar high over farmland and cities created by background artist Johnny Johnsen.



Little Johnny Jet (1953) features animation by Ray Patterson, Grant Simmons, Mike Lah, Walt Clinton and Bob Bentley. Heck Allen gagged the short with director Tex Avery. This was the first cartoon Avery made when he returned from about a year's leave of absence.

Barn Dance

Lem and Daisy Goon square dance in a barn in Tex Avery’s The Hick Chick (1946).



The background is by Johnny Johnsen.

I don't know if this is a Preston Blair scene, but he, Ed Love, Walt Clinton and Ray Abrams are the animators.

A Gander at Mother Goose Backgrounds

Tex Avery jumps into familiar territory in the Warners spot-gagger A Gander at Mother Goose (1940). There’s Sara Berner as Kate Hepburn, a dog/tree routine and the kind of quiet-noise gag he liked to do. He sets things up as calm and peaceful, then some character screams or makes a lot of racket.

In the final gag, Tex engages in something he loved—a slow pan over a Johnny Johnsen scenic background, with something in the foreground moving at a different pan rate to create a 3-D effect. In Goose, narrator Bob Bruce recites the opening to “A Visit From St. Nicholas” (“’Twas the night before Christmas....”)



He dissolves into another background and trucks the camera in. It saves work by his animation, though not for cameraman Manny Corral.



Tex then dissolves into the pan shot. Carl Stalling plays a clock-like gong in the score for added Christmas calm effect.



Dave Monahan gets the rotational writing credit.

This is the cartoon which features Little Jack Horner with a Bugs Bunny voice and an eagle that says “Doc.” Bugs hasn’t quite been invented yet. Say, Tex, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you take the voice and the “doc,” find a rabbit and...

I'd Love To Take Orders From You Backgrounds

I’d Love to Take Orders From You (1936) has director Tex Avery doing a Friz Freleng cartoon—a young boy and his father, with danger vanquished and a twist ending.

Avery was in a separate building from the rest of Leon Schlesinger’s animation staff, so he had his own unit of animators. You’ve probably seen the picture of them standing at the door of Termite Terrace—Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Sid Sutherland and Virgil Ross. They were the only ones over there, though. Cecil Surry was another animator. He was an import, like Ross, from the Walter Lantz studio.

As for Avery’s background painter, ex-newspaper artist Johnny Johnsen was in Avery’s unit and re-joined him soon after he left for MGM in 1941. How long he worked with Avery, I don’t know, so I can’t tell you if these watercolors are Johnsen’s. I suspect they are; they certainly are as detailed as Johnsen could get. The first one opens the cartoon, the second one comes a little later.





At MGM, Avery would be making fun of the kind of background you see in the opening, with animals (like Sammy Squirrel) making their way along as the painting is panned left to right. You can probably tell there are trees on overlays in the foreground. Unlike later Avery cartoons, they aren’t panned at a different rate than the rest of the background, which gives a nice 3D effect.

Detouring America Backgrounds

Johnny Johnsen brings us cityscapes and nature-scapes (is that a word?) in Detouring America, a 1939 Tex Avery travelogue. Avery was more cinematic at Warners than at MGM. I don’t recall getting this many angles in his Metro cartoons.

There are overlays galore in this short. The buildings in the immediate foreground are examples in the first two frames. There’s a great pan going up the Empire State building that, unfortunately, can not be edited together included here.



There are tree overlays and a cactus overlay. I wanted to clip together the Arctic pan but couldn’t get the colours to match, so you only get a portion of it.



Johnny Johnsen was an artist for a number of newspapers in various states. He was born in Colorado on July 23, 1885 and died Feb 7, 1974 in Los Angeles. He left Warners soon after Avery did and joined him at MGM.