Shotgun Non-Wedding

“The worst thing about these nosy people is, they’re always interferin’ with somebody’s love-life,” says the voice of The Cat That Hated People (from the cartoon of the same name).

Further dialogue isn’t needed, like many fine gags in a Tex Avery cartoon. Animation tells all.



The animators in this cartoon are Walt Clinton, Grant Simmons and two ex-Disney artists soon to leave the Avery unit, Bill Shull and Louie Schmitt. The title character is played by Pat McGeehan. The short was released in 1948.

How To Escape From the Moon

Tex Avery’s nameless black cat (Pat McGeehan using a Durante voice) has had enough of abuse on the Moon and wants to return to the abuse of Earth (specifically, the United States of America) in The Cat That Hated People.



But how to get off the Moon when your space ship that crashed into a heap of metal? It’s easy when you’re in a Tex Avery cartoon. “A body can do just about anything,” said one of his characters when Tex was still at Warners. In this case, the cat pulls down a backdrop of a golf course, sets himself on a tee, yells “Fore!” (to nobody in particular, but that is what one does at a golf course), and swats himself toward Earth.



You can check out frames from the next scenes in this post.

Heck Allen gets a story credit, with Louis Schmidt, Bill Shull, Grant Simmons and Walt Clinton credited as the animators.

Cat, Paper, Scissors

The Cat That Hated People (from the cartoon of the same name) meets up with a disembodied hand with scissors chasing a piece of people and trying to cut it.



The paper runs past the unnamed cat. The hand changes its target.



Director Tex Avery uses four drawings of the cat and four more for the scissors. They’re not in a cycle; Avery uses them at random. A couple of extra hands appear.



Handiwork displayed. Gag over. On to the next one.



Walt Clinton, Louie Schmitt, Bill Shull and Grant Simmons received animation credits. Schmitt made the model sheets. Pat McGeehan stars as the cat in this 1948 short.

And If Ya Feel Like Singin'...

The cat that hated people (from the Tex Avery cartoon of the same name) enumerated why he hated people before deciding, at the end of the cartoon, they weren’t so bad after all.

He did it in a series of sight gags. Here’s one where the cat explains what happens when you feel like singing (if you’re a cat on a fence outside at night, that is).



The cat plops away with the boot inside him (and a solo oboe playing) as Tex wipes into the next scene.

Walter Clinton, Louie Schmitt, Grant Simmons and Bill Shull are the animators, with Pat McGeehan voicing the cat.

Approaching the Mysterious Planet

When pretty well all of Leon Schlesinger’s directors were treating frames of film like an audience looking at a stage, newcomer Tex Avery used techniques you’d find in feature films, albeit in some cases he was doing it as a parody. You’ll see “shots” at various angles, with the layouts sometimes being overhead or looking up at the action.

He seems to have done it less after getting settled in at MGM, perhaps because he wanted nothing to draw attention away from the gag. But here’s a cinematic effect treated quite straight in The Cat That Hated People (1948).

After the cat’s rocket ship treats the planets as a pinball game, Avery has the camera move up and in on the world where the ship crashes. He fades into three different background drawings by Johnny Johnsen; the only thing animated is a thin stream of smoke.



It’s done very straight. The same thing was done cleverly and as a joke in the 1946 Warner Bros. cartoon The Mouse-Merized Cat (“Hey, Babbitt! The people are here!” says the Costello mouse in what sure seems like a Bob Clampett cartoon, but isn’t.)

Walter Clinton, Louie Schmitt, Grant Simmons and Bill Shull are credited on this cartoon as animators.