The Great Oscar Baiter

Some may say that I’ve been too harsh on Tweety Bird over the past year. And those people would be dead wrong. I have, if anything, gone far too easy on the yellow bastard, trying to look past my deep hatred for him in order to find what good there was in his various shorts. Hell, the last time we talked about a Tweety short I was downright mildly positive! It took a long shower to get the stink of that off me, I can tell you that much. At any rate, Canary Row marks my last opportunity to dunk on him, so buckle up folks, things might get emotional. Hey, anger and hatred are still emotions! (via Wikipedia) Friz Freleng's Canary Row is, if nothing else, a fairly important short in the history of Tweety and Sylvester, as it marks the first time Granny appeared in a short with the pair. In fact, Canary Row is generally considered her first "official" appearance; granny characters had appeared in shorts since the thirties, but it wasn't until this 1950 short that she b...

Does anyone really like Foghorn Leghorn? He doesn’t seem to have many fans, and yet he’s remained remarkably popular over the years. Maybe people just love the way he says, “I say, I say”; he’s certainly one of the easier Looney Tunes to imitate. Or perhaps he does have a legion of dedicated followers. Who's to say? Whatever the case, it seems the Academy didn’t care for him too much. Of all the Foghorn Leghorn shorts to get released, only one received a nomination, his 1946 debut, Walky Talky Hawky. (via Wikipedia) Much like the recently covered Tabasco Road , Walky Talky Hawky was directed by Bob McKimson; if I had been a little more careful with my planning, I would have avoided putting two of his shorts so close together, but mapping out an entire year's worth of shorts is difficult, and I've only got so much room to kick a short down the road remaining. Anyway, in addition to featuring the debut of Foghorn Leghorn, Walky Talky Hawky also stars Barnyard Dawg (also ma...

While Walt Disney dominated the category for Best Animated Short throughout the entirety of the 1930s, his main competition was right there alongside him from the very beginning. Sure, Flowers and Trees won the very first Oscar in the category. And yes, Disney received another nomination for Mickey’s Orphans. But taking up the third spot on the slate was It’s Got Me Again!, one of the very first Merrie Melodies. Eventually Warner Bros. Animation would become a powerhouse in its own right, surpassing the Mouse in terms of quality and respect amongst animation scholars, if still lagging behind in money, Oscar wins and global ubiquity. Of course it’d be a long road to get there. And as anyone who has seen this 1932 short can attest to, it was one with a pretty rocky start. (via TV Tropes) The premise, at least, is fairly easy to summarize. Directed by Rudolf Ising, a very important but relatively obscure figure in the Golden Age of Animation, It's Got Me Again! follows a nest of ...

Content Warning- Today's short contains racial stereotypes. Tex Avery is generally considered to be one of the most important figures in the history of animation. Moving away from the sentimentality of Disney cartoons or the ho-hum slapstick seen in other studios, Tex Avery pushed the idea that cartoons could do anything, utilizing the medium's full capabilities for absurd character animation and extreme slapstick violence. The time he spent working at Warner Bros. is generally considered to be the dawn of the Golden Age of Animation. So you would assume that today's short, the 1939 Merrie Melodies cartoon Detouring America would be an all time classic. And you would be very, very wrong. (via The Internet Animation Database) Unlike a great deal of Merrie Melodies, there's no real plot to Detouring America; there are none of the classic Warner Bros. characters, instead serving as a humorous travelogue across the United States. And at first, that seems like a pretty ...

I don’t think I’d be ruffling any feathers to say that Mel Blanc is probably the greatest voice actor of all time. How could he not be? He brought the Looney Tunes to life after all. And while directors like Chuck Jones, Tex Avery and Friz Freleng (director of today’s short) play a large part in that, Mel Blanc was really the secret ingredient that made them all come together. Nowadays it takes dozens of actors to do what he could by himself (and nowhere nearly as well). And out of all the shorts he provided voices for, one stood above the rest as his favorite- 1957’s Birds Anonymous. (via Wikipedia) The premise of Birds Anonymous is pretty self-explanatory I think. As Sylvester tries to eat Tweety one day, he is stopped by a soft-spoken orange cat who convinces him to join the titular Birds Anonymous, a support group for cats who want to give up on eating birds. Of course Sylvester being Sylvester, he has a particularly hard time quitting cold turkey, and soon takes drastic measures ...

Last weekend I threw myself a mini- Looney Tunes marathon, watching such classics as Rabbit Seasoning, Hair-Raising Hare, Baseball Bugs and more. And it once again struck me as odd that, for such an iconic character in animation, Bugs Bunny didn’t have much luck with the Academy Awards. Today’s short, 1941's Hiawatha’s Rabbit Hunt, is the second of his three nominations. But at the end of the day, Oscars don’t really matter. What matters is whether or not the shorts were funny. Is this one? Only one way to find out. (via TV Tropes) Directed by Friz Freleng (who seems to come up a lot around here as of late), Hiawatha's Rabbit Hunt follows the standard formula you've come to expect from a Bugs Bunny short. Bugs is minding his own business in the forest (in this case, reading The Song of Hiawatha ), when a dim-witted hunter comes along to make trouble for him. However, instead of matching wits with Elmer Fudd this time around, Bugs has to contend with Hiawatha himself. Gr...

My incredibly negative feelings towards Tweety Bird are pretty well-documented by now. Some might say that they are “ridiculous” and “completely unwarranted” and that I should “seek professional help.” And perhaps those people may have a point! But still I defy you to watch Tweetie Pie, the first pairing of Sylvester and Tweety, and tell me that that yellow bastard has been anything but the worst. (via Wikipedia) By a combination of sheer coincidence and lazy planning, this is the second day in a row we're watching a Friz Freleng short. And while Greetings Bait was pretty atypical for a Merrie Melodies short, Tweetie Pie (which comes to us from the far flung year of 1947) is pretty standard stuff for a Tweety short, or any "hungry animal wants to eat an animal short." Sylvester stumbles across a cute little bird out in the cold and tries to eat it. His owner, however, takes sympathy on Tweety and brings him inside. Hijinks, as they so often do in shorts like these, en...

As I’ve said before, the major and most apparent risk with using pop culture references as a source of humor is that it typically doesn’t age well. Unless you’re referencing something which goes on to become a timeless classic, the best you can hope for is that your joke winds up taking on a strange new life of its own divorced from context. And honestly, sometimes that can work! Case in point- today’s short, the 1943 film Greetings Bait. (via IMDb) Regular readers of this blog should need no introduction to Friz Freleng, the director of this film. Greetings Bait was made during Freleng's stint at Warner Bros. as part of the Merrie Melodies series. But don't expect Bugs Bunny or Porky Pig to show up. No, Greetings Bait features a forgotten member of their stable- a worm. But not just any worm! You see folks, this worm is a caricature of comedian Jerry Colonna! For those of you who don't know who that is, don't worry- you're not alone. Far from it, actually! How c...

Content Warning- Today's post contains discussions of suicide When it comes to the iconic characters Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, I’ve made my feelings fairly clear. Bugs Bunny is hilarious. Pepe Le Pew is not. Speedy Gonzales is a badass. Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner are the poor man’s Tom and Jerry, and there’s nothing wrong with that. And Tweety Bird , of course, is my mortal enemy. But somehow, despite being the absolute worst Looney Tune, the Academy loved them some Sylvester and Tweety shorts. Which is unfair on two levels; it was unfair to the much better shorts that they ignored, and it was unfair to associate Sylvester with Tweety Bird. As we’ve seen with Speedy Gonzales, Sylvester can be a great character under the right circumstances. And as his debut short, Life with Feathers, shows, sometimes the right circumstances are incredibly dark. (via Wikipedia) Life with Feathers is another short from animation legend Friz Freleng, this time released in 1945. ...