What About Thad?

I haven’t gotten to reviewing the December release of Foghorn Leghorn & Friends: Barnyard Bigmouth until now, so I’m glad to say that Warner Home Video improved its standards for the [still] half-assed Looney Tunes Super Stars series. Thanks to our many nasty reviews and comments about the first botched batch, the widescreen problem has been amended. Kind of. On this disc, you have the option to watch it in ‘fullscreen’ (the way it was made) and ‘widescreen’. Of course, they still lie to us with a deliberately misleading selection screen:

A more apt comparison would be as follows:

But I digress. The cartoons are still intact, and they all look great. Now the caveat: most of these cartoons aren’t very good at all, and you know things are getting bad when one of the best cartoons in the compilation is from 1963 (the very funny Banty Raids, pictured above). Bob McKimson started his directorial career in 1945 solidly, and got quite a few years of very funny cartoons under his belt. The Foghorn Leghorn series was the cream of that crop, as proven by cartoons like Crowing Pains and The Foghorn Leghorn, where the laughs come not so much from the gags themselves (though they quite often do), but how bombastically they’re played out. After a few years though, before the shutdown even, McKimson got in a real rut, turning out cartoons clearly below the level Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng were.

Most of his great animators (Manny Gould, Pete Burness, Bill Melendez, Emery Hawkins) had already left at that point, and his Bugs and Daffy shorts became real ‘business-as-usual’ pictures. Even the Foghorn cartoons began to slip, with something like All Fowled Up (the last one done before the shutdown, mostly with Jones animators because McKimson’s crew had mostly jumped ship at that point), featured on this disc, barely being able to sustain six minutes. There’s some bright spots if you look for them, like the always endearing animation of Rod Scribner (if you can forgive his talent is clearly not being utilized), but they’re largely forgettable.

This mantra sounds the same as usual, but that’s because it’s absolutely true, and it’s strongly evident with this collection. It’s basically the disc in a later Golden Collection you’d watch least, in that it’s really scraping the bottom of the later Looney Tunes barrel. One thing that became apparent watching McKimson’s cartoons in such pristine shape is how stiff the character animation had gotten. The quality seriously recedes to Hanna-Barbera TV level, with maybe a couple more drawings (the John Seely canned soundtracks on Weasel While You Work and Gopher Broke really drive this point home). McKimson was clearly just going through the motions at this point to get a paycheck. I wonder what was going on with him personally that sucked out all the enthusiasm and sheer joy so apparent in his earlier work.

It took a bit longer for the reality of the dwindling budgets to affect Jones and even Freleng; around roughly 1960 is when an assembly line feel became dominant in most of their respective work. Compare the hysterical Two Crows from Tacos, tag-teamed beautifully between Virgil Ross and Art Davis, to the unbearable Crow’s Feat, a cartoon with no Davis (he had left the studio) and the deteriorating Gerry Chiniquy’s style dominating the picture over Ross and even Hawley Pratt. True, gags and timing is everything (it’s easily one of Freleng’s worst) but shoddy drawing and animation does no one any favors.

So in all, is this disc worth buying? If you truly want to have every Warner cartoon on DVD, absolutely buy it, as there’s some funny moments if you scour through it, like the Mike Maltese scripted Fox-Terror, the most bizarre Foghorn cartoon ever. It’s worth buying if you’re a student of animation too, just to study the deterioration of a very talented animator. But if you’d just like to enjoy the best of what Bob McKimson has to offer, just stick with what’s been made available on the Golden Collections, and hope that some of the brutally funny earlier Foghorns are released restored.

No need for further lengthy, masturbatory prose on the subject from I, as it’s been done. If you consider yourself any kind of fan of classic animation, this needs to be in your library. Here’s a run-down of which of the Snafu shorts require your closest attention, a ‘top ten’ if you will.

Spies (1943, Chuck Jones). Easily one of the greatest Warner cartoons of all time, with its peppy tailing of Snafu as he does himself in. Also has the great gag of a Nazi spy using her tits as a radio device.

The Goldbrick (1943, Frank Tashlin). A fairly morbid warning against being lazy. Tashlin uses some very subtle, stylized ways of animating here, the hardest scene being the above frame where three different characters do three different actions (with little to no holding of the poses).

Fighting Tools (1943, Bob Clampett). The ending is fairly reminiscent of some of those lackluster Lou Lilly scripted cartoons, which try to end ironically but just ends mean. But it’s only reminiscent, because the ending is still funny in spite of it being in a concentration camp. Features one of the best run cycles ever animated (by Rod Scribner).

Rumors (1943, Friz Freleng). The weirdest cartoon I. Freleng ever did. Snafu succumbs to a Seussian epidemic of Rumoritis.

Booby Traps (1944, Clampett). This one almost didn’t make it, because in my opinion, Clampett didn’t take it far enough. There should have been a scene where Snafu tries to fuck one of the decoy girls, and the vaginal wall is lined with acid or rigged with a land mine. Or both. But we can’t have everything.

Snafuperman (1944, Freleng). The opening sequence at Snafu’s bed is some of the best animation Virgil Ross ever did. It’s very elegant and clearly defines the characters without resorting to overacting, while still maintaining massive appeal. The cartoon is also very funny.

Private Snafu Versus Malaria Mike (1944, Jones). Bobe Cannon animated almost all of this cartoon, save two or three scenes. It’s some of the best work he ever did, accomplishing the amazing feat of making Snafu’s ass a character all its own.

Gas (1944, Jones). Another cartoon devoted to a Billy Bletcher voiced, Cannon animated character.

Censored (1944, Tashlin). The charismatic auteur was using camera tricks to cover up breasts long before he directed Jayne Mansfield. It’s another one to add to the list of Tashlin films showcasing his leg fetish, too, since those are given more prominence than the mammaries.

Outpost (1944, Jones). Not to come off as a Cannonphile, but this series really was a moment in the sun for him. Another one that showcases the animator’s gifts, this time in handling pantomime and the female figure. I’m curious if Jones pulled Cannon off of the unit’s theatrical shorts during this period, as he often has the lion’s share of footage in these cartoons, while the amount of Cannon animation done for the home front dropped considerably.

Maybe more thoughts later…