What About Thad?

I was fairly shocked to see how nice the Warner characters looked in the first half of this 1986 commercial, and it took me about three seconds to realize that Virgil Ross animated that section. This was probably the last time he ever animated the characters, and it might have been his last animation period. (Greg Duffell, please confirm this if you’re reading.) Ross (and Ben Washam) seemed to have settled on a set style for the Warner stable around 1955 and continued drawing and animating them that way for the rest of his career. And I’m sure that drink tastes exactly like Bugs Bunny & Pals.

(Thanks, Mike Matei)

Yeah, I know, it’s been really disheartening coming here day after day and seeing Pervis at the top of the page. I’ve been busy and having computer troubles for awhile. Hopefully this new MacBook Pro will make life right.

No earth-shattering title card discoveries. But here’s a Bob Clampett cartoon I’ve been giving a closer look at lately. This is from his stellar 1938 season of black-and-white Porky Pig cartoons, before things started to go south for him for awhile, when he grew tired of the poor pig.

All of the Clampett trademarks are in place by this point: rubbery animation, great synchronization to music, plain fun, racy/topical jokes (including that incessant one about Eddie Cantor nobody but Clampett found funny), and even some animation reuse from Pettin’ in the Park of some of the animals in the water, but here it at least it matches the drawing style. They may have even been scenes Clampett animated himself in that cartoon (it was his first credit at the studio).

Quite a few Clampett partisans seem to think that his unit of animators were substandard (and therefore responsible for the downturn in the quality of his shorts about halfway through 1939), but a cartoon like this belies that. The animation is of course a far-cry from the later heights he’d achieve with Rod Scribner, but as far as pure funny timing and movement is concerned, most of this cartoon is at least on the same level as the best Fleischer cartoons – by no means a small feat.

Enjoy this trip to the beach as the impending snow approaches.

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