Word: clampetts
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...animation, this is a Golden Age. Not since the 1940s -- with Pinocchio and Dumbo from Walt Disney and the great cartoon shorts by Tex Avery at MGM and by Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones at Warner Bros. -- has the form been so commercially successful and artistically exhilarating. Moreover, at a time when mass art is fragmented, even divisive -- when virtually no species of entertainment has universal appeal -- the hip, comic ingenuity and emotional breadth of the best cartoons reunite the consumers of popular culture with Hollywood's surest instinct to please in a vast Saturday matinee of the spirit...
...been higher. Steven Spielberg and Warner Bros. have joined forces to produce Tiny Toon Adventures, featuring kiddie counterparts of famous Looney Tunes characters like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. The weekday series, debuting in September, is animated in the witty, wildly elastic style of such cartoon pioneers as Bob Clampett and Tex Avery. Disney is adding two more cartoon shows to an afternoon lineup that already includes DuckTales and Chip 'n' Dale's Rescue Rangers, TV's two highest-rated (and best-animated) syndicated children's shows. The Fox network is entering the fray with Peter Pan and the Pirates...
Daffy was not real, of course -- just a sheaf of drawings flipped past the eye at 24 frames per second. But the comic artistry of such directors as Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett made Daffy and the other denizens of the Warner Bros. cartoon barnyard seem as vivid as Sly Stallone and twice as funny. They surely seemed so to Greg Ford, a scholar-evangelist who has mounted cartoon retrospectives at museums and revival houses. Last year Warners hired him and Animator Terry Lennon to write and direct the little black duck's comeback vehicle...
...their company, it takes a stern suspension of belief to remember that these star actors were born and raised in the genially warped minds of a cell of young cartoonists 40 and 50 years ago. Of the six major Warner's directors--Jones, Isadore ("Friz") Freleng, Robert McKimson, Bob Clampett, Fred ("Tex") Avery and Frank Tashlin--the first three spanned virtually the entire life of the shop, from the early or mid-30s until it was closed in 1963. In 1937 Warner's hired Mel Blanc, the man of a thousand funny voices, most of them sounding like a Bronx...
...year, MOMA visitors and cassette buyers should understand what Critic Manny Farber realized about the Warner's cartoons in 1943, "That ( the good ones are masterpieces, and the bad ones aren't a total loss." It would be fine if films with such titles as Porky in Wackyland (Clampett), Show Biz Bugs (Freleng), Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century (Jones), What's Opera, Doc? (Jones) and Duck Amuck (glorious Jones) were embraced by the canons of academe. But imagining this, one can also hear Daffy grouse, "What a revoltin' development thith ith." Better, perhaps, for the Warner siblings...