Director: Tex Avery
Producer: Fred Quimby
Animation: Preston Blair
Music: Scott Bradley
Voice Characterisation: Frank Graham and Bea Benaderet
Cast: Little Red Riding Hood / Red Hot Riding Hood, Grandma and the Wolf
Date of release: May 08, 1943

In 1994 Red Hot Rising Hood was voted #7 of The 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members of the animation field and is considered by many to be not only Tex Avery‘s finest cartoon but one of the best ever made. It has influenced cartoons and movies ever since; pastiches and tributes to it crop up everywhere from Who Framed Roger Rabbit to The Mask.

As soon as it starts we are in familiar Tex Avery territory, we have a false start. The stuffy narrator proceeds to tell the traditional Little Red Riding Hood fable, but the three central characters, Little Red Riding Hood, The Wolf and Grandma rebel; threatening to quit. “…every cartoon studio in Hollywood has done it this way” moans Red in a hard boiled Brooklyn accent.

Immediately the cartoon re-boots to the bright lights of glamorous Manhattan. The narrator now adopts a more clipped modern style. The Wolf, now dressed in top hat and tails is whistling at female pedestrians from an open-top stretch limousine as he drives across town. We meet the next of our next re-booted character; Grandma! She is seen as a cocktail swigging socialite operating out of a penthouse apartment in a salubrious downtown district.

What follows is probably one of the most iconic scenes in cartoon history. The Wolf arrives at “Sunset Strip” a nightclub boasting “30 gorgeous girls”, one of whom is Red Hot Riding Hood a cabaret singer. Red appears to be an amalgamation of Betty Grable, Lena Horne and Katherine Hepburn. The Wolf settles at a table to watch her act. She arrives on stage in a sexy hood and picnic basket; both are immediately tossed aside to reveal the scantily clad siren of the stage beneath. She sings the wonderfully ribald “Daddy” written by Bobby Troup in 1941. The Wolf, whistles, bangs the table, hits himself repeatedly over the head with and enormous mallet and generally shows his lurid appreciation for Red’s performance; in every way imaginable. Even today this scene seems racy.

Red, refuses the Wolf’s advances and after hailing a Yellow cab, is pursued across town by the Wolf. There is a moment when the Wolf instructs another cab to “Follow that car” only to be left behind on the sidewalk by the overzealous cabbie. Very reminiscent of the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup, made ten years earlier. The Wolf arrives at what he believes to be Red’s apartment block. We see the elevator light rushing up the building, both vertically and horizontally, even skipping from one apartment block to another. Finally the Wolf arrives at the top floor but instead of the curvaceous Red, he is confronted by a sex crazed Grandma, hell bent on having her way with the hapless Wolf. “At last a Wolf, Yahoo!” she whistles.

Grandma chases the Wolf around the apartment and in one fabulous sequence we see a shrinking Wolf, with his back to the wall, wringing his hands as Grandma launches herself and her freshly painted lips across the room, like a rocket. We get a glimpse of Tex Avery’s genius and his attention to details during this sequence and I advise anyone to skip through Grandma’s “leap-of-affection” frame by frame. At first, Grandma is a blur of grey and red, the Wolf ducks and Grandma plants a kiss on the wall behind him. Grandma concertinas to a flat high heeled pancake then recoils, unwrapping and rebounding, whilst her lips are still stuck to the wall. Grandma exits the frame but her lips remain stuck to the wall via an elastic tendril of wrinkled skin, which finally pops free and whips off screen to follow Grandma in her trajectory across the room. A huge lipstick mark is left on the wall, behind a much-relieved Wolf.

Brilliant!

The most famous element is the musical scene where Red performs and “Wolfie”, as she calls him, reacts in highly lustful wild takes. Those reactions were considered so energetic that the censors at the time demanded cuts in this scene and others.
The film’s original conclusion had Grandma marrying the wolf at a shotgun wedding (with a caricature of Tex Avery as the Justice of the Peace who marries them), and having the unhappy couple and their half-human half-wolf children attend Red’s show[citation needed]. This ending, deleted for reasons of implied bestiality and how it made light of marriage (something that was considered taboo back in the days of the Hays Office Code), was replaced with one (that, ironically, has also been edited, but only on television) where The Wolf is back at the nightclub and tells the audience that he’s through with chasing women and if he ever even looks at a woman again, he’s going to kill himself. When Red soon appears onstage to perform again, the Wolf takes out two pistols and blasts himself in the head. The Wolf then drops dead, but his ghost appears and begins to howl and whistle at Red same as before.
Prints with the original ending (where the Wolf is forced to marry the lusty Grandma) and the Wolf’s racier reactions to Red are rumored to have been shown to military audiences overseas during World War II, though it is not known if this print still exists. Source: Wikipedia

The influence of this cartoon is such that it’s iconography permeates pretty pervasively throughout modern culture. Red Hot Riding Hood is a short, colourful gem, full of animated jokes and visual flair. Tex Avery at his best! I strongly recommend the readers, indulge themselves in an immediate viewing. It would be seven minutes well spent.