Director: I. Freleng
Story: Ted Pierce
Animation: Manuel Perez
Voice Characterisation: Mel Blanc
Musical Director: Carl W. Stalling
Cast: Bugs, Sylvester the hound dog, Old Lady.
Date of release: February 22, 1944

This 1944 short was apparently the first Friz Freleng-directed Bugs Bunny cartoon to use the modern design.

From the opening shot of a house in winter snow and the sound of clarinets climbing a scale as the wind whips snow across the scene, we can guess that someone is going to end up out in the cold.

Inside a snug living room a spoiled hound dog, Sylvester, is being tucked up by an old lady by the light of a roaring open fire. There is a knock at the door and the old lady (voiced by Bea Benaderet who went on to find fame as the voice of Betty Rubble in the Flintstones!) is horrified to find a “poor little rabbit out in the cold”. She carries Bugs to the fire and Sylvester is promptly displaced.

A green rug beneath the dog, seems a bit of a problem. It vanishes reappears and shifts colour throughout the cartoon as it is sometimes on the character cell and at others drawn onto the background.

There is a sequence early on where the jealous Sylvester imagines all the dastardly ways that he could get rid of the unwelcome visitor. The rudely drawn contents of Sylvester’s thought bubble are our first indication that he rather a simple character. This is reinforced by the hound’s simpleton voice characterisation, by writer Ted Peirce as Sylvester throws Bugs out into the cold for the first time.

So the set up of the entire cartoon is established here after 1 minute 45 seconds.

While Bugs is building a frozen likeness of himself to trick his way back into the house he launches into a timelessly funny monologue.  During this scene a peculiar discrepancy in the Sylvester design can be noted. As the dogs listens to Bug catching “pneumonia” his head becomes huge. Presumably to emphasise the wide eyes as Sylvester becomes wracked with guilt at Bugs’ “demise”.

According to Wikipedia the version of this cartoon that aired on TBS cut the part where as Sylvester the Dog is sobbing over melting the snowman likeness of Bugs, believing he killed him. Bugs says to Sylvester, “You’re really in a jam now, Doc. It’s the hot seat for you, sure.”

The rest of the cartoon is filled with various pranks and gags cantering around Sylvester and Bugs’ frantic struggle for domestic supremacy. A couple of highlights for me were the scene when Bugs places the frozen stiff Sylvester in front of the fire and hastily pretends to draw him. The old lady is fooled into thinking Sylvester is posing for the artistic rabbit (who is drawing his thumb) and tiptoes back up stairs leaving the now thawed out Sylvester to continue his battle with Bugs.

There a sublimely well-placed punch to Sylvester’s rear that illustrates brilliantly the animation principle of “Squash and Stretch”.

The short ends superbly as the action ratchets up with a simple repetition of Bugs and Sylvester taking it in turns to be ejected through the open doorway, finally culminating in the ejection of the old lady herself. We are treated to a final short of the reconciled Sylvester and Bugs relaxing, undisturbed in front of the open fire. Bugs gets the last laugh by breaking down the fourth wall and addressing the audience directly with “Ain’t I a stinker!”

Aside from the rather random title (the cartoon has nothing to do with the Air Force) it is filled with some really nice Bugs Bunny characterisation. While Sylvester the dog is a likable boob it is hard to believe that he would ever manage to get one over on Bugs.

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.

Director: Tex Avery
Story: Rich Hogan
Animation: Ray Abrams, Irvin Spence, Preston Blair, Ed Love
Music: Scott Bradley
Voice Characterisation: Pinto Colvig as ‘Practical Pig’ and Bill Thompson as Adolph Wolf.
Cast: The Three Little Pig and Adolph Wolf
Date of release: August 22, 1942

This Academy Award nominated animation was Tex Avery‘s first cartoon for MGM after his split from Warner Bros. Blitz Wolf is considered to be on of the earliest World War II propaganda cartoons. The cartton is essentially a re-telling of the Three Little Pigs story, in which the pigs are cast as soldiers fighting the invading Adolph Wolf (apparently featuring the uncredited vocal talents of Droopy himself Bill Thompson).

It could be argued that the pigs actually represent the attitudes of the American public before Japan bombed Pearl Harbour in 1941. The ‘Practical Pig’ (voiced by Goofy himself Pinto Colvig) is ridiculed by his lack-a-daisical brothers for over-zealous preparations for the coming conflict, which they believe will never arrive.

The ‘Practical Pig’ is laughed at and a peace treaty is waved in front of his face.

“Why this isn’t worth the paper it’s written on…”

These days this cartoon, is rarely broadcast; certainly not in its original form. Many of the jokes are too strong for modern audiences, especially the cartoon’s many racial slurs against Germans and the Japanese.

The cartoon itself is stuffed full of typical Tex Avery gags. Virtually everything in the short is anthropomorphic: bombs, tanks, bullets, war machines and even the central cast. There are also a lot of signposts. It seems as if typographic conventions used in traditional newspaper cartoons are very much alive in this new medium.

Writers during this period would think nothing of having a character produce a sign from behind their back or from their inside breast pocket to impart some witty remark using plain old fashioned type. When the invading Wolf blows down the house of straw with the magnificent “Der Mechanized Huffer und Puffer” a signpost is revealed that reads “Gone With The Wind” quickly followed by another pointing out “Corny gag isn’t it?” Personally I find these textual jokes quite charming, but I wonder how often we see text used in this way in animations today?

One of the censored scenes is the payoff of delicious gag which follows the Three Little Pigs standing on each others shoulders in order to aim and fire an enormous cannon. The camera pans up the length of the barrel for a whopping thirty seconds; through clouds and past the ubiquitous signpost reading “Darn long thing – Isn’t it?” before firing its shell at the Pagoda strewn, Red-sun-bathed, Japan.

When broadcast on Cartoon Network recently this scene was re-edited so that the target was replaced by the Wolf. I roll my eyes with despair. The Second World War happened! Although I have heard that producer Fred Quimby cautioned Tex Avery to be careful during production, “After all, we don’t know who’s going to win the war.”

Following the detonation of the Pigs’ secret weapon “Defence Bonds” we follow the vanquished Adolph Wolf down an impossibly deep crater to hell. “Where am I? Have I been blown to…” he asks, whereupon he is interrupted by a troop of trident-wielding demons who reply “Errr, it’s a possibility!” The catchphrase of a popular comedian on the day, Jerry Colonna.

A great example of Tex Avery at work. The lush (oddly World War I) backgrounds are wonderful, the ‘karkee’ colour grading gives the cartoon a fittingly unhealthy hue and the inventive animation mark it as a classic, albeit a controversial one.