The Great Movies III

With commentary tracks, interviews, and documentaries, the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes Golden Collections on DVD surround the films with the legend and lore of Termite Terrace, where the animators and their writers and assistants labored in the 193os and 1940s under the unloved producer Leon Schlesinger. He was an independent contractor supplying cartoons to Warners, and he required every animator (including Jones, Tex Avery, Friz Freleng, and Bob Clampett) to produce ten cartoons a year, one every five weeks, with two weeks for vacation. Schlesinger sold out to Warners in the mid-40s, but lived on in the legends of the Termites.

I met Jones (1912-2002) and his wife, Marian, many times at the Telluride Film Festival, and spent a week with them on the QEII during Telluride's twenty-fifth-anniversary cruise. I heard again and again about Schlesinger, his cluelessness, his rigidity, his time clocks, and especially his weird Trumpian comb-over. "Leon never did figure out that he was the inspiration for Daffy Duck,"Jones chuckled. At last, in a 1940 Friz Freleng short named "You Ought to Be in Pictures" in one of the Warner's collections, I've seen Schlesinger for the first time, and, oddly enough, he looks a little like Elmer Fudd and, yes, he has the most unconvincing hair I have ever seen.

The animators sometimes bent Schlesinger's rules to make more ambitious cartoons. Working with Michael Maltese, the writer of all three of the National Registry cartoons, Jones knocked off a Road Runner short in three weeks flat to steal time for "One Froggy Evening," which required extra attention for its singing and dancing frog. More time was needed, too, for "What's Opera, Doc?" in which Elmer Fudd plays a Wagnerian warrior and Bugs Bunny, in drag with blond pigtails, is Brunnhilde.

Of the three titles, the strangest is "Duck Amuck,"which plays with the reality of the genre. In it Daffy Duck is aware he's a character in a cartoon and shouts angry tirades against his animator, who strikes back with pencil, eraser, and paint brush. Daffy begins as a dueling musketeer but suddenly runs out of background and is marooned on an empty white screen. He demands a backdrop, and a brush enters the frame to paint a farm. Daffy, a trouper, starts singing "Daffy Duck, He Had a Farm." But the backgrounds change with sadistic glee: snow, a beach in Hawaii. Then he is erased. He reappears with a guitar but cannot make his music heard, and holds up a sign saying "Sound, Please!" He gets a machine gun and a klaxon.

"I've never been so humiliated in my life," Daffy complains. There's more. He's on a desert island that's a speck in the distance. "Give me a closeup!" he demands. The island is framed in a small box surrounding the speck with black. "This is a closeup?"The camera zooms to his bloodshot eyes. Soon "The End" appears on the screen, and Daffy angrily pushes the letters offscreen and gets into a fight with curtains of black ink that threaten to obscure him. It's a fight to the finish between a cartoon character and his medium, with a twist at the end when we find out who the animator is.

The subtext of "Duck Amuck" is Daffy's desire to be the star of the studio, and his career-long rivalry with Bugs Bunny, who came along just as Daffy was becoming Warner's star. In both "Duck Amuck" and "What's Opera, Doc?"Jones gives himself freedom to rewrite cartoon conventions.

In the opera spoof, bits of half a dozen Wagner operas create a pastiche of romantic turmoil as Elmer woos Bugs. There are sensational shots (the opening lightning storm) and quieter moments that surprise us, as when Elmer Fudd seems sad and takes the plot seriously. For the first time, we feel sorry for this creature who exists to be the foil of Bugs. There is a scene where Bugs appears to be dead, tears drop from a flower on a broken stem, and Elmer mourns, "Poor little wabbit."Jones seems perilously close to breaking through the ritual of the Elmer-Bugs feud into the reality of their endless Sisyphean rivalry. At the end, amazingly, Elmer is not defeated, but strides off in his helmet and with his spear, the wabbit under his arm. Doesn't that break all the rules?

Bugs then asks us, "Well, what did you expect in an opera? A happy ending?"

"One Froggy Evening" is a parable starting with the old joke about a guy with a talking frog. A construction worker opens a time capsule from a demolished building and finds a frog who puts on a top hat and dances while singing "Hello, My Ragtime Gal."Later, he will perform an Irish ballad and the aria "Largo al factotum" from 7be Barber of Seville.

Dollar signs dance around the construction worker's head as he imagines the frog as a box-office bonanza. But the frog will sing only for the worker; it clams up and goes limp when anyone else is listening. In despair, the worker seals the frog inside another time capsule, and we see it being discovered by another worker, a century in the future, who is also delighted by its act.