The Extras - A Brief History of Looney Tunes with Jerry Beck

Episode Date: September 28, 2021

"What, no Mickey Mouse?"Legendary animation historian Jerry Beck joins the podcast for a multi-episode discussion on Looney Tunes.  In this first episode, Jerry provides background on how he got into animation history and the importance of his friendship with the iconic Leonard Maltin.  And he provides a brief history of Looney Tunes starting with the character of Bosko, which was influenced by the popularity of Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse.  Mickey’s popularity led moviegoers to pressure the studios for more animation, and led to the popular saying of the day, “what, no Mickey Mouse?”  That pressure eventually led to the development of Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies to create musical cartoons for theatrical release.  Jerry also discusses the development of the Looney Tunes “stars”, including Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and that wacky rabbit Bugs Bunny.  He also discusses the impact of key directors including Tex Avery and the voice of so many Looney Tunes characters, Mel Blanc.  Whether you know the history of Looney Tunes already or are a novice, Jerry tells the story in terms we can all enjoy. The Extras Facebook pageThe Extras Twitter Warner Archive & Warner Bros Catalog GroupOtaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals. www.otakumedia.tv

Hi, I'm film historian and author John Fricke. I've written books about Judy Garland and the Wizard of Oz movie, and you're listening to The Extras. Hello and welcome to The Extras, where we take you behind the scenes of your favorite TV shows, movies, and animation, and they're released on digital, DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K, or your favorite streaming site. I'm Tim Millard, your host, and today I have a very special guest. He is a writer, animation producer, college professor,

and author of more than 15 books on animation history. He is a former studio executive with Nickelodeon Movies and Disney and has written for The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. He has curated cartoons for DVD and Blu-ray compilations and has lent his expertise to dozens of bonus documentaries and audio commentaries. He's currently on the faculty of Cal Arts in Valencia, UCLA in Westwood, and Woodbury University in Burbank teaching animation history. I've had the chance to interview him for numerous animation extras over the years,

most recently for the 50th anniversary Blu-ray release of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? Jerry Beck, welcome to The Extras. Thank you very much. Happy to be here. Love talking about bonus material and extras on physical media. That's my thing. I appreciate you joining the show today. I was looking at your bio, which is very extensive. But one thing that jumped out at me was early in your career, you were a research associate for Leonard Maltin. Tell us a bit about how you got started in animation and working with Mr. Maltin. Well, I'm just that's how it is.

You don't lose your memory of your earliest days and ambitions and things like that. And when I was in high school and early college, I still am a fanatic about animation, cartooning, movies, and loved it. Didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I was thinking of getting into the world of animation, which in the 1970s was a dead end. Not like today, we're in a boom period today. Back then it was nothing but Saturday morning cartoons and the occasional Disney feature and really no room for young people to even join the field because all the old timers were still around from the 1930s and 40s and 50s. I had noticed that the really good stuff in animation was the stuff that was made in the 30s, 40s, and 50s.

And the stuff made in the 1970s when I was coming of age and in high school and college was crap for the most part. There were some beautiful things done overseas and independent films and things like that. I lived in New York, Museum of Modern Art. I got to see animation from around the world. So, you know, the world of animation was sort of open to me. Ralph Bakshi was doing Fritz the Cat and his movies in the 1970s. But mostly the world of the 1970s was pretty poor. So the history was of interest to me. And unlike today, where we have the internet and everything else in the world, we have streaming channels and, of course, Blu-rays and DVDs and things. The only way you could see old cartoons was on Saturday morning on the Bugs Bunny Road

Runner show. And one morning, a famous fateful day for me, one morning I was, and I was probably, I was, oh, I got, I was already out of my house at that point. I was probably, you know, 18 or 19. I was already living on my own. And a cartoon came on, on the Bugs Bunny show and on Saturday morning, and I was turned it on right in the middle. I'm like, Oh, I like, I really liked that cartoon. What's the name of it? And then it just hit me right there. Gee, what is the name of that cartoon? Also had this head in my head, like who directed that cartoon? Or, you know, I had all these questions suddenly popped into my head and there was literally nowhere, nowhere to look up this, what I call simple information.

Nowhere. We didn't have the internet. We didn't have Wikipedia or IMDB or any kind of book on the subject and nothing. So I literally sat down. And from that point on, every cartoon that came on, I wrote down the name of the cartoons. That's all they had on the Bugs Bunny Roadrunner. So they didn't have the credits or anything, just the title. I wrote down the title and then I wrote down what that cartoon was about.

Because as you may know, many cartoons, the cartoons' titles don't really tell you anything about the plot of the cartoon. For example, Roadrunner cartoons, which are all the same, kind of different gags, but the titles are just kind of puns and things. So they don't really relate. But I wanted to finally like write down what was this cartoon and what was it about? And I started doing that. I started doing that in earnest in the next few years in a big way. And one of the luck, unbelievably to me, I had discovered without getting into it too detailed, I discovered the books of Leonard Maltin, books like The Great

Movie Shorts, which were brand new at that time. The great movie shorts is a book where he took all the Laurel and Hardy, Three Stooges, Our Gang, and many, many other short subjects. And he not only wrote about them, but he gave you a filmography of what each one was and who did it and what was it about. And I kept thinking, that's the book I want for cartoons. I want to see that. Kept thinking, that's the book I want for cartoons. I want to see that. Then amazingly, around the same time, his book, The Disney Films, came out in 1973 or so. And that was a complete listing of all the Disney features and had the cartoons in it. And I'm like, okay, this is what I'm looking for.

This guy's great. One day, again, being in New York was so lucky. I was an avid reader of Variety, the weekly Variety, and Village Voice, of course. This was the 70s, so it was kind of underground newspapers and things. One day there was an advertisement for the new school, and I was going to the School of Visual Arts and dealing in animation there and trying to be an animator. It was some kind of an – I don't even know if it was an advertisement.

I just saw something about Leonard Maltin is teaching a class about the history of animation at the New School. I'm like, oh, wow. And it was a college course. It was the real deal. It was not for the general public. You had to be enrolled and tuition and cost hundreds of dollars. And I spent everything to get into that class. I had to meet this guy and he was doing a class on the history of animation. Well, this was what I was into at this time. I got into that class. It cost a fortune, but I did it. I had to. It was a life thing. Met Leonard that day. He autographed my, I have it right here on my shelf, my Disney films book. And he even dated it. So I know what date we met. It was like a January, 1973, I think, or 74. We became instant friends.

The other people in the class, it was like about seven or eight or nine or ten people in the class. And all of them were taking it for credit. I was there for kind of the enjoyment or for the I wanted to soak this knowledge up. But Leonard and I became like almost instant friends because I was like the most enthusiastic person in the class. The other people were just doing the homework and got to get through, get the grades. I didn't I just wanted to dive into this. It was new for Leonard as well. And he kept doing the classes. They finally, I mean, I'm giving you too much of the story, but ultimately we became very good friends. We were friends. And the idea of doing a book based around the history of the American animation studios seemed like a thing that somebody, a college professor that Leonard was at that time,

you know, Leonard was writing articles and things, but he wasn't famous yet. You know, he had done this TV movies guide, his guidebook, you know, about movies on television, and some of these other books, and that was his big fame at that time. And he was teaching college, and he just got it in his mind after it took a long time. Because I met him, like I said, in 73 or 74, and the book of Mice and Magic didn't come out until 1980. So this shows you. And we started working on it. He eventually came around to the idea of doing the book.

Meanwhile, I was already researching history of animation. I said, I got to start with a roadmap. I got to know how many Looney Tunes there were. There was no place to get this. I had to know how many MGM cartoons there were, how many Max Fleischer cartoons there were, how many Terry Tunes, whatever it was. And I started doing a lot of research at the Lincoln Center Library. They have a special library there for entertainment reference. I started working on that there. And I would share this information with Leonard.

And eventually Leonard was like, okay, this is the roadmap. I call it the roadmap because you can see, okay, here's what happened. Just by looking at the filmography, you can get a rough idea of the history of things. So we ended up working together on this book in the late 70s. It took a couple of years to do. Years. And I still remember that even the, there was a year, the book came out in spring of 1980, but I still remember it was a year between when it was completely submitted to the publisher and it coming out. So it was submitted in 79

in the spring. And it was a whole year of, you know, reading the galleys, things that we could do easier on the computer today, but reading the galleys and correcting mistakes and making it right so that when it was published, it was just perfect or as perfect as we could make it at that time. One of the funny things about that was, if you know your cartoons, the Popeye cartoons, especially from the 30s, Max Fleischer ones, they all have titles that are in Popeye speak. So instead of hospitality, the cartoon is actually called something like hospitality. You know, it's misspelled because it's in Popeye speak. And there's a lot of like learn politeness is the name of a cartoon, but it's, you know, so the, the book editors, they would send us back to galleries and they corrected all of the Popeye titles to the correct words. They must've thought we were idiots. And we had to tell them, no, no, no, what we gave you is the right title, the right spelling. So we had to go in and specially fix

that wherever we saw it amongst many other things like that. So anyway, Leonard and I were best friends, still are today. We are still in touch constantly really and uh colleagues and uh that led to the rest of my uh i wanted to do more with animation and that's what i ended up that's uh that's a terrific story the galleys that you're talking about makes me think about nowadays the problem sometimes you get that with autocorrect right you purposefully put in a name or a title and it tries to change it on you. It sounds like you early on really started cataloging Looney Tunes cartoons. Maybe you can give us just a little bit of a background of when you started to do that and then a little detail about the actual early days of Looney Tunes. Stay with us. We'll be right back.

Hi, this is Tim Millard, host of The of the extras podcast and i wanted to let you know that we have a new private facebook group for fans of the warner archive and warner brothers catalog physical media releases so if that interests you you can find the link on our facebook page or look for the link in the podcast show notes. You know, back in those days of the 1970s that I grew up in, there weren't many people really into old cartoons. Nobody even thought about that sort of thing. Disney was getting some recognition. It was the art of Walt Disney. A book had come out around that time that was a beautiful giant Abrams, giant massive coffee table book with tons of images. That was something where there was some interest in classic animation. But beyond that, it was so minor. It was so few people interested in this. It's not that way now,

it seems. But back then, it was really off the charts, not to mention even when I was in high school and college. I mean, that's why I had to go to like School of Visual Arts where people took this seriously. Because, you know, to be into comic books, Stan Lee's comic books, to be in the comic books and cartoons back in the 60s and 70s was like saying to the world you had a problem mentally. It was something you didn't tell people because people looked at you like you were crazy. And so it was kind of an underground. It was kind of cool in a way. In retrospect, you know, the earliest comic book conventions, which I attended in the 1970s, late 60s, it was like a little secret group of a couple of hundred people and scattered,

you know, the real world. So it was an interesting, different time and piecing together this sort of thing. The only plus on this back then was a lot of the participants, not everybody, but a lot of them were still alive. A lot of animation was done in New York, like Popeye cartoons and Fleischer and things like that back in the old days. A lot of those animators were still with us. We could interview them. We could talk to them. We can get artwork for a book. Similarly, in L. LA, a lot of the

artists were still active. So that's an advantage we don't have today. A lot of them are gone. Most of them are gone. So that's what it was like in the putting together of that sort of thing. The Looney Tunes themselves, well, let me try and make this as concise as I can. I have to give you a little bit of background, a little history of animation background here. Movies begin. Animated cartoons are a novelty, a trick film, like George Méliès. The early, early animators, Winsor McCay has to be mentioned, a newspaper cartoonist, and he showed his first animation in vaudeville. So animation was a surprise, a treat. You know, seeing a moving drawing, seeing comic strips from the newspaper come to life was very, very fascinating in the 19-teens, 110 years ago or so. Cartoons were still popular throughout the 1920s. A lot of them were live-action animation, like Coco the Clown. And then occasionally, or once in a while, a personality would develop like Felix the Cat. And people enjoyed watching these little comic adventures. They treated them

no more special by the 20s than, again, comic strips in the newspaper, which were very popular then, more popular than now. But the cartoons were a tolerated enjoyment in a movie show in the 1920s. The big studios that were around in the 1920s, by the mid-20s, we had Paramount and MGM. And, you know, you had these big studios that were forming. They really didn't care that much about animation. It was just another short subject, a little novelty they could throw on the program. But then sound came in. subject, little novelty they can throw on the program. But then sound came in. Without getting into the whole history of Disney, Walt Disney decided to make a sound cartoon that introduced

Mickey Mouse. And that cartoon and the character and the animation that Walt was doing at that time in the late 20s was like electricity. It was a thunderstorm in the world of film. People saw the cartoon, Steamboat Willie. And although you can look at it today and it's very archaic and primitive, it was magical. It was like people were staring at like, oh, how do you do this? Because think about it. We know when sound came in, you remember, you know, those early sound movies, 1928, 29, 30, through maybe roughly 32, 33. There's no background score in a lot of those movies, right? You know, you've seen those really early ones where somebody says something like, what are you doing, Tex? what real life sounded like. Real life doesn't have a background score. So those early movies really reflect, you know, the live action movies reflected real life and how we sound. Really no sound effects, no music.

But what does an animated cartoon sound like? Nobody could care less about thinking about that. But Walt Disney sort of had a necessity to stay in business. And they came up with this cartoon that made sounds and noise and talked and had music wall to wall. And it blew people away. It was like what we think of, I guess, the term today would be like going to Disneyland. You know, it was like, whoa, like just the biggest special effects thing you can imagine. Well, that turned everything around, not only for Walt Disney, but for the field of animation, because suddenly now every studio, every major studio, let's go through some

of them again, RKO, Paramount, Columbia, Universal, every one of them had to have cartoons because, you know why? Because the audience was so enthralled. Everybody was with this, with Disney's original cartoons that it became a staple, something part of the movie bill that every movie theater practically had to run because the audiences were clamoring for a Mickey mouse, a Mickey mouse. It was a famous song written at this time called what no Mickey mouse.

What kind of a party is this? And that song reflects and the expression and expression that was well known in 1929 30. What no Mickey mouse, people actually were outraged if you didn't have a cartoon on the program. That's how popular sound cartoons were in the beginning of sound. And so every studio, every studio affiliated one way or another with an animator or an animation studio. Paramount had Max Fleischer studio, every studio affiliated one way or another with an animator or an animation studio. Paramount had Max Fleischer's studio. Disney originally signed.

He was an independent, and he remained independent because he had been screwed in the silent era by Universal and Oswald the Rabbit. But I won't go into that now. The thing is, he was an independent,, for distribution, he went with lowly Columbia Pictures. Why them? Because, well, they weren't big enough to demand anything more. To get Disney would be, holy mackerel, signing Clark Gable, getting the biggest movie star in Hollywood. But they bent over backwards to give him whatever he wanted to get him. Whereas every other studio, studios like MGM wanted to buy him. They literally wanted to buy his studio, own the character, hire Disney for 10 years or something like that, and keep the cartoons exactly the way they were. People love Mickey Mouse and Steam, but Willie, let's keep making

that for 10 years. Well, Disney didn't want to do that, and I'm getting ahead of myself. But every studio had to do something. And Warner Brothers, amongst all the others, was on the outlook for animators to create a series for them. It was a must. Every studio had to provide cartoons. Remember, this is also an era of block booking, studios owning movie theaters. So Warner Brothers owned its own movie theaters. If they couldn't get the Disney cartoon from another distributor, as long as they had their own built-in supply. Warner's also had another idea. Now I'm getting to the Looney Tunes aspect. Warners had another thought.

With the coming of sound, as you may know, musicals suddenly became a big thing in the late 20s. Then there was a die-out period around 1930, 31 or so. And then it comes back big time with 42nd Street and the other Warner Brothers musicals. But around in that early period when sound was just coming in and musicals were the thing, Warner Brothers and all studios hired their own songwriters. They started hiring people they never had to hire before,

like musicians and songwriters to write songs. And they would buy songs and own the songs. And they saw that if they have to do cartoons, which they kind of sort of had no interest in, this is true of a lot of the bigger, snobbier studios, cartoons were beneath them. It's kind of like the New York Times. They don't run comic strips. Or the Wall Street Journal. It's beneath them to have a comic strip. Well, that's how the studios were back then on this sort of thing. But they kind of had to. Their arm was twisted. In the case of Warner's, their theory was, and it's a good theory, was as long as we've got cartoons, we have to do cartoons. Let's make the cartoons do double duty. They're not only is it a

cartoon, but it can, each one will plug one of the songs we own the rights to and help us sell some sheet music or records. And so for the first many, many years, I want to say almost 10, but let's say certainly the first five years of Warner cartoons, starting with Looney Tunes in 1930, most of the cartoons are either centered around a song that Warner's owns, or it's even titled after the name of the song that Warner's owns. And they did like, you know, We're in the Money or Shuffle Off the Buffalo. These are cartoon titles as well as songs. Everybody at that time, every studio, including Warner's, had to have a Mickey Mouse character because Mickey was the thing. And so they had Bosco, a little boy character

that looked more like Mickey Mouse without the ears than a little boy. He looked like Mickey Mouse. So they even got two of Disney's top animators who split with Disney just as the coming of sound came in. And they decided if he can do it, we can do it. And they set up their own studio. That was Hugh Harmon and Rudolph Ising. And if you put their names together, as their studio did, it was Harmonizing. They were Harmonizing. And they made cartoons in the Disney manner, which was, of course, what everybody wanted, what Disney, what Warner Brothers wanted. And they started the series titled Looney Tunes. And then the next year

they did Merry Melodies, which was also, you know, Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies are knockoff names of what Disney had done in 1929, which was starting a second series called Silly Symphonies. And so they basically were ripping Disney off with their title. And Disney had so established that the Mickey series, which was very popular, but he also established a second series, the Silly Symphonies, which were miscellaneous characters all done to music. Well, Moiners did the same thing. Looney Tunes was their first series and it featured their Mickey Mouse character named Bosco. And then they started the next year, Merry Melodies, a second series, which were miscellaneous new characters, all set to musical beats, or in the case of them, really set to specific songs.

So that's how Merry Melodies and Looney Tunes began. And that was the difference between the two series, why they have two names. People always ask that question. In later years, in order to answer that now, in later years, when color came in, the Looney Tunes remained in black and white because that was accepted at that time. And they had the star character, whoever that was. And the Merry Melodies being unique subjects went to full technicolor. So by the later 30s, the Merry Melodies were color cartoons, the Looney Tunes were black and white. Somewhere around 1942, 43, they all went color. So the designations kind of didn't mean anything anymore. There was a time where Warner's would sell them as two sets of cartoons. You could either buy this or that or both, but it wasn't sold as one

big package of Warner Brothers cartoons. It was sold as two different series. But I can say by somewhere in post-war, it was just listed in the trades as Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies. And I don't know. There must have been somebody. I'd ask later years Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett, who designated later on what was a Merry Melodies or a Looney Tunes? or Looney Tunes. And there really was no, there must've been somebody on high because they were contracted to the studio to provide them with X number of Looney Tunes and X number of Merry Melodies, even though they were really Bugs Bunny appeared in each, you know, it didn't really matter. So that's the early days of Looney Tunes. When did some of the characters, you know, that we associate with Looney Tunes become more prominent?

Well, it was a slow and gradual thing, and I think we're all better for it. Unlike today, the last 30, 40, 50 years of television animation, characters have to be developed immediately, instantly from the first episode on. There's some exceptions to that. from the first episode on. There's some exceptions to that. But for example, if you're pitching today, you know, or 50 years ago, you know, Scooby-Doo, you know, the first episode of Scooby-Doo has all the characters just the way they look today in modern day Scooby-Doo cartoons. There was no what we call development. Whereas in the case of the classic cartoons of the old days, particularly the Looney Tunes, you can see the characters develop on screen. They didn't set out to go, let's create a character Bugs Bunny, and then suddenly it just bloomed. It developed over three or four or five cartoons.

And that's true of some of the other characters as well, most of the other characters. They all kind of develop on screen. So what do I mean by that? Luckily, they start off with this base of having a lot of miscellaneous cartoons that they could play with. They could come up with funny ideas. And from those cartoons, the characters would emerge. By the mid-30s, they had tried several leading men. Yeah, they were men. Leading men characters for the Looney Tunes series. And they had a couple before they hit upon Porky Pig. Porky Pig was the first of the ones we're familiar with. And that character debuted in a merry melody, a miscellaneous cartoon, cartoon based on a song called I Haven't Got a Hat. And the cartoon's premise was, it was kind of a parody of Our Gang. It took place in a classroom,

a school classroom, and the kids would come up and all perform for the teacher. And there was a dog and there was a two little, wait, what were they? Two little cats named Ham and X. Maybe they were dogs. Maybe they were dogs. Ham and X. And then there was Porky and Beans. And Porky was a pig and Beans was a cat. And Porky, they decided just for laughs at that time, politically incorrect today, but they would have Porky be a stuttering character and have that character do a recitation. He'd perform a famous poem, but stuttering. And that was the joke. But people like that, it worked in 1935. It was very funny. And people wanted to see that character again. So they decided to move some of these characters like Ham and X and Porky and Beans into the Looney Tunes as maybe the star

characters. They actually teamed them up in strange ways and made a few gang cartoons like Our Gang within the Black and White Looney Tunes series. 1936, I got to digress this for a second. 1936, you know, the Warner cartoons were not the most popular ones. They were just also rants. The most popular cartoons in 1936 were Popeye from Paramount and Fleischer and Betty Boop and Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Those were the most popular characters. Warner cartoons were just good cartoons, but not anything special. Leon Schlesinger, the producer at that time, the owner of the studio at that time, actually, he sold it to Warner Brothers later in the 40s. He knew he needed some new blood.

He had to figure out something. He wasn't himself an artistically creative guy. He was just a producer. And he ended up hiring now an all-star team. I don't think he even understood what he was doing, but it turned out to be an all-star team of people behind the scenes. Those people included Tex Avery, young cartoonist that worked at the Walter Lance Studio and was just a brash guy who came in and said he had directed cartoons. He kind of didn't, but he did do a lot of work and

gag writing at Walter Lance Studios. And so he hired him and made him an instant director. Frank Tashlin. Frank Tashlin, you know that name. He was the famous later in later life, live action director of Doris Day, Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis, and more comedies, but was a cartoonist back in the 30s, newspaper comics and animation. And he came out from New York to LA and got a job immediately as a director at Warner Brothers. to LA and got a job immediately as a director at Warner Brothers. Unbelievably talented in that regard there. They hired, they needed new music. Music was old hat. They hired a guy who had been doing music. Well, he started doing music in Kansas City. He was the guy Walt Disney brought out from Kansas City to do the earliest Disney cartoons and Mickey Mouse cartoons, a fellow

named Carl Stalling. He ended up freelancing for other studios in the early 30s and Mickey Mouse cartoons, a fellow named Carl Stalling. He ended up freelancing for other studios in the early 30s and then ended up at Warner Brothers in 36, Breath of Fresh Air, and was the Warner Brothers music director for the next at least 20 years. And really, he's revered. I mean, there's soundtrack albums of his work, but his cartoon music is the cartoon music people imitate. So Carl Stalling came in at 36, as did Mel Blanc. Mel Blanc, unknown, trying to get a foothold in radio or voiceovers and cartoons, knocked on the door. They weren't using radio actors or actors in general in cartoons up until around the time Mel Blanc came to Warner Brothers. Because when I say they, I'm talking about not just Warner Brothers, but Disney. Nobody used real actors. They used the animators at the studio to do the voices. Walt Disney is the voice of Mickey Mouse. Why is that? Because that's what they did back then. The animators did the voices. But Mel Blanc came in and he had so many great voices. And they asked him, can you do a stuttering pig? Can you do a drunken bull? Can you do? And he did these things and they were falling on the floor laughing. By the way, I'm modifying these stories for length because there's a lot more to it than this. And he becomes literally not only the voice of Pork comedic timing with the genius of Carl Stalling's music,

Tex Avery, Frizz Freeling, who had been there. He's the standby. He worked with Disney in Kansas City. He started at the Warner Studio with Harmonizing when it started. He was the senior director by 1935, 1936, and made very good, solid cartoons. Great career. I won't even go into his career right now. I could talk about that for two hours.

But major, major guy. Later, later, later in life, you know, 30 years later, created the Pink Panther. And earlier than that, created Yosemite Sam and on and on and on. So this was the beginning right there of the all-star team. They start with Porky Pig, and then finally they make a cartoon where Porky is going to chase, is going to go on a hunt, hunting trip. And he hunts for ducks. And he comes across a crazy duck.

And that becomes Daffy Duck, ultimately. And, you know, the early Daffy Duck is completely loony, toony, crazy, nutty. You know, and the character developed as years on screen. He becomes later on like an egotistical foil for Bugs Bunny. But early on, you know, this is just the way things were done. Ultimately, Porky goes on another hunting trip because the hunting cartoon was so popular. This time he goes after a rabbit. Well, that's just the beginning of the Bugs Bunny story because the rabbit is so crazy that they decide to make many more with the rabbit. And he

gets modified and modified and modified. And by by 1940 finally tex avery makes a cartoon with the rabbit everybody else is they're all kind of putting their own tune sense on making it avery has a blank do the voice like brooklyn he throws in an expression that came from his own childhood background his own his high school background everybody in his school in texas called everybody doc so everybody said hey what are, Doc? So they threw that into the cartoon. What's up, Doc? Comes Bugs Bunny's signature line. And Bugs Bunny is right there in 1940, becomes the number one cartoon character at that time. And then during the 1940s, huge, finally, bigger than Porky Pig or Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny puts Warner Brothers cartoons on the map.

And then it goes on from there. They've created dozens, I guess I'll say, dozens and dozens of characters throughout the years. The Speedy Gonzalez's and Foghorn Leghorns and things like that. I mean, just so many and almost all of them. I'd say, I would say almost, I would say all of them really. I didn't think about it. But almost all of them started out in a one, what we call a one-shot cartoon. A test, a cartoon that was just, hey, this is a funny idea. Or the character is a supporting player in another person's cartoon. They never just came out with speedy, well, they did come out with a cartoon called Speed

Against the Dolls, but there was a prior cartoon with the character that he looks completely different. They would keep honing them on screen. They never came out with something like, it was just the character instantly. And that's that. It was always developed over time. And by 1945, by 1955, by 1960, they have such a menagerie of popular characters coming out of that studio. It's pretty amazing. Last thing thing I want to say is that the Warner studio, I like to say, it's kind of like the Beatles in a way. I even think of I'm a big comic book nut. So the Marvel comics of the 1960s, the Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, comic books of that

period, those were two what I call big bangs. And as is the Warner cartoons in the 1940s and 50s. It's the right people in the right place at the right time. It's the time period. It's the people. It's the place they did it. And that's true of the Beatles. It's true of the Marvel comics in the 60s. And, you know, can it be

repeated? Can it be imitated? Yeah. Can it be repeated? Yeah, I think it could. But, you know, they're trying really right now and doing a very good job at Warner Brothers trying to recapture that 1940s feel for the Looney Tunes. Right. To pick Warner's Gone with the Wind, Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, Citizen Kane. To me, that's what they are. Maybe not everyone, but they belong in that world. They don't belong in the kids' department. They don't belong in the kids' area. They don't belong to be handled.

They belong to be handled, as George Feltenstein has, like the classic films of the studio. Because they are. classic films of the studio because they are. That's been kind of a life's mission for me to try to open people's eyes to that, that I come from an era, like I said before, where people shunned you if you somehow, if somehow it was known you had any interest in old cartoons, I'm trying to bring attention to the fact that these weren't aimed at children. They're, they're fantastic entertainment for any age. They're classic film. And that's weren't aimed at children. They're fantastic entertainment for

any age. They're classic film. And that's what I try to do. You've been listening to the first episode of a multi-part series discussing Looney Tunes with animation historian Jerry Beck. In our next episode, Jerry provides background on his career curating looney tunes titles for release on home entertainment and he discusses his collaboration with warner brothers executive george feltenstein on the fan favorite looney tunes golden collection that was first released on dvd and subsequently on blu-ray in the looney tunes platinum collection and in our third episode we will discuss the bugsugs Bunny 80th Anniversary Collection and get Jerry's input on the recent Space Jam film.

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