Chuck Jones

We spend a lot of time hereabouts talking about Disney. It’s like I’ve got a whole column about it or something. But even if I’m not our premiere animation expert for general animation, I’m still familiar with other studios. Even outside the US. But no kid growing up in the US in the Golden Age of Syndication could possibly be unfamiliar with the works of Chuck Jones. I’ve done my level best to make sure my children know him as well. I think they saw his work first when they were literal babies and didn’t know what was going on.

People don’t talk about the Looney Tunes shorts as art very often. Oh, Roger did, but Roger’s tastes were known to be wide-ranging. These days, I’m beginning to feel as though we don’t talk about them enough at all. It’s possible, after all, for a studio head to think that removing the shorts from a streaming platform was a good idea that wouldn’t cause general public outcry. For that same studio head to shelve a movie based on Jones characters in the belief that the tax benefit was worth more than the movie. It’s awful to contemplate, given how magnificent the cartoons were.

Oh, and funny. Don’t get me wrong. I think even the ones that are based on pop culture stuff my kids don’t get will often be funny to my kids. After all, they were to me when I was their age. I do have happy memories of my son’s adorable toddler giggle as we watched “Duck Amuck” or “The Rabbit of Seville,” and I will tell you for sure that my son was not familiar with Rossini. He just knew the rabbit and the man were doing funny things.

But “Duck Amuck” is also one of the greatest pieces of absurdism committed to film; Jones describes the creative process as him and writer Michael Maltese hovering together over the drawing board laughing, with the only problem being who to make Daffy’s nemesis, since of course his nemesis was Jones himself. The solution was perfect. He frequently worked with Maltese, as well as Maurice Noble, whose backgrounds for “Duck Dodgers in the 24 ½ Century” are little short of astounding.

Oh, it’s true that Jones was lucky, since the stable of artists, writers, and musicians at Warners—to say nothing of the great Mel Blanc and June Foray on voice—allowed his visions and those of the other directors to reach fruition. But this is one of those places where everyone’s talent raised everyone else’s highs to match one another. It would be difficult not to test what Mel Blanc could do if you had the chance. And Jones spoke highly of composer Carl Stalling. All in all, it sounds like, unlike across town, everyone at Warners animation was great at what they were doing except for management.