Please visit my friend and colleague Frank Young’s new blog devoted to the cartoons Tex Avery directed at Schlesinger’s. As proven repeatedly on his soon-to-be retired John Stanley blog, Frank is an excellent critic and analyst of the popular arts. He’ll be going through the Avery WB shorts in order of release and already has a microscopic examination of Gold Diggers of ’49, a cartoon that, by his own admission, isn’t very good in spite of its historical significance.
I agree with Frank that the Avery Schlesinger shorts were the most important in pulling the animated cartoon short out of its acquiescence to Disney in the 1930s. They may falter stacked against his filmography at MGM, but that’s only natural since Avery was developing his style and skill during his Schlesinger tenure.
Instantly bookmarked this website! Watching “Northwest Hounded Police” as a kid was one of the biggest reasons that I wanted to be a cartoonist. Tex Avery ranks as being one of my all time favorite animation directors and someone who continues to influence me to this day. It will be good seeing someone go through his work at the Schlesinger Studio and maybe discover some titles that I’m not familiar with. I hope Frank Young is also able to pinpoint things that might have inspired Tex’s later work at MGM.