The Mr. Jones That Became Mr. Twiddle

For all three of you waiting for an update… not so much of one. I’ve been busy with my new position at WBGO, the jazz station in Newark, so I haven’t cared much about my graveyard of a website. I’ve also been working on a proposal for my second book, which I hope to announce formally in the coming year.

One of the fellows who has been of great assistance in that regard is Will Friedwald, the noted animation and jazz historian, whose books on the Warner Brothers cartoons (coauthored by Jerry Beck) are still of vital importance, even if he feels otherwise. David Gerstein and I recently did him the favor of hauling things in and out of his storage place. He repaid in kind by granting me access to all of his animation files. I’m going to be posting a lot of treats from Will, but I thought this would be of the most historic value to start off with.

Sh-h-h-h-h-h was the last theatrical cartoon Tex Avery directed during his all too brief (and unhappy) stint at Walter Lantz Productions. It may be the darkest he ever did. What I love about those four cartoons he directed at Lantz in 1954 is that they are pure Avery: he drew the boards and he didn’t have a character designer, so this is the closest Avery’s roughs ever got to being animated.

The storyboards here are almost the final film verbatim, in both story and design, as Lantz didn’t have the money to screw around (note the alternate ending that he thankfully didn’t go with). None of these limitations hindered the Avery on film, of course, even if it did force the real-life Avery out of the animated shorts business.