Fans of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies know of the famous "Termite Terrace," the workspace for Warner Bros.'s brilliant short subject animators, so named for the dilapidated condition of their original back lot studio. Even after the artists moved to grander quarters, they kept the nickname and the irreverence until members of the group moved on to different studios or television. The output from Termite Terrace -- particularly from 1938 to 1949 -- include some of the best cartoons ever made, in my opinion (which is correct). 

From the beginning, Warner Bros. cartoons were known for caricaturing Hollywood stars, satirizing current events, and making musical and anecdotal references to pop culture. That attention to what consumed the popular imagination continued throughout WWII, mixing in soft lampoons of real-life anxieties, like the draft, rationing, and espionage, with overt (occasionally racist) propaganda.

I picked two wartime beauties for this Blogathon, because I like to imagine myself sitting in the balcony of the Castro Theatre in 1944, waiting to see Arsenic and Old Lace after my shift at one of the Bay Area shipyards in among my friends and neighbors --  a newsreel, the coming attractions, then Bugs Bunny (Mel Blanc) giving some jerk his come-uppance. I imagine it would have felt remarkably comforting.

Bugs Bunny is hanging out at an airbase reading a book that describes how Gremlins (which are an actual mythological Thing, apparently) sabotage airplanes. As he is mocking the idea, a real life gremlin walks by and begins to wreak havoc. Bugs tries to best the creature and is hilariously frustrated until nearly the end.

There's many a great gag in this picture, made all the better by director Bob Clampett, that dark genius, who was also responsible for Russian Rhapsody, another gremlin-themed short starring Hitler (best Hitler EVER) beset by tiny Russian saboteurs.

The angry rabbit is my favorite rabbit.

Bespectacled Bobby Soxer, Red Riding Hood, is taking Bugs Bunny to grandmas (ta HAVE, see?), but the Big Bad Wolf has other plans. Red is grating, grandma is out working the swing shift at Lockheed, and (spoiler) Bugs is not eaten by the wolf.

Soooo many references in this short that I didn't get until much older, especially in the music: "Five O'Clock Whistle," about a factory worker who doesn't know when to quit; "They're Either Too Young or Too Old," a woman's lament that all the good men are away at war [which is (sorta) sung by Bette Davis in Warner's Thank Your Lucky Stars (1943)]

The great radio and television actress Bea Benadaret. known best as George & Gracie's neighbor in The Burns and Allen Show, provides the unforgettable voice of Red Riding Hood. I defy you not to incorporate some of the things she says in your regular life after watching this. Billy Bletcher provides the voice of the Big Bad Wolf, which is extra funny, because he was the voice Disney's wolf about a decade earlier in The Three Little Pigs.

This is a weird one, but a good one.

Wouldn't you much rather see a cartoon or two instead of 20 minutes of Coke ads and 12 minutes of previews? 

Me too.

This post is my contribution to the Shorts! Blogathon, hosted by Movies, Silently

Please take a moment to peruse the many excellent entries in yet another fab-themed event.

Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, 
By Leonard Maltin, Plume, 1987 

I can only imagine what was in the drinking water in Kansas City, Missouri, at the turn of the last century, but somehow that town was the stomping ground for some of the most influential and important animators in film history: Walt Disney was barely in his twenties when he started his own company, Laugh-O-Gram Studio, and hired cartoonists Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, Ub Iwerks, and Isadore "Friz" Freleng, to produce animated shorts for local theaters.

The popularity of his creations (if not the studio, which went bankrupt within a year), sent Disney and Iwerks to Hollywood to complete the weird live-action/animated short subjects called the "Alice Comedies," and develop the more enduring cash cow that would be Mickey Mouse. Harman, Ising, and Freleng stayed behind to found their own short-lived studio, creating their own Mickey-like character Bosko, a happy-go-lucky Negro boy. Their cartoon was one of the first to synchronize speech and music with animation and was quickly picked up by Leon Schlesinger, producer of what would become Warner Bros. Animation classic series, Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. 

While Harman & Ising were making money for Schlesinger, Freleng went to New York to work on the animated version of the sublime Krazy Kat comic strip, eventually coming round to Warner Bros. to be replace Harman & Ising who had quit Schlesinger over contract disputes.* Freleng became the head director and developed the first fully-defined character, Porky Pig, in 1935. He in turn left Warner Bros. for an unhappy two-year stint with the animation studios of MGM (because those cartoons were stupid), then came back to Warner's to stay in 1939. 

Thus began the Golden Age of movie cartoons, particularly for Warner Bros. Some of the finest, funniest, sharpest shorts were created under the direction of Friz Freleng and his fellow animator/directors, Bob Clampett, Robert McKimson, and Chuck Jones. Freleng introduced or retooled such beloved characters as Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam (whom he was said to resemble), Tweety Bird, and Sylvester Cat, and went on to win four Academy Awards for the studio. 

Freleng was also responsible for Speedy Gonzales, a cringeworthy character developed in the mid-1950s and a precursor to the less clever, less-deftly animated creations of the DePatie-Freleng Enterprises (DFE), which he co-created with Dave DePatie around the time the Warner Bros. animation studios folded in 1963. You can thank DePatie-Freleng for the Ant and the Aardvark series, The Barkleys (a cartoon based on All in the Family ...only with dogs), and most famously and profitably, The Pink Panther.  DFE made cartoons until 1981, when it was bought by Marvel Comics Group and renamed Marvel Productions. 

And that, Jimmy, is where Transformers comes from.

Eventually (and inevitably) the Disney Conglomeration bought Marvel Entertainment in 2009, so here we are back at square one and the drinking water in Kansas City.

Throughout the 1980s, Freleng did very well for himself as an executive producer of various Looney Tunes-related vehicles and revivals. He retired from Warner Bros. in 1986, handing the reins to his former secretary, Kathleen Helppie-Shipley, who has quietly become the longest-serving producer of the franchise, second only to its creator, Leon Schlesinger. 

Friz Freleng died of natural causes on May 26, 1995 at the age of 88.

He did great things.

Okay, Now That's All Folks.

But how cool is that?

It's quite possible that Mel Blanc was my first personal hero. In our household, Warner Bros. cartoons were the main source of information about how movies work, particularly how they work well, through direction (including art and music direction), writing, editing, scene composition, and character development. When I realized that one guy did 90% of the acting, it kind of blew my mind and helped me develop an abiding respect (and an ear) for voice actors thereafter.

Melvin Blank (with a "k") was born in San Francisco to a couple who ran a ladies-wear business, and moved with his family shortly thereafter to Portland, Oregon, where he lived until the mid-1930s. By the time he graduated from high school in 1927, Blanc had already displayed a talent for mimicry and character voices. That awful Woody Woodpecker laugh came from one of Mel's class clown improvisations, for instance, but his post-school career was as a musician in the NBC Radio Orchestra and pit conductor at Portland's Orpheum Theatre.

Blanc married Estelle Rosenbaum in 1933 and the couple hosted a local radio program called "Cobwebs and Nuts," in which Mel provided all the voices (because the management was too cheap to hire more actors). Eventually, the couple moved to Los Angeles where Mel picked up a lot of work as a character actor on a variety of radio programs, not the least of which was as "The Maxwell," Jack Benny's car. He also voiced the first four Woody Woodpecker cartoons (thanks to that horrible horrible laugh) and did some work for Disney Studios, but was soon under exclusive contract to Leon Schlesinger's company, which produced all of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts for Warner Bros.

Mel Blanc helped create some of the most famous characters in motion picture and television history: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Marvin Martian, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester Cat, Tweety Bird, Wile E. Coyote, and the Roadrunner, to name a few. By 1960, Blanc had switched to television cartoons, still for Warner Bros. Looney Tunes franchises (The Bugs Bunny Show and its derivatives), but also for Hanna-Barbera classics, such as The Flintstones (Barney Rubble and Dino), The Jetsons (Cosmo Spacely), The Perils of Penelope Pitstop (The Bully Brothers), and Yogi's Gang (Secret Squirrel) among many others.

In 1961, Blanc was nearly killed in a car crash and lay unconscious for weeks in the hospital. He was unresponsive to doctor's questions when they asked how Mel Blanc was feeling, but when they asked after Bugs Bunny or Porky Pig, he answered in the character voice. This went on for days until Mel Blanc finally woke as himself. Perhaps this is an apocryphal tale, but I like it. It's spooky. 

He made a few appearances as a human being in character spots on the Jack Benny program and other shows in the early 1960s, but stuck mainly with cartoon voicing and worked on nearly every popular Saturday morning cartoon up until 1989 -- including a lot of crap (I'm talking to you, Scooby's Laff-A Lympics), but the man enjoyed his work.

And he was so very good at it. If it weren't for Mel Blanc's tremendous talent and influence, we probably would not be enjoying the work of today's best and most versatile voice actors: Hank Azaria, Tom Kenny, Seth MacFarlane, Tress MacNeille, Harry Shearer, and Tara Strong, to name just a few. He raised the bar incredibly high.

Mel Blanc died of heart disease on July 10, 1989, surrounded by his family very much loved and very much missed. 

I woke up this morning with the entire Looney Tunes cartoon, "Bully for Bugs" (1953) playing in my head. Probably because last night my son was being extra space-invasive and "Stop steaming up my tail!" is our running joke when one of us needs the other to back up a few spaces. 

It reminded me of a slideshow I put up a couple of years ago about studio cartoons, so I'm taking the opportunity to recycle it and add a few things. 

But watch this first:

*Originally posted on the original Mildred's Fatburger site, 2/24/2011