The Extras
The Extras
REPLAY: Revisiting Tex Avery Screwball Classics
This is a REPLAY podcast, where we revisit some of our early hidden gems, compilations, and most popular episodes.
Episode specific description:
Animation historians Jerry Beck and George Feltenstein talk about restoring the Tex Avery Screwball Classics, Vol. 1-3
Ready to dive headfirst into the world of animation? We've got you covered! Get ready to be enchanted as animation historians Jerry Beck and George Feltonstein unfurl the illustrious career of legendary animator Tex Avery. Travel back in time to Avery's beginnings in the 1920s, explore his work at Walter Lantz Productions, and marvel at his non-conformist shift from the Disney style of animation in the 1940s. His bold humor and distinctive gags not only made him a legend but also revolutionized the animation industry.
Restoring and preserving these masterpieces wasn't a walk in the park. Jerry and George share their painstaking journey of piecing together Avery's work in the mid-90s, dealing with censored cartoons, and their relentless search for the best materials available for the restoration process. They've worked tirelessly to restore and preserve these classic animations and have succeeded in bringing them back to life on these three Blu-ray releases.
Available for purchase on Amazon:
Tex Avery Screwball Classics Vol. 3 Blu-ray
Tex Avery Screwball Classics Vol. 2 Blu-ray
Tex Avery Screwball Classics Vol. 1 Blu-ray
Pre-order Looney Tunes Collector's Choice Vol. 2 Blu-ray
Purchase Looney Tunes Collector's Choice Vol. 1 Blu-ray
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Hi, tim Alard here, and this is a replay episode where we highlight noteworthy episodes from our podcast archives. I know for animation fans there's a lot of excitement for the December release of the Looney Tunes collector's choice, volume 2. So I thought this was a great time to review our very first podcast with animation historians Jerry Beck and George Feltonstein back in October of 2021. And they came on to discuss the release of TechSavory Volume 3. It's a highly entertaining episode. So whether it's been a few years since you heard it or if you're hearing it for the very first time, I think you'll really enjoy it. Hi, jerry and George. Hello, good to see you guys. Hello, tim. Hi. Just for those listeners out there who aren't as familiar with the legendary animator Jerry, can you give us a brief background? I know it could be a whole podcast in itself, but maybe you could just give us like a brief background on TechSavory's career.
Speaker 2:Well, techsavory was a young cartoonist in high school, and all that back in the 1920s and when the 1930s approached and the Depression was I'm really telescoping this he went out to California to find his dream and be a cartoonist and he ended up in animation. He worked at the Walter Lance studio on the Oswald Lucky Rabbit cartoons in the early 1930s and he sort of made a mark there as a very funny gag guy and a really good animator. And there's a lot of debate about whether he directed some episodes or at least contributed large amounts, because you can see some of what we now know is Avery's trademark humor in some of these Oswald cartoons. There's one early Oswald where a Boy Scout one, where they are hiking in the woods and they get lost and they run off the background and suddenly it goes blank and you suddenly see animators' names scroll and they're like they know they've gone too far. He did that sort of gag later.
Speaker 3:That's why the Technicolor ends here. Joking Lucky Ducky.
Speaker 2:I also think of the one where I guess the Stormthorne sounded police, where the wolf is running off the frame of the film, that kind of thing.
Speaker 3:He's pulling the hair out of the gate Right.
Speaker 2:Avery was essentially I'm going to get back to his career, but he's essentially a gag man and the more outrageous the better. Also, he has a great ability to be the person in the theater watching the cartoon and wishing oh, it wouldn't be funny if the cartoon character did that. What if it'd be funny if this happened, if he pulled?
Speaker 2:the hair out of the gate or he started talking to me or he shot the guy in the third row you know what I mean, that kind of thing. And Avery did that. He did it from the point of view of the person in the theater and Gags, gags, gags were basically it he was to me was the mad magazine of cartoons. Back then there was no mad magazine, there were humor magazines. But that's kind of outrageous kind of humor commenting on media and society. It's what Saturday Night Live today does.
Speaker 2:Anyway, avery had an opportunity at Leon Schlesinger's studio. He was, of course, the producer for Warner Brothers at his own studio. He was not happy with the cartoons they were making the year prior. This was really the first year of Leon Schlesinger's own studio. The very first years of Leon's Warner Brothers cartoons were Harmonizing's studio. When they left and went to MGM he had to create a whole new studio and that first year you get buddy cartoons and kind of mediocre kind of things. I mean I love them all and I know all the fans do too, but I have to say that it's very rare that Leon Schlesinger got involved with the nitty-gritty of the cartoons. I can only think of two real examples, and they both involve Avery. The first one was he decided to get a whole new crew assembled and that brought in Tex Avery. Avery apparently was able to prove to Leon that he couldn't make a cartoon, that he had done this cartoon and that cartoon at Lance. And he also brought in Frank Tashlin. This is all in 1936. And he brought in Mel Blank and he brought in Carl Stalling All in 1936. It was a whole big revamping.
Speaker 2:Those four are the cornerstone of what would be the Warner Brothers cartoons and the Warner Brothers cartoon humor. And their attitude was we can't compete or stay at top of what Disney is doing. Everybody in the business was trying to be Disney, trying to do three little pigs trying to do the silly symphonies, particularly Harmonizing. They really wanted to do Disney in the worst way. And people at Warner's, their attitude was let's just make funny cartoons. That's going to be our thing, it'll be different and it would take until 1940 and Bugs Bunny for the rest of the animation industry to see it their way. And suddenly by the 40s everybody's doing Warner Brothers type cartoons, everybody's imitating that sort of wide-eyed and Sailing. Yeah Well, avery. Of course they were joined by Freeling, who was already there, and Jones and Clampett.
Speaker 2:Avery is with Warner Brothers in the late 30s. He is kind of the ringleader of this sort of thing. Every other animator had their head. Meaning Tashlin did his cinematic thing, which was equally great. Jones, for some reason during that period, was doing, he was continuing to try to do Disney knockoffs, like Tom Thumb in Trouble and sniffles and sniffles, right exactly. And so I think they were hedging their bet a little bit on not following the Disney lead and I think after Snow White came out they kind of, by the time you get the Fantasia which was like 1940s, like no, no, no, no, no, no, no. The small studios, the short subject producers, they can't follow that anymore.
Speaker 2:Avery's there and he's making all these stuff and he's exploding with ideas. A lot of his ideas that aren't with specific characters are, like I said before, parody, making fun of the other cartoons on the block, the other short subjects in the theater, the travelogs, the newsreels, the movies themselves. Like I say, he's like a mad magazine and that rubs off to the other directors as well. And he even comes up with new ideas, like the idea that eventually became speaking of animals George knows what I mean, which was an idea that he had and he tried it out at Warners. But he did it all in cartoon. They'd show you the farm animals and they'd have a narration about it and it'd be drawn realistically and then they'd say something funny the animal. And that was the idea. Avery wanted to do it in live action and Schlesinger was like that's, we're not doing that. That was you know. To me that was like strike one.
Speaker 2:Later, by the time we get into the 40s, avery's getting more and more ambitious and he's just in love with the idea of killing off the lead character in the cartoon. And this is where Leon butts in for a second time creatively, which he never did when Avery did a cartoon. The heckling hair where he kills off Bugs Bunny at the end, even though it's a gag, leon, well, you're killing off my cash cow, you're not doing that. That was actually strike three. I'll get to strike two in a minute. Strike three and I. And then he was put on suspension. That suspension allowed him to fulfill his dream of doing this speaking of animals idea with Paramount and it allowed him to be available at MGM.
Speaker 2:Who who had always wanted a star, a star character? They wanted Mickey Mouse in the worst way in 1929, 1930. They couldn't get him. They got up by works instead. Later on they got Harmon and Eisen, and now Bugs Bunny is the big character. And the guy one of the guys, who's one of the pivotal people involved with creating Bugs Bunny is suddenly at liberty. He's suddenly available. Do you don't think they're going to grab him? And they, the same exact time they they've got Hannah and Barbara creating Tom and Jerry. So MGM gets its dream by hiring tech savory. They now have a cartoon department. That's the best, and they did.
Speaker 2:And I want to say what strike two is, because it relates to our video release. I'm going to tell you right now this is a speculation by me, recently concocted by me. Strike two, I think and it's Leon who's got the strike is the crackpot quail. The crackpot quail is a great cartoon that came out. George reminded us of 42 or 41, but I think it's 42 was really the release of it, which is the same year that Avery's gone. He makes this cartoon and it's got. It's got this rat. The character's doing a raspberry sound through the whole cartoon, fart sound through the whole cartoon. Well, first of all, if you look at the Hayes code, you're not allowed to do the raspberry. You can refer to it. You can't do it on screen. Here's a whole cartoon of it. I'll bet Slush and Jared blew his top. They had to go in and redo it with whistles which are horribly annoying.
Speaker 3:It's a real. That is how everybody has seen it until now.
Speaker 2:Until now. Amazingly, in the vaults at Warner's held at UCLA they have a nitrate vault print of that cartoon. I happened to see it back Well, how many years ago now, I don't even want to guess like 20 years ago or more, 25, 30, I don't know. When I did my book on Looney Tunes I was looking at the original prints for the credits and things back then and watched the cartoon why not? And heard that and I was like what the hell? And I wrote it in my book that there was this raspberry sound which had never come out. I figured, when Warner's got around to restoring the cartoon, which they did eventually for HBO Max, that they all would be right with the world. And then, when it wasn't and we were doing this, I said George, george, we got to do this, we got to do that Somehow. We never did it in the entire time we were doing the Looney Tunes golden collections. You know, this is a thing I forgot about.
Speaker 2:We have to do this and I'm so glad we did because I've reevaluated it I think it's one of the best cartoons he did at Warner Brothers. It's fantastic, absolutely, I think. I personally believe and I may be wrong I love you know. Other of my fellow colleagues can come and debate me about it, but it seems to me between killing off Bugs Bunny a whole cartoon with raspberries and his insistence on trying to do this speaking of animals thing, which he literally did three or four of these, I think that was like he put him on. Why would Leon suspend one of his great directors? It didn't make any sense. But clearly something was wrong here. I don't know, that's just the way I see it.
Speaker 1:Three strikes and you're out, kind of a thing.
Speaker 3:Well, I think it's also important to give him the credit that he was the director. Everybody contributed to the development of Bugs Bunny. Yeah, all the directors had a different take. Yeah, but it was he who nailed it with having Bugs say to the closest version to Elmer before Elmer became Elmer and what's up, doc, and that was in a wild hair and that is you know. Some people say, you know, that is the first bugs bunny cartoon and that's where you really see the whole basic plot points of what would be maybe several dozen to follow of Elmer and bugs, you know, involved in some kind of chase. But text came up with the formula that really stuck and each director continued to play with different forms of bugs in future years, but by that time text was within a year.
Speaker 3:He was over at MGM and we're all the better for it. The first cartoon he did there was called Blitzwolf. It earned an Academy Award and it is the first cartoon on what we're here to talk about today, which is Techs A Rescuerbal Classics, volume 3, which has just come from the Warner Archive on Blu-ray and DVD, just in time for people to enjoy the fall season and get ready for the holiday. Yeah, but I'm so happy that this turned out the way it did because we had our A team on it. We owe it to the people at Warner Brothers Motion Picture Imaging. They worked on the first volume and they did a great job with this here and it's just been very important to me. Jerry and I worked on a laser disk compilation of Techs Avery's work in probably the mid 90s. I want to say yeah, maybe maybe a little earlier, maybe yeah, I guess it was in the 90s, yeah, 93, you know, yeah, and we were constricted.
Speaker 3:There were some censored cartoons on there because the people at Turner wouldn't send us uncut masters. It was the best that we could do but it was never right. And then, when I got to Warner Home Video, I wanted Techs Avery done right and the amount of money it would take was so staggering that it seemed impossible and I thought we could get the money from France. In France Techs Avery's as popular as the Simpsons. I don't know how it happened, but there's Techs Avery merchandise all over France. He's huge.
Speaker 3:And a tin came out from Warner Home Video France in the early aughts, I want to say around 2001, 2002 and the cartoons are censored and badmasters as beautiful tin packaging. And they even got a cartoon from Universal and they had a booklet and it made the front page of Le Monde, the French Parisian newspaper. Oh, mauvais, warner Brothers. You know c'est terrible. You know because they recognize that, as Jerry and I do. We think of these as these are classic American short films. They're not kitty babysitters, they weren't meant for TV, they were meant for theatrical audiences. They are seven to eight to nine minute films that happen to be animated, that were made by and for adults, but children could see them too and certain gags would go over their heads. And we've always fought for the respect for the classic animation, both on the Warner and the MGM side as well as the Popeye side, for people to respect these films the way they should be. And the laser disc set we almost got there.
Speaker 3:What the French did in France sold very well, but it wasn't the right thing and to get them on Blu-ray. That's why we had to do it at this get a time, and I'm so pleased that this third volume turned out as nicely as it did with 20 beautiful MGM cartoons, and we should mention that, tragically, the original negatives to all of these MGM cartoons not just the ones the text directed but the entire cartoon library and short subject library went up in flames and a tragic fire in the late 1970s had an archive on the East Coast and it is from second and third generation materials that we were doing our work and we didn't have the luxury that crackpot quail has of being from the original negative. You know the original negatives to most of the Warner Brothers cartoons are still extant. That isn't the case with any of the MGMs, and so I didn't know how good we could make them and, furthermore, in prior years they were in the hands of other people who would pull reissue versions from the 60s with a contemporary MGM lion and, I would say, metro color, which is your immediate giveaway that those are not the right titles.
Speaker 3:But I had nothing to do with it, jerry had nothing to do with it, and there were a lot of mistakes made. If you put these things in the wrong hands, there are going to be problems. We're all human. We're all subject to slipping up here and there and making a mistake, but the amount of mistakes that were made on a lot of these cartoons in the past is really depressing, and this was an opportunity to get it done right.
Speaker 2:You know, I want to say something that's in praise of what we've been doing and what George is doing Right now. We're living in a universe where there's a streaming service, HBO Max. We also have the cartoons Popeye, Warners and MGM filtering to me TV on a broadcast channel and, honestly, they wouldn't be there if we hadn't been doing, if George hadn't been championing doing these cartoons, restoring the cartoons, the Warner cartoons, the Popeye cartoons, the MGM cartoons, Tom and Jerry and Tech Savory. There's a lot of people right now sitting back on their sofas and they're able to watch these cartoons on me TV or maybe they can bring them on on HBO Max. They wouldn't have been there at all if it weren't for what we had done. In how many years has it been now the last boy about at least 15 years or so restoring the cartoons for the Golden Collections and the recent Popeyes Just Popeyes wouldn't be on me TV at all if we hadn't restored them. You know, the black and white, the color ones, the color ones.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the black and whites were done years ago and we never thought we could get to the color ones because of the cost involved, because you're dealing with three colors and it's just a very complicated, you know, an expensive process.
Speaker 2:I just realized it's another thing to champion here or to celebrate is also the fans who were listening, because they supported what we're doing at Warner Brothers. They bought the product, they couldn't wait, they still can't wait for more stuff and that helps make it happen. If we didn't have any support, you know, with sales on Blu-ray or sales on DVD, you know we couldn't continue to do it right, george, that is.
Speaker 3:That goes without saying. And when we were kids, I know, jerry, you probably felt the same way I did. You know, it's wonderful to watch the cartoons. They were pink and we loved them. Anyway, they were faded, they were cut up.
Speaker 3:But to own them, yeah, ownership Mm-hmm, physical ownership Mm-hmm, because you can have something in a streaming service but it may not be there the next day. Right, you can have something that you have in your digital locker, and this won't happen with Warner Brothers, because it's not Warner Brothers policy. But there are certain other studios that have been known to have a movie be available digitally and sell it, and the fine print allows them to pull it out of your locker and you don't have the movie anymore. Wow. So that's why, when you can hold it in your hands, you don't have to worry about buffering. You don't have to worry about compression, hopefully, because our discs are the compression and authoring is done very, very well and a lot of TLC went into this.
Speaker 3:Some people go a little too far. They watch everything frame by frame and in a way, I feel bad for people who can't just sit back and watch the cartoon and enjoy it. Right, enjoy it. We sent it in the best quality possible and we are very, very proud of the fact that we have this opportunity and are looking forward to the next opportunity. Yeah, who knows what may be lurking around the corner? Who knows what we might?
Speaker 2:work on next.
Speaker 1:I can't wait, jerry, I did want to ask you about. You know, in our last podcast we were talking about the curation of how you curated for the Golden Collection and everything of the Looney Tunes. How did you go about selecting the shorts that are on this release?
Speaker 2:Every collection is a little bit different. Tick Savory, in this case in particular. I think George might be able to answer better. There's a lot of factors that allowed certain cartoons to be preserved over other ones, in a certain order.
Speaker 3:Well, it's actually luck of the draw and also, blitzwolf was the first cartoon and I wanted to be the first cartoon on the first release. We only have one 35 millimeter color reversal internegative. That's it.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 3:We don't have. We went literally searching the world trying to find another good source to work from. And, by the way, George, george, george.
Speaker 2:I really want to. I want to get this clear for fans who may be listening. This is something I find a lot of them don't understand. We don't just look at Warner's vaults around the world. I know that. We look at all the archives. Please explain that. Just I want you to mention that.
Speaker 3:Well, we canvass the various members of FIAAF, which is the Film Archive International Association, really of all the archives around the world. Of course, here we have UCLA, library of Congress, george Eastman House, museum of Modern Art, american Institute, and then you go from there. There's the British Film Institute, there's the Cinématec France says there's so many. There's in Belgium there's a very, very important film archive. We put out an all points bulletin. We're looking. Do you have anything on Blitzwold? We went everywhere and Jerry knows a lot of collectors I used to. I don't anymore, except for Jerry and myself but no one had good material on Blitzwold. So it wasn't just that the first two minutes are from like a fourth generation do, but also it was previously released and was so it looked like a train had run over it. I didn't see how it could possibly be cleaned up in order to be viewable and enjoyable. Now the first two minutes of the cartoon do look soft and doobie, and before the release came out we were very public, since we couldn't put a note on the disc. We were getting the word out there. Hey, the first two minutes of the first cartoon, you see, are not going to look so good, but it's not for lack of trying. And then when the Hitler Wolf puts the treaty out, suddenly everything is beautiful because we were able to clean all of the damage. And this is really important.
Speaker 3:With the classic animation, you fix the film damage. You remove the dirt that was on the film, not the dust or dirt that was on the animation cell. You leave the animation with its warts and all because that's what people saw on the screen in 1942 when the cartoon premiered. Mary and I both share this philosophy that you don't clean it. There is another studio, very famous for animation, that tries to make everything look brand new and in the process it no longer feels organic, like film. So we leave that occasional dribble of dust that goes up the cell as it went through the animation camera, but we fix the scratches on the film element, the black marks and the white mitt marks on the film element, but nothing in terms of the animation. That's the difference, right, and we also did audio restoration on these as well, tried to take out the little clicks and pops and make them cleaner, and it's something we're very, very proud of. And the initial response has been very, very rewarding, and it's only been out for a week and a day it feels like forever.
Speaker 1:Yes, well, how long have you guys been working on these volumes? When did you start? I mean, I don't mean like from laser disc, I mean from the from the one archive DVD, blu-ray. The first Blu-ray, I guess, was two years ago, jerry, I was wondering if there's any fun stories about some of the shorts included in this release, volume three, that you wanted to highlight.
Speaker 2:Oh, let's see. Well, this is a great collection. There's so many great things. I mean I'm like George, we're into getting out the ones that are particularly ones that really we really care about. This set has more cartoons on it that I really care about than I think any other set. Now, that's hard to believe because I care about all the cartoons and all of the tech savory cartoons. But King size canary is one of the absolute greatest cartoons ever and it's finally on here. And Happy Go Nutty, which we had a problem with that, was going to come out in volume one, I believe that was one of the screwy squirrel cartoons and and there's a rumor out there that says Warners, everybody seems to know everything about our company, even though they don't work there.
Speaker 3:So they spread lies on the internet. They pull out of their pocket. Well, the legal department never said no to Happy Go Nutty ever. It just was what was ready and what was available to us, and a lot of work went into this. So we knew we could put it on a future volume, because all the screwy squirrel cartoons were there except for Happy Go Nutty. So that led some of the conspiracy theorists to say, oh you know, the legal department said no, and I read this stuff and I just laugh and I say like you know. Well, I can't really say what I want to say, but I just wanted to say that I'm delighted that it's there and that we're able to bring it to the people. I mean, there were some cartoons in.
Speaker 2:George, you can talk to this better than me, but there were some cartoons that were held back by us because of the possibility of finding a better, a better nag or separation or something that was better than what had already been. Some of those things where we thought something would be better. We're already rushed through for H&M, we're already rushed through for HBO Max, that's right. So we knew there was a better element and again, I'm not really up on this. I know that I believe Little Tinker is one, because that's one of my absolute favorite Averys. I know that was one that the rumor was there's a like the neg may exist. You know the camera nag may.
Speaker 3:I don't know if it was true, but the camera may exist on that one, and maybe it came from safety separations Safety separations, which is the next best thing to the negative, and that's why it looks so beautiful. Right, that is not as famous as some of the other cartoons. It's one of my favorite Avery cartoons. Yeah, me too. It's not like in the top 10. Right, but I think it's so sweet and funny. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's got the Avery gags. Here's the thing. You've probably never heard about, that it's again this is Jerry Beck speculation, but it's a first of all. It's a great cartoon and it's a rare Avery with heart, as they say. Right, but the thing is I keep looking at that cartoon and I'm like man. It's almost like Avery saw the first Casper the friendly ghost cartoon in 1945. And he goes. I know how to do this idea funny, because even though he's not a ghost, the cartoon is all reactions to him as a thing they don't want to be near, which is the whole premise of Casper the friendly ghost, you know. But in yet those are never funny, they're just. You know, they're just these little reactions and that's it, avery. Every reaction is hilarious, you know. I mean I just love it for a lot of reasons. On that We've got some great. I'm going off here because I'm suddenly have pulled up the list here and sell bound, which is the last cartoon that he directed at MGM, which is a classic. I mean this guy this hardly.
Speaker 3:I don't think there were any bad ones at one, and now there's one of the ones that had just been done and we redid it.
Speaker 2:I want to say something that may be debatable, but, honestly, a lot of fans you're talking before about fans on the Internet and they don't get this and right. You know. A lot of them think, because they're critical of, for example, avery too, or so they're critical of some of the sets that have been put out that it's their criticism that makes us do this. Well, that's not true. We're trying to give you a possible collection at every step of the way.
Speaker 3:George, you have anything to say about that other than that, I think the best thing to say is that we're here to celebrate the release of volume three. I'm very proud of it. I'm so glad to continue our collaboration in animation and other things. Jerry likes other things besides animated cartoons. He likes filmmaking. That's right, and it's a pleasure to be with him, to talk with him talk shop, as we say. But we both have the same passion for the work and to get it to the fans so that they can own it and have it on their shelves. And it's been wonderful Tim of you to have us here today, to be able to talk about these wonderful cartoons and to keep the memory of TechSavery alive in gorgeous technicolor.
Speaker 1:Well, I hope you enjoyed this replay episode For more details on the TechSavery releases we discussed. Look for the links in the podcast show notes and, coming up around the time of the release, we'll have an all new episode with George Felmsdien and Jerry Beck to discuss the Warner Archive release of Looney Tunes collector's choice volume two. I really enjoyed volume one and I'm excited to hear what they have to say about the curation and the animated shorts that are a part of that release. So be sure you're subscribed or following the show so that you don't miss it, and follow us on social media as well, and that way you'll get any updates about that episode. Until next time, I'm Tim Mallard. Stay slightly obsessed.