King of the Fourth Wall: A Tribute to Tex Avery

Animation may be younger, than say, literature and painting; ok, far far younger, yet it undeniably has an interesting history.

Now well over a century old, the medium of animation has had it’s share of high and lows, innovation and stagnation. We live in a world where Norm of the North and Foodfight! can exist on the same shelf as Toy Story and The Lion King at the entertainment section of our local Wal-Mart.

My post today is about a man who is both famous and obscure. This can occur in a niche of media like animation. There are always enthusiasts and fans in the know, especially in the Digital Age, but many people, studios, techniques etc., still lie outside of common knowledge. 

My purpose is not to correct an oversight, but to provide insight for those who are not familiar or who only have a passing interest in animation.

So, most likely, when I tell you that Fred “Tex” Avery (1908-1980) was a giant of the animation industry, most of you will simply nod your heads and say “yeah, so what?”. Then I’ll say “Well, among other things, he created Daffy Duck and gave Bugs Bunny his catchphrase.” And then you will say “oh!”, your eyes lighting up (hopefully) with interest, and I’ll then proceed to tell you more.

But you can’t sum up someone’s life with a bunch of facts. Well, ok, technically you can, but where would be the fun in that? So the rest of this post will be composed as part biography, part analysis, and, part shameless fanboy gushing. I'm sorry, can't help myself. Let’s begin.

This is probably going to sound very weird to you, but Tex Avery and Dante Alighieri have several things in common. Both did things that were innovative in their lifetime, while borrowing from other people and sources  as a launching pad. Both have been so influential, their work has been copied so much, that it doesn’t seem original anymore if you were to do any sort of reading/watching without context. Oh, and they both both made tons of pop culture references and put in material that was shocking for its time.

For Dante, it was making himself the hero The Divine Comedy and putting his political opponents (people both dead and alive when he wrote his great work, mind you) suffering in Hell.

Why am I comparing Avery with Dante of all people? Well, ok, I’ll get to the point.

For Avery, cartoons could do anything. Or rather, animators could make anything happen in a cartoon. Wile E. Coyote hangs in the air until he realizes that there is no solid ground underneath him, and he’s flat as a pancake when he hits the ground, hurt, but somehow ready for more in the next scene.

Avery knew that’s what people expected. But he took it to the next level. Whatever it took to make a gag funnier, well, it happens in an Avery cartoon. 

Characters pulling object from nowhere. Bodies contorting and stretching in impossible ways. Women with more curves than a major league pitcher. No fourth wall whatsoever. Cartoon characters knew that they were in a cartoon; what, you thought Gary K. Wolf came up with that idea? Ha! You even saw the audiences in the theatre pop up from time to time. The fourth wall was obliterated in an Avery short. 

Cartoons have always been funny; Avery just took everything to another level. Sometimes, more can be more.

He wasn’t the first to come up with the ideas, the gags or the pop culture jokes that became his signature. Like Dante, he combined old things in ways that made them fresh, and, again like Dante, he has been imitated by so many other talented people that Avery seems unoriginal now.

For lack of a better word, Tex Avery created the “wackiness” that we all associate with cartoons to this day when started working for Warner Brothers in the 1930s. Not to take away from other legends like Chuck Jones and Walter Lantz, but when it came to visual gags, when it came to the visual creativity we all associate with animation, Avery and his team were in a league unto themselves.

In fact, it was because of the fact that others had come before him that Avery’s style works so effectively. 

One of his most famous cartoons, “Red Hot Riding Hood” (1943), is one of the best examples of Avery's great visual comedic chops. It has everything that Tex Avery is associated with now, made at the height of his career, and it is also considered to be one of the greatest cartoons of all time, by the way.

The cartoon begins like your typical adaptation of Red Riding Hood. Our heroine skipping through the forest to Grandma’s house, cute woodland creatures frolicking around her, the wolf sizing her up from behind a tree. The narrator is narrating. For the first 30 seconds, everything is by-the-numbers.

Then, the little girl, and the wolf and the animals, pause, and scowling towards the narrator, start complaining to the narrator that they are doing the same thing as everyone else, and they're sick of doing the same thing. Exasperated with everyone else's constant whining, the narrator finally throws up his (invisible) hands and says “OK! We’ll do it another way!”

Fade to black, then the second title card pops up. 

“Red Hot Riding Hood” is in bright, modern neon letters. The subtitle underneath promises the audience that “Something New Has Been Added”. While it may seem like a simple tongue-in-chhek wink to the audience, it’s actually a reference to cigarette ads that were well-known at the time.

It turns out that a LOT  of new things have been added. Instead of a forest, we have the modern night club scene. The wolf is now a top hat and coat tails clad playboy, and Red Riding Hood is now a gorgeous, lounge singer. Emphasis on the gorgeous, by the way. The word vavoom comes to mind.

The voice of Katherine Hepburn and the body of Lana Turner, a combination that any man would find irresistible, captured in paint and ink. The wolf understandably is smitten with her, and wants to make her his girlfriend, (maybe for just one night) instead of simply eating her up. 

Red, in a nice twist on the damsel in distress angle, rejects the villain's advances in a loud outburst,  slamming him  into a wall with a table lamp, and quickly makes her way to Grandma’s hous-er, I mean “pad”. Yep, we’re dealing with a groovy and hip granny here. Seriously, did you think that trope started in the ‘80’s?

From then on, gags as far the eye can see. 

And things get really crazy when granny sees the wolf and decides to pursue him herself. Woof. 

Naturally, this is not what the wolf had in mind. Now he tries to scramble away. Doors lead to nowhere or are bricked up, cutting off his escape. So finally, in desperation, he jumps out of the window. This being a cartoon, he's of course hurt, but still on his feet, through the magic of slapstick. 

The short ends with the wolf at the same nightclub, bandaged up and annoyed to the breaking point. Just as he swears off beautiful women forever, the stage curtain opens to reveal Red again.

 Not willing to go through all that trouble again even for a girl that hot, he shoots himself, point blank, with a  very large gun. However, his ghost pops up out of his cooling corpse, whistling and cheering at Red's performance as if nothing had happened in the last six minutes. 

Now that is how you bookend a story!

 I could go into an analysis about it, but that would be boring and it would take up too much time. A lot of Avery’s humor is in visual gags anyway, so reading my descriptions does not do it justice. 

Red Hot Riding Hood has all of Avery’s staples in full force. The fourth-wall breaking, the pop culture references. And for the time, the humor was very risque. Hell, the original ending, with wolf marrying the grandma and having wolf-human babies with her, was cut by the censors for explicitly showing bestiality. 

How they produced this short at all with the Hays Office at the height of its poweris a miracle in itself.

I also brought up this cartoon to show you Avery’s biggest weakness. While he was very creative, he also tended to repeat himself a lot in his other cartoons. When he liked an idea, he really stuck with it. Or perhaps he was the victim of his own success, trapped by his renowned signature style. 

 There are of course, variations and differences in his filmography. But Avery style is unmistakable, but it's copied so much, it's power has been watered down with the passage of time. To sum up, Avery’s work tends to blend together after a while. What’s worse, for kid’s like me, who grew up in the 90’s, many of the references, gags and fourth-wall breaking would seem lame, or we just saw Animaniacs and Tiny Toons do it first. Trying to tell someone who has watched Family Guy or the South Park that Avery’s work was groundbreaking and shocking as these shows when they were released in the '40's, they’ll likely just shrug and say “So what?”

My answer to that response is, that Avery has inspired all those shows. Let that sin for a sec; all of them Family Guy’s cutaway gags were taken from Avery. Animaniacs whole fourth-wall breaking schtick was because of Avery. He even gave us animation’s first (deliberate) sex symbol, for good or bad. You think Hello Nurse or Jessica Rabbit, or heck, even Fujiko Mine were original and provocative? Red could just as easily stand toe to toe with them today.

There’s a reason why his work has been copied so much. He was the guy who contributed to making animation, well, animated, if you’ll excuse the pun. As for the pop culture jokes? Well, who’s to say what we will recognize in a 100 years. Maybe psychiatrists won’t all look and sound like Freud one day. Maybe the internet meme in that new episode will go over everyone’s heads in a year or two (most likely). 

Avery couldn’t help living in the times he lived in anymore than we can. He was one those artists who could be both timely and timeless. Same way many of his contemporaries like Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng and Walter Lantz could be

I want to pay respects to the man who helped change animation forever. He doesn’t stand alone, but he is indisputably a legend. 

Unfortunately, just like with Disney’s Nine Old Men, his legend seems to be fading with the passing of years. This post is my attempt to keep this genius from being forgotten. Maybe that is a little hyperbolic. But I fear that, as more and more copy what he pioneered, he will be crowded out of the public memory by imitators. The imitators may capture the spirit of what he did, the essence of his creativity, and that is all fine and good. Inspiration should never be frowned upon.

However, there was only one Tex Avery in the world. Hopefully, we will never forget why that matters.