Oddball Films and curator Kat Shuchter present Masters of Animation - Tex Avery , a celebration of one of the funniest, most irreverent animators of the 20th century; the man who created such iconic cartoons characters as Bugs Bunny (and coined "What's Up Doc?"), Daffy Duck, Droopy and many more. Fred "Tex" Avery's iconoclastic style transformed the adorable and fuzzy characters of Di$ney studios into comedians, half-wits and lunatics; often breaking the fourth-wall and confronting the audience with the artifice of the cartoon they are watching. This program features all your favorite characters and celebrity caricatures as well as some forgotten friends history may have forgotten along the way. We'll begin where Avery began at Warner Brothers; his first Looney Tunes short (animated by Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett), with long-lost character Beans in Gold Diggers of '49 (1935). See the very first Daffy Duck cartoon Porky's Duck Hunt (1937) and see why that "crazy, darn fool duck" bounced and cackled his way into our hearts. Then, see what happens when Daffy is let loose at the editing bay and creates an avant-garde collage film in Daffy Duck in Hollywood (1938). While we're in Tinseltown, we'll head over to the club where a few dozen of the most iconic stars of the 1930s and 1940s are all cavorting in style in Hollywood Steps Out (1941). Avery turns a fairy tale on its head when lounge singers, swingin' grandmas and pimped out wolves put a new twist on an age-old classic in Red Hot Red Riding Hood (1943). Educational films get a jab when we learn all about insects in the ridiculous Bug Parade (1941), and all about monkeys, lions and other wacky fauna in (the not always anatomically correct) A Day at the Zoo (1939). Roy Rogers' early band "Sons of the Pioneers" voice the yodels of the feuding hillbillies of A Feud There Was (1938). Bugs Bunny fakes his own death in one of his very first cartoons, The Heckling Hare (1941), the film that led to a dispute that caused Tex to pack his bags from Termite Terrace and head over to MGM where he made our final three films of the night, King-Sized Canary (1947), Doggone Tired (1949) and Counterfeit Cat (1950). It's a night of wit, wackiness and wabbits all screened from 16mm prints.
Date: Thursday, February 12th, 2015 at 8:00pm
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Featuring:
Hollywood Steps Out (Color, 1941)
This bizarre Merrie Melodies cartoon features caricatures of a who's who of Hollywood big wigs all stopping to ogle an avatar of Blonde Burlesque megastar Sally Rand doing her famous Bubble Dance. See caricatures of Peter Lorre, Henry Fonda, Clark Gable, Groucho Marx, Greta Garbo, Claudette Colbert, Cary Grant, Judy Garland, Rita Hayworth and so many more!
Gold Diggers of ‘49 (B+W, 1935)
Tex Avery's first W@rner Brothers cartoon! Animated by Bob Clampett and Jones in their early days at Warner Brothers. Early Looney Tunes star “Beans” finds a mother lode to share with the town only to end up in one wild chase when it gets snatched!
Red Hot Riding Hood (Color, 1943)
Tex Avery's sensual adaptation liberates its characters from their Disney-style forest and slaps them in the middle of swanky Manhattan. Grandma's a nymphomaniac swinger, and her rustic cottage home a hip penthouse pad. Little Red has become a red-hot singer-stripper; the Wolf is a model of lupine lechery; and the forest is supplanted by a big-city nightclub as the enchanted place of forbidden sexuality. The Wolf tries to pull the old Red Riding Hood gag in order to meet up with Little Red, but Grandma has other ideas.
The Heckling Hare (Color, 1941)
One of the first Bugs Bunny cartoons, featuring plenty of Avery's patented fourth-wall breaking. A dumb dog is sniffing around in the forest and stumbles upon Bugs’ hole. He starts digging and soon Bugs is toying with him. He hits the dog with a bat, escapes in the water, and hides on his back. He then hides in a tree and gives the dog a tomato to squeeze. The dog, thinking he killed Bugs, holds a funeral. When Bugs pops up during the funeral, the dog becomes angry and accidentally falls off a cliff. The ending of this film caused a rift between Avery and the producers that ending in Avery leaving W@rner Brothers forever.
Porky's Duck Hunt (B+W, 1937)
It's Daffy Duck's debut! Porky is all ready for his duck hunting expedition, only he wasn't counting on running into "a crazy, darn fool duck" like Daffy. Of course, his every plan is foiled, and once again returns home empty handed. This classic features a bevy of hilarious gags including electric eel utilization, hiccuping dogs, bizarre celebrity sightings, a boatful of drunk fish serenading the pond and Porky yelling "This wasn't in the script!"
Daffy Duck in Hollywood (B+W, 1938)
Watch Daffy Duck wreak havoc on a movie set by cutting and splicing together various clips into finished product of a movie contains nothing but newsreel titles and clips surrealist style. An anarchistic and avant garde masterpiece!
A Feud there Was (Color, 1938)
The McCoys and the Weavers are two feuding hillbilly clans. A very early and different version of Elmer Fudd "Peacemaker", attempts to end the fighting; but violence and zaniness win out. Featuring yodels and music by Roy Rogers' cowboy band Sons of the Pioneers (Tumbling Tumbleweeds) for that authentic, down-home sound.
A Day at the Zoo (Color, 1939)
It's more site-gags galore when Tex takes his irreverence to a zoo, and while he might have gotten the anatomy of some of the animals wrong, he gets the comic timing right every time.
A cartoon spoof of educational insect films, this hilarious short brings us an unending stream of visual puns, from the tried and true "horse-fly" to a wasp losing her corset and hence her waspy figure.
Doggone Tired (Color, 1949)
A Tex Avery Technicolor Classic from Avery's MGM days. This plucky cartoon features an over-zealous hunting dog, who upon his owner’s admonition to get a good night’s sleep or he’ll never catch the rabbit of his bloodthirsty desires, proceeds to have a night of noisy haranguing from the very same rabbit. Who will win in this game of wits and weariness?
Plus! Counterfeit Cat (1950) and King Sized Canary (1947).
Kat Shuchter is a graduate of UC Berkeley in Film Studies. She is a filmmaker, artist and esoteric film hoarder. She has helped program shows at the PFA, The Nuart and Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater and was crowned “Found Footage Queen” of Los Angeles, 2009. She has programmed over 100 shows at Oddball on everything from puberty primers to experimental animation.
About Oddball Films
Oddball films is the film component of Oddball Film+Video, a stock footage company providing offbeat and unusual film footage for feature films like Milk, documentaries like The Summer of Love, television programs like Mythbusters, clips for Boing Boing and web projects around the world.
Our films are almost exclusively drawn from our collection of over 50,000 16mm prints of animation, commercials, educational films, feature films, movie trailers, medical, industrial military, news out-takes and every genre in between. We’re actively working to present rarely screened genres of cinema as well as avant-garde and ethno-cultural documentaries, which expand the boundaries of cinema. Oddball Films is the largest film archive in Northern California and one of the most unusual private collections in the US. We invite you to join us in our weekly offerings of offbeat cinema.
