Looney Revue, Part 3 1934-1936: In Porky and Tex, Looney Tunes finds its sense of humour

Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, Tom Palmer and Earl Duvall all left Warner Bros in the span of one year. Friz Freleng, whose animation work with Warner dates back to Sinkin' in the Bathtub (1930), has been promoted to Merrie Melodies director, and How Do I Know It's Sunday (1934) is very much cut from the same cloth as its predecessors. Similar to I Like Mountain Music (1933) and We're In The Money (1933), except this film is set in a grocery store and it's a variety of food products that come to life to sing and dance. It goes through the same motions, but it displays a little more imagination than the earlier cartoons. In a couple instances, it plays with cartoon dimensions in a fun way, as seen when an Eskimo child drawn onto a bottle (he is a part of the bottle label) begins to move, while still part of the bottle, he casts a fishing line into a nearby bottle. The fishing line then drops inside a kitchen sink where a fish is caught (this sink being part of this second bottle's label). The child struggles to keep the fish on the hook, as he fights with the line, before losing it inside a third bottle's label, which is a picture of a coffee cup. The gag closes when the fish lands safely into the nearby cup of coffee. There is a dexterity in this gag that was rarely present before, pointing out immediately that Friz Freleng was someone to keep an eye on.

Later, the Eskimo child decides to leave the home of his bottle label, and ventures off to his girlfriend's house. She's shaped like gingerbread person and lives in her cookie home. A swarm of flies kidnap the cookie girl and intend to eat her, but the boy and all the other animal product beings band together to save her. There's a busy finale with a lot of action from both sides, which includes the flies flinging safety pins at the heroes, while they retaliate by squirting seltzer bottles back at our heroes. How Do I Know It's Sunday is formulaic but plays to the genre's strengths; it uses a song that's performed in an entertaining manner, as a series of short conversations between characters, it has amusing gags and makes use of many props, and moves quickly so as to never wear out its welcome.

Buddy remained the star of Looney Tunes from his late 1933 debut to mid 1935 mercy killing. Buddy's Circus (1934) arrives at roughly the midway point, with direction by Jack King. Under King, the Buddy cartoon is a little more attractive than it was under Tom Palmer or Earl Duvall (Bob McKimson is one of the credited animators on this one). Buddy and his traveling circus crew arrive in town via hot air balloon, and jump onto the ground and in seconds their tent is up and their show has commenced. There's a competence in the animation as the action moves quickly, with this short opening functioning nicely as a jolly cartoon set-up. Things quickly turn sour when our esteemed host Buddy walks on stage and announces the first attraction, the Ubangi Twins, hailing from "Darkest Africa" (oh no), who perform some sort of tribal song and dance (oh noooo). They are succeeded by the even more offensive Oscar the Ubangiphone, an African with lips so large he can play records on his mouth. And this is followed by the next act, Elastiko the Indian Rubber Man, who smacks his head on the floor so hard it bounces back up. All of these acts are made of static shots of these racist caricatures performing to the camera. The cartoon's "main attraction" is a montage-of-sorts of various circus performers and animals trotting around the tent, and a short narrative about a baby in the attendance getting lost finishes up the cartoon. Portions of this play similarly to I Love a Parade (1932), and it's just as mundane and lifeless as that Merrie Melodies was. Buddy's Racist Nightmare Circus would have been a more appropriate title for this one.

Buddy starred in 24 Looney Tunes cartoons before he was retired, most of them directed by Jack King. None of these shorts are particularly well remembered, with Buddy frequently looked upon as the low point in Warner Bros theatrical short film animation. Only 3 of his cartoons were ever released on DVD or Blu-ray, so he will not be covered anymore in this series. He was essentially a botched do-over of Bosko, who himself was an intentionally inoffensive but cheery pick-me-up that resonated with film-goers of the Great Depression's roughest years. There was never meant to be anything radical or unique about Bosko or Buddy; Americans everywhere were struggling and unhappy, and looked to the movies to provide an escape and distraction from their lives. These characters were designed to be a monolith for wide eyed optimism in the face of any and all hardships, that were being created everywhere during the Depression; though, in animation, none came close to the success and lasting appeal of Mickey Mouse. (As a side-note, it's interesting to observe the success Fleischer Studios achieved during the Great Depression for sculpting an entirely different character to raise the spirits and entice the appetites of film-goers, by going in an adult direction and catering to a demographic not on Disney's radar, in the good-hearted but risque flapper Betty Boop).

Bosko and Buddy are largely forgotten by popular culture and even as Looney Tunes still finds a way to re-imagine itself through various new forms and properties every few years, and continuously churns out merchandise of all kinds, these retired Depression-era stars have never made a comeback, Porky Pig (who we will get to later) being the earliest character who's earned a spot in the canon. Both characters did make rare post-1930s appearances, however, in the early 1990s, in the Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs television series. Within the universe of these shows, many years have passed since the bygone era of the classic Warner Bros shorts, with characters such as Bugs and Daffy having retired from wacky adventures, as a younger generation of hyperactive animals take influence from them. In the Tiny Toon Adventures episode "Fields of Honey" (1990), Babs Bunny is saddened when she realizes she has no famous female Looney Tunes star to aspire to. When looking through the film vault, she watches Bosko in Person and becomes enamored with Honey. She spends the episode trying to track down the mysterious star who - along with Bosko - disappeared decades ago, even curating a Honey Pictures movie night which successfully gets the elderly duo to appear. It's a classy tribute to the characters, acknowledging that perhaps Bosko and Honey have become unfairly forgotten by history. It does sidestep the blackface angle and Bosko's unfortunately racist origin, though, by giving the characters dog-ears, so isn't exactly an accurate representation of their place in history.

Buddy appeared on TV a few years later in the Animaniacs episode "The Warner's 65th Anniversary Special" (1994), and was not given the same kind treatment afforded to Bosko and Honey. It is revealed that the Warner siblings Yakko, Wakko and Dot (before they got sealed away in a vault for being too zany) were created in the 1930s to liven up Buddy's banal cartoons, usually by antagonizing him and just being their energetic selves. The trio proved to be so popular that they took Buddy's spot as Looney Tunes star, with Buddy's career immediately ending and disappearing out of sight. After many decades, he returns in this episode to get revenge of Yakko, Wakko and Dot. This is a fitting end to the story of Buddy, and is a livelier and funnier piece of animation than any of his theatrical cartoons.

Disney's beautiful three-strip Technicolor shorts made them a stand out in the field of theatrical animated shorts, and by 1934, Leon Schlesinger decided to fight back by converting Merrie Melodies to colour as well. Because Disney had an exclusive contract over three-strip Technicolor for use in animation, Warner Bros had to settle with two-strip Cinecolor, which made use of the red-greeen spectrum. The results were not as vibrant or impressive as what Disney was making, but it was a step forward for them, and the two-strips did have a charming appeal nonetheless. Friz Freleng now had colour at his disposal, but still struggled making Melodies under the formula created by Harman and Ising. It proved challenging to create one-offs without any returning characters that had to focus around a musical performance that left an impression on audiences. Warner was desperate to produce a star who could compete against the likes of Mickey Mouse or Betty Boop, and allowed Freleng to create a Melodies with an assortment of new characters who could be used again in either Merrie Melodies or Looney Tunes.It turned out to be the best decision Warners animation had made up to this point.

I Haven't Got A Hat (1935) is an ensemble piece, which debuted Beans the Cat, Little Kitty, Ham and Ex, Oliver Owl, and the soon to be legendary, Porky Pig. The characters are school children performing a musical recital in front of the class for their teacher Miss Cud and their parents. Porky is first, appearing rounder and cruder than he would become in later cartoons. He performs a dramatic reading, which he recites rather enthusiastically, fighting his pesky stuttering the entire time. His speech impediment is more persistent, causing him to trip on words with each line of dialogue; later, it would relax, only surfacing when to be used for a specific comedic effect. Little Kitty is next, a high pitched kitten with severe social anxiety who runs out of the classroom just before she's able to finish reciting "Mary Had A Little Lamb". This isn't an especially funny cartoon, but it's cute, and recreates the awkwardness of school presentations to an uncomfortable success. Ham and Ex, twin puppy dogs, sing the title song, and it's an infectiously jolly tune, with both dogs doing falsetto and one cutting in with a bass treble throughout. It's probably one of the most successful animated musical performances in the Merrie Melodies up to this point, hitting the perfect balance of irrelevance, cuteness, catchiness, and succinctness with just enough crass to be appealing to children. Oliver Owl plays a piano solo next, but his act is sabotaged midway by a prank from Beans, a trouble-making cat. I Haven't Got A Hat isn't one of the most dynamic works of animation Warner Bros released up to this point, as it does rely on a lot of static shots of characters on a stage with a minimal backdrop, but it does have a lot of personality. When most Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts from 1930-1935 struggle to come up with even one likeable or interesting or charismatic character, I Haven't Got A Hat has several. In a film featuring Porky's debut, it's interesting that he wasn't the breakout character, as Beans became Warner's next attempt at a star, briefly succeeding Buddy on Looney Tunes. Porky acted as his sidekick most of the time, until it eventually obvious just who the truly memorable character was. But it took some work to get to that point, as Porky in I Haven't Got A Hat isn't the same lovable Warner Bros mascot.

The Country Mouse (1935) is another Freleng Merrie Melodies that strays from the Harman-Ising formula, this time because of how plot-driven it is. A farmboy mouse has aspirations of becoming a boxer and against his grandma's wishes, hitches a ride to the nearby boxing event so he can show everyone what he's got. He gets hurt bad by an opponent who wishes to drag out the beating, but his grandma - upon hearing the live boxing play-by-play on radio - bicycles over to the arena and gets in the ring to beat up the other boxer for hurting her grandson. It's an easily forgettable cartoon that's most notable for an early appearance by Beans and a pig who could be Porky as children who hang out at the farm with the other young animals who like to watch the strong farmboy mouse train.

The Jack King directed A Cartoonist's Nightmare (1935) kicks off a brief transition period in Looney Tunes, which saw Beans at the series' leading character, which only lasted from September 1935 to April 1936. Most of these films featured Porky as his sidekick, with others featuring Ham and Ex; A Cartoonist's Nightmare is the only Beans film that doesn't feature other characters from I Haven't Got A Hat. Beans is really only the star in credit, however, as the protagonist is a nameless animator. The short opens in an animation studio, interpreted in the style of Gothic asylum or haunted house, with overworked animators and tired staff. One animator working tirelessly after-hours is shown working on a gigantic stack of animation cells. We see that he is animating a Beans cartoon, but he falls asleep at his desk after drawing steel bars, trapping the heroic cat in a cell, separating him from a monstrous goblin. The goblin stretches outward, and hauls the animator into the page of the cartoon. He carries the animator downstairs, outside of the reality of the cartoon, into a sort of cartoon-creation purgatory. They walk past rooms labeled with various animation department technical duties, before taking him into a room called Cartoon Villains, where he shows the scared animator off to a roomful of the many crooks, scoundrels and rapscallions he and his studio have created in his past, and they are fed up with their thankless lives. They want more than seemingly "existing" only to be thwarted by the cartoon heroes. They want to win.

A Cartoonist's Nightmare is an early example of self-aware meta-critiquing from Warner Bros, pointing out the true-but-tired formula of cartoon heroes conquering over cartoon villains in the final act, after a rising action period of the protagonist himself in peril and seemingly defeated - a structure which even A Cartoonist's Nightmare follows beat-by-beat. It's a critique of its own existence. It poses a great existential question about the cartoon industry and art-form, pointing out its absurdity and irrelevance and sameness of its characters and plots. It engages with the problem in a manner more inventive than Ride Him, Bosko (1932) previously attempted, though not nearly the same level that Duck Amuck (1953) later would. Its fourth-wall breaking is about to become commonplace in Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, with the introduction of Tex Avery. It became a trademark of his films to make jokes about their own nature as cartoons, and to insert the "real-world" into his animation to make comments about the theatre-going audiences. But few of Avery's shorts are so heavily about the actual cartooning process as A Cartoonist's Nightmare, a high mark in mid 1930s Looney Tunes.

Hollywood Capers (1935), another Jack King directed Beans Looney Tune, is a fairly basic cartoon, especially when compared with the preceding short. It has two parts. The first half involves Beans sneaking into a Hollywood studio. On the set are a handful of the characters that debuted in I Haven't Got A Hat, such as Oliver Owl, Little Kitty, with smaller cameos from Miss Cud and Porky Pig. Oliver is directing Kitty, and with Beans being mischievous on the sidelines, it all feels like a reworked version of their debut picture. In the second part Beans breaks into a laboratory and accidentally awakens a mechanical Frankenstein's Monster parody, which chases Bean through several sets before getting crushed to pieces upon walking into a giant fan. The formulaic Looney Tune sorta resembles a Buddy cartoon, though Beans at least has a slight personality traits like being curious or rebellious, which causes him to fall into trouble that Bosko and Buddy wouldn't have likely encountered, at least not in such a head-on manner.

Fred "Tex" Avery started his animation career in the late 1920s, with a job inking cells for Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons for Winkler Studio, and soon after, Universal. By 1930 he was a full-time animator, and from 1931-April 1935 he worked on the majority of the Oswald shorts. He was always looking to further his creative involvement, and insert more of his own gags, which grew to a point where he acted as an uncredited director - under Walter Lantz - on a couple cartoons. He left Universal in April 1935, but not before a workplace accident from office roughhousing resulted in a life-changing experience. Pranks and fooling around were commonplace among the boys at the Universal animation studio, and one day, Avery turned his head toward a projectile paperclip spitball at the wrongest possible instant, striking him in the left eye, immediately causing it to go blind.

Tex applied to work for Leon Schlesinger around May 1935 and let slip that he was an animation director (though he lacked the team leader experience, and had no title-card credits to back it up if questioned). Avery drew up some gags and storyboards on a white board and it impressed Schlesinger enough to take a gamble on the young animator - that and he was too desperate for new blood to turn away a talented prospect. Tex Avery was now the third full-time director on the active roster, alongside Jack King and Friz Freleng. With a crew larger than ever before, Schlesinger had too many staff to work inside his building. There was a small separate building nearby in the middle of the Sunset lot, where Leon moved Tex and his newly formed team - Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, Sid Sutherland, Virgil Ross (the former two being Warner veterans, the latter two coming from Universal). The newly formed workspace would affectionately be referred to as "Termite Terrace", and even after the Schlesinger staff moved into other work spaces over the years, that term stuck around, a moniker representing the birthplace of classic Warner Bros cartoons.

Tex Avery's Looney Tunes debut, as well as the first director credit of his career, Gold Diggers of '49 (1935), premiered in November 1935. It opens with a striking tracking shot, casting a long horizontal gaze at the old west, laying out its time and place with visual cues; a title card "The Time" pans to a calendar pinned on a wagon, with a close-up on its date: July 1849. Panning further along, "The Place", is then answered by a sign on a building "Goldville", with "Gold" crossed out, implying a recession in the town. Finally, "The Girl", with the camera following Little Kitty as she hurries over to the town bulletin board. A lot of information is given in just the film's first 20 seconds (omitting the Looney Tunes title cards), and is achieved in one attractive continuous sequence. Sign gags become an art form in itself in later Looney Tunes (think the Hunting Trilogy, or Wile E. Coyote/Road Runner), and the sign gags here feel like a rough draft of what's to come.

Gold Diggers of '49 is relatively tame and conservative for what we now think of when we see a Tex Avery cartoon, so it's safe to say the newcomer was testing the waters of his new work environment instead of diving into the deep end. That said, it isn't completely foreign for Avery's usual aesthetics, and does occasionally sparkle with his trademark energy. It is one the quickest moving Looney Tune/Merrie Melodie shorts made up to this point, with a plot that only briefly pauses between action; it has many scenes of characters rushing to achieve a goal. This suits the narrative, which follows a literal rush of characters to find gold first. Cartoons of the first half of the 1930s were often leisurely paced; sound was new, and a lot of the era's animation was set to music, either orchestral or popular, neither of which were fast-paced in the 1930s. Gags took precedence over plot for Avery, and he realized that by quickening the pace of the latter, he had more opportunities to engage in the former. One of Gold Diggers of '49's more exciting moments is the climatic car chase scene, which takes advantage of the relatively new idea (for animation. It had been a staple in paintings for much longer) of maximizing speed lines to strengthen the illusion of fast moving action. Wilfred Jackson's Disney cartoon The Tortoise and the Hare (1934) is one of the earliest examples of American animation pulling this off incredibly well.

Porky Pig makes his second appearance in this Beans vehicle, in a much different characterization than he had in I Haven't Got A Hat. He is a majorly overweight adult and Little Kitty is his daughter. In both films he is voiced by Warner actor Joe Dougherty. His voice is sped up in I Haven't Got A Hat to make him sound like a child, and is played normal in Gold Diggers of '49. The actor spoke with a real stutter which the animators worked around, but after a while - and after Porky became a breakout star - it became difficult and costly to animate around a voice actor who couldn't control his line deliveries. In 1937 Mel Blanc would take over voicing Porky, which he did up until his death in 1989.

The Beans/Porky dynamic is showing a shift in Jack King's serviceable Boom Boom (1936). The "Featuring Beans" card that used to pop up after the main title card does not appear here, in a short that co-stars the two companions in equal measure. Beans and still-adult Porky share nearly every scene together, as two soldiers in the midst of war who brave up and take on the trenches to save their commanding officer who was taken as a prisoner-of-war. This falls under the era where Beans is still seen as the "Looney Tunes star", but that wouldn't last much longer. Of the two leads, Porky steals the show, as we see him struggle to fight against his natural passiveness to muster up the courage to fight. Beans, lacking in character and personality, does not experience an arc-of-sorts for himself. He's just Beans, still a holdover of the Great Depression-era of happy-go-lucky heroes in the peppy-but-bland Bosko and Buddy mold, which had run stale by 1936. Boom Boom is a madcap montage of wartime violence with little to speak of in regards to form. It cuts from gag to gag with little regards to spatial awareness or the camera's eye. The gags themselves are cute though not very funny, but it's well paced and sequences do not stretch too long to exhaust the film's energy.

"Moderne Art Conceived and Designed by Leodora Congdon" controversially reads the title card for the Warner Bros oddity, Page Miss Glory (1936). Not controversial because of the contributions of art-deco painter Congdon, whose aesthetic gives this film life and for whom the short could not exist without, but because it is the only credit, ignoring the work of the animating staff. Perhaps in a publicity maneuver to sell this cartoon as a one-of-a-kind auteur project, the film's title card erases the collaborative work which brought it to life. Page Miss Glory is directed by Tex Avery, and features animation from Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, Bob Cannon, Virgil Ross, Sid Sutherland, and Cecil Surry. And as is common for Warner shorts of the era, its composer is Norman Spencer.

By the start of 1936 Disney's exclusive contract on three-strip Technicolor cartoons had expired, and Warner Bros was quick to upgrade their two-strip Merrie Melodies to the three-strip process. The first was Friz Freleng's I Wanna Play House (1936), which precedes Page Miss Glory by a couple months. It's hard to imagine this film working at all with only a two-strip colour palette, so it's fortunate that Disney's contract expired when it did. I Wanna Play House also debuted the bullseye-ring around the title cards that open Merrie Melodies, which would become an iconic staple of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies introductions for years to follow.

The film opens somewhat drably in a small town called Hicksville which is awaiting the arrival of a celebrity donned Miss Glory. Even with its new Technicolor, this opening sequence is smart to play so conservative, and not try to wow its audience with eye popping colours - yet. Hicksville is coloured in earth tones, the hotel interior mostly made up of variations of brown. A teenage bellhop named Abner is excitedly and anxiously awaiting Miss Glory's arrival, and after a couple false alarms - noises made by various farm animals traveling by - Abner falls asleep on the bench. In his dream, the building around him is transformed into a futuristic Cosmopolitan Hotel. Browns are replaced with chrome and blue, and the film suddenly pops to life. It's very going-from-Kansas-to-the-land-of-Oz, although Page Miss Glory precedes The Wizard of Oz (1939) by several years. The small wooden Hicksville Hotel is now transformed into a society-within-a-building-structure, its scope and post modern details calling to mind Jacques Tati's Playtime (1967).

When Abner wakes up in his dream, he is still a bellhop. He is better groomed and in nicer grooms and attending to professional men in tuxedos, but he is still, interestingly, just a bellhop. His fantasy upgrades every aspect of his surroundings, but keeps him in the same humble occupation. He is still waiting on a Miss Glory. Many men surround Abner wishing for him to "page Miss Glory", which sends the bellhop off looking for her. He is as ecstatic as when he was awake, thrilled to be waiting on hand and foot for this unseen celebrity, only now in a luxurious high-culture setting. The film's perspective on celebrity worship culture from a submissive fan is one not often taken in Hollywood-and-glamour based cartoon shorts. This film's titular character - and presumably most major celebrity, considering how excited everybody in the hotel is to meet her - doesn't even make an appearance until the final few seconds. Page Miss Glory is more concerned with celebrity idolizing culture than depictions or caricatures of actual celebrities, although there are a couple of those thrown in, too.

What follows is an incredible sequence, in which Abner is behind the bar with three men in tuxedos, either waiters or bartenders. This is a musical number, where the trio and Abner sing "Page Miss Glory", while making drinks. The trio sway in sync with one another while pouring alcohol, which cuts to a montage of the glasses being lined up, bottles pouring, and mixes shaking. It cuts back to the singing men, whose dancing is a little sloppier now, and they're no longer in sync. The bar in front of them has several empty glasses, and it now becomes apparent that the hotel staff are drinking these themselves. For a bit of effective repetition, it cuts to another short montage of the drinks being prepared, but now it includes a truly bizarre scene where a circularly framed composition reveals itself to be the point-of-view from inside a mouth, as the man who finishes mixing the beverage gulps it down, the liquid falling down the screen hitting their tongue which now appears at the bottom of the frame. And in true Tex Avery fashion, the person immediately belches; exquisitely artistic film-making is immediately followed with a crude gag. Avery understands the language of film, and is clearly capable of going beyond expectations to create formally ambitious animation, but his goal is still to make you laugh. When the second drink-making-montage cuts back to the trio of bartenders, they're completely hammered, with a mountain of empty glasses in front of them.

One of the short's more unexpected gag occurs when Abner accidentally steps on the dress of an older, larger woman as she is walking away, ripping the entire dress off her body, leaving her in just undergarments. Initially embarrassed, she rips two large leaves off a plant to cover her body, but suddenly feeling free and sexy, she takes the opportunity to perform a playful fan dance as a spotlight is shown on her. The cartoon continually sets up scenes or gags that we expect to play out a certain way, with these high-culture-society characters in a professional setting, but turns its expectations on its ear, with jokes that are foolish or crude, loosening up characters that are initially drawn to look uptight.

Page Miss Glory saves its most colourful sequence for the finale, when Miss Glory herself has finally arrived to the Cosmopolitan, which sends the entire hotel into a frenzy, with every man in the building rushing at a chance to meet her. This causes Abner to get lost in the shuffle, as he spends her entire musical number stuck in elevators, pushing random buttons on the elevator's floor menu to the rhythm of the music, in a manner very similar to Dylan Moran frantically flipping switches on a fuse box set to the music of Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" in Shaun of the Dead.

Page Miss Glory obeys the number one Merrie Melodies rule in that the cartoon must feature a musical sequence of the song it is named after, but never before has the Schlesinger Studio - and certainly not the Harman-Ising Studio before them - ever attempted such a visually ambitious and artistic display of dance and performance set to music. Before this film, musical numbers would generally contain static shots of characters standing and singing the song, usually with characters alternating lines. Sometimes there would be dancing, but the camera wouldn't engage; merely document. Here, the large cast of men with Miss Glory in the middle are moving to an extravagantly  choreographed routine shot from multiple angles, with the camera actively engaging in the performance. On a birds-eye-view shot, the circle of dancing men are moving counter-clockwise while the camera - or at least the large platform the men are on which takes up the rest of the frame - moves clockwise, creating a dazzling dizzying effect. This is maybe the first instance of a Merrie Melodies musical performance using the camera and cutting in an artistic way to enhance the image. The dancing and camera angles are clearly inspired by the choreography of Busby Berkeley, whose many musicals include 42nd Street (1933) and Gold Diggers of 33 (1933) (which were Warner Bros productions), which created the aesthetic we know today when we think of classic Hollywood musicals.

After a couple rocky years of trying to regain their footing after the Harman and Ising exit (a period which itself didn't produce great cartoons, merely acceptable ones to moderate success), Schlesinger Studios found itself on a gradual upward trajectory by the start of 1936. Their new cartoon star Porky Pig would grow in popularity with every appearance, and newly hired director Tex Avery had a unique comic sensibility that gave the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies a distinct personality for the first time. The Warner Bros animation staff didn't have to ape off Disney anymore, or continue to take their talent hoping to copy their success. They were on the path to creating a new style of American cartoon. Tex was instrumental in helping create the Looney Tunes sense of humour, and while he pushed the conventions of cinematic technique to some degree, later that year Schlesinger Studios would push cinema to even greater heights under the direction of Frank Tashlin.

Note: I will not be watching every single Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies film, only the ones made easily available across the essential DVD and Blu-ray video compilations (Golden Collection, Looney Tunes Super Stars, Chuck Jones Mouse Chronicles, Platinum Collection, Warner Archive's Porky Pig 101) 

Historical information in this and other installments come from three invaluable sources:
Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, by Leonard Maltin
Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in its Golden Age, by Michael Barrier
Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons, by Jerry Beck & Will Friedwald