When I say the name Tex Avery, most people don’t know who that is.
Yet I think Tex A
very (real name: Fred Avery) stands amongst the greatest entertainment geniuses of all time.
It’s not just that at Warner Bros. he pretty much created Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, not to mention Droopy and the unjustly forgotten Screwy Squirrel at MGM, but he pioneered the idea that in a cartoon anything was possible.
The madcap animated ideas he imbued into his cartoons in a nonstop montage of imagination have to this day yet to be topped. Watch them, and anything since just seems overly conventional.
And anything that doesn’t (be it Ren & Stimpy or Animaniacs) was directly inspired by him.
So from this day forward, when you’re bored, search his name on YouTube.
It was difficult to select just three cartoons to show you, but start with these (which also include Bugs Bunny’s first-ever appearance in A Wild Hare):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GsX94P6hfk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcv_nkFgIEs