Tex Avery bluffed his way into directing and helped invent Bugs Bunny
In 1935 Tex Avery told producer Leon Schlesinger he was an experienced director. He later admitted he was nothing of the sort and had simply talked his way in. Within a few years his unit had helped shape Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd and a wisecracking rabbit.
Frederick Bean Avery was born in Taylor, Texas, in 1908. At North Dallas High School a popular catchphrase was What's up, doc?, which he would later hand to Bugs Bunny. He dreamed of drawing newspaper comics, quit a summer course at the Art Institute of Chicago after a month, and arrived in Los Angeles on New Year's Day 1928, working warehouse and dock jobs until he landed a post inking Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons. He rose to animator at Walter Lantz's studio by 1930.
There, office horseplay cost him an eye. Colleagues flicked spitballs and rubber bands at each other's heads; one animator used a wire paper clip instead, Avery turned at a warning shout, and it struck his left eye, which was later replaced with a glass one. Some have wondered whether losing depth perception fed his odd visual sense. Frustrated by pay, he left for Schlesinger's studio.
His unit, with animators including Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones, was housed in a termite-ridden bungalow they called Termite Terrace, a name that came to stand for the whole Warner cartoon operation. Avery made Porky Pig cuter and less piglike, and in Porky's Duck Hunt of 1937 unleashed Daffy Duck, bouncing around the frame at double speed with Mel Blanc's shrieking voice. He fussed over timing so much that he would snip frames from the final negative if a gag felt off, and sometimes supplied his own belly laugh. After other directors had tried a rabbit nicknamed Bugs, Avery's A Wild Hare reworked the formula.
Later, at MGM, he created Droopy, Screwy Squirrel and Red Hot Riding Hood. His style ran opposite to Disney's: fast, surreal, sarcastic, often aimed at adults, full of physically impossible gags and characters who spoke straight to the audience, insisting a cartoon can do anything. He died in 1980.
Source: Tex Avery
