At Cartoon Brew you can help Select The 100 Greatest Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies-- it's for a new book project by Jerry Beck. I heard about this and then spent a couple days going through the archives trying to pick a top ten to post. It was not easy, this stuff is like bible to many people my age. I probably saw these, on average, 20 minutes a day for several years.
Porky Pig's Feat (1943) is directed by Frank Tashlin, it has Porky and Daffy trying to run out on a hotel bill. It's of the older surreal B&W style, really dense frames, early characterizations of Daffy, Porky and even Bugs.
The Unruly Hare (1945) is a color Tashlin with the old style Bugs and Elmer Fudd. Bugs was more evil and manic in the old days. I had to pick some of old ones for the quality of the animation and chose these two which have stuck with me since I first saw them. Sometimes the pacing or dated jokes of the earlier ones don't hold up for me but these two are great.
Right away I thought of the line "No! Not the Thinker!" from one of my favorites-- It's Hummer Time (1950)-- a cartoon with no big stars. A bird is being pursued by a cat. The cat keeps failing and in doing so, each time, disturbs a large dog. The dog then grimly puts the cat through a ritualized punishment regimen as the cat protests. It's just a really simple and brutal cartoon.
Another one without big stars is Boyhood Daze (1957) where a kid gets sent to his room for breaking a window and then daydreams of ways he might be a hero so that his parents won't always blame him for everything. It has that graphic style like Andy Warhol's shoe ads & illustrations. In the daydream sequences the characters speak a childish syntax even with adult voices. Paper airplanes become jet fighters.
(more selections below the fold:: you can post your own list at cartoonbrew thru Jan. 9th)
A Sheep in the Deep (1962) features Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf who punch the clock in the morning, lunchboxes in hand, and then proceed to wail on each other until the work day is over. I always loved the inexorable pacing and absurdity of these.
I picked the Roadrunner cartoon Lickety-Splat (1961) because it has some of the best long falls for the coyote, the kind that end in a muted puff of dust off the canyon floor. It has a gag that launches early on but keeps recurring to interrupt successive gags. To find the title to this particular episode I went thru the wiki Roadrunner entry and read the descriptions of each episode. This in itself was hilarious as they are generally described in a prosaic and technical manner.
Bugs Bunny was always my mentor and idol, though, I must confess. I immediately thought of Ballot Box Bunny (1950) where he is up against Yosemite Sam, running for Mayor. It features the scene where Bugs misplays the piano tune on purpose, avoiding the key under which Sam has set explosives, thereby causing Sam to become infuriated enough to demonstrate the correct way to play the tune. Upon doing this Sam becomes the victim of his own trap. It also has a stiff pun for an ending and intimations of suicide under the close of the iris.
I also included two other 'modern' Bugs Bunny cartoons: 8-Ball Bunny (1950) where he has to take the little penguin home and Rabbit Fire (1950) my favorite of the "Duck Season! Rabbit Season!" trilogy.
Finally, we have Three Little Bops (1957) directed by Fritz Freling, with voices by Stan Freberg, music by Shorty Rogers. It's a rhyming jazz retelling of the 3 little pigs story where the pigs play hard-bop in a club made out of straw and the big, bad wolf tries to sit in on trumpet but he totally sucks. The pigs toss him out and so the wolf uses the trumpet to blow the club down. And so forth to the next club.
You wouldn't believe the impact this cartoon had on my little mind, even apart from it's obvious qualities as animation. For at least the next week in first grade I tried to write everything that I had to write in the same meter as the narration to this, to the beat.
Well, it's all so subjective...you could add porky's hare hunt, kill the wabbit, singing frog, wackyland, some of the censored ones etc etc. You can see, if you go and check out some of the lists already posted, people had a hard time listing just ten, preferring to name 100 or 75. It was nice to go down the rabbit hole once again and it will be interesting to see the final tallies. I'd recommend you contribute a list yesself if you're of age.
