{"id":40494,"date":"2011-07-01T13:48:00","date_gmt":"2011-07-01T13:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jordanhthonextract2.wordpress.com\/2011\/07\/01\/tex-avery"},"modified":"2011-09-23T04:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-09-23T04:00:00","slug":"tex-avery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/tex-avery\/","title":{"rendered":"Tex Avery"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/other\/texavery\/37.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/other\/texavery\/37.jpg\" border=\"0\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Fred &#8220;Tex&#8221; Avery (1908-1980) is probably my favorite animator of all time. He created Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck before leaving Warner Brothers (after a Jack-Kirby\/Stan-Lee-style dispute with Leon Schlesinger) to set up his own shop at MGM, where he made 63 cartoon shorts between 1942 and 1955. <\/p>\n<p>The 63 MGM Tex Avery cartoons (which are like a holy grail to me, for reasons I&#8217;ll explain) contain 16 that star Droopy, the diminutive basset hound who&#8217;s one of the triumverate of Avery\/MGM characters whom the French have actually had printed onto commemorative stamps (the other two being the sexy red-haired singer &#8220;Red&#8221;\u2014the basis for Jessica Rabbit\u2014and the sex-crazed, eye-popping Wolf who follows her around).<\/p>\n<p>Turner (who owns MGM) put out a laserdisc box set of all 63 Avery cartoons (which I actually held in my hands in a record store in the mid-eighties, but did not buy, because I didn&#8217;t have a laserdisc player, because nobody did) that&#8217;s out of print like all laserdiscs. There were two VHS collections (&#8220;Tex Avery&#8217;s Screwball Classics&#8221; and &#8220;Tex Avery&#8217;s Screwball Classics 2&#8221;) which had a measly eight cartoons each; my then-roommate and I watched those to death back 20 years ago. But nothing on DVD! Absolutely nothing. All I had, all I could have, was my memories of watching after school on my friend Alan&#8217;s blurry color TV, and dozens of crappy, disorganized YouTube copies from VCRs all over the world.<\/p>\n<p>I mentioned that the French have a special reverence for Tex Avery. A year ago I began reading about the mysterious &#8220;Int\u00e9grale Tex Avery&#8221;\u2014a professional-grade bootleg DVD set containing the entire contents of the 25-year-old laserdiscs. (They transcoded from the PAL discs, which have more scanning lines.) Getting a hold of these mythical five DVDs was not easy or fast&#8230;but I did it. Click this <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/texavery\">link<\/a> to behold a sight I&#8217;ve imagined for years: the exquisite title cards to all 63 MGM Averys:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/texavery\">href=http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/texavery<\/a><\/p>\n<p>If I could invite you all over right now to watch, I would!<\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\"><img width='1' height='1' src='https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/17244873-7887238296566854749?l=horrorthon.blogspot.com' alt='' \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Fred &#8220;Tex&#8221; Avery (1908-1980) is probably my favorite animator of all time. He created Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck before leaving Warner Brothers (after a Jack-Kirby\/Stan-Lee-style dispute with Leon Schlesinger) to set up his own shop at MGM, where he made 63 cartoon shorts between 1942 and 1955. The 63 MGM Tex Avery cartoons (which [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-horrorthon_posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40494"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40494"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40494\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41166,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40494\/revisions\/41166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jordanorlando.com\/ns\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}