THIS MONTH
THE RED DRESS
FOR MOST WORK PLACES, an infestation of flies would be a nuisance and mean a call to pest control. But for the staff at Warner Bros. Cartoons Inc during the mid 1930s, it was an opportunity. Some of history’s greatest animators would spend their days gluing tiny strips of coloured paper onto the wings of the insects and piss themselves laughing as the poor bugs circled and divebombed the workshops, leaving trails behind them like insectoid Red Arrows. Such pranks may have been outlets for letting off steam or a creative gang flexing their comedy muscles but, either way, this contributed to conjuring up some of the greatest cinematic art ever created.
Welcome to Termite Terrace, the dilapidated wooden building on the Warner Bros. lot so called because it was ridden with thousands of tiny termites. In reality, the WB units only worked there for a year, but the name stuck as a byword for the golden age of the studio’s output. Termite Terrace was a frat house — ‘National Lampoon’s Animated Animal House’, so to speak. During this period, studio boss Leon Schlesinger, a bean-counter wearing a spanking white suit, crass combover and bad cologne, rarely ventured into his own kingdom. Dropping in, he once observed, “Pew, let me out of here! The only thing missing is the sound of a flushing toilet!” It was a litmus test at Termite Terrace that if Schlesinger found something unfunny, it was probably hilarious.
Still, it was to Schlesinger’s credit that he had the good sense to (mostly) leave his creative geniuses alone and let them weave their magic. A riposte to Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies, Looney Tunes (and its companion strand Merrie Melodies) were conceived as a way to plug the Warner music back catalogue. The series had a low-key start in 1930 with Singin’ In The Bathtub but gradually a house style started to emerge. Edgy, rich and bereft of any moralising, each Looney Tunes cartoon is a catalogue of comedy styles jam-packed into six minutes: slapstick, word play (influenced by vaudeville and radio), real-world satire and pop-culture riffing, all knitted together by their own logic (the laws of physics went out the window), attitude and energy. They featured anarchic heroes (often with a speech impediment) getting one over on an inept villain, involving a panoply of piano drops, dynamite, shotguns and ACME-sponsored inventions. They are the most fun you can have without taking your clothes off.