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Tribute Includes Animator's Best Looney Tunes

Warner Bros.

Turner Movie Classics will pay tribute to animator Chuck Jones, who directed many of the best Looney Tunes.

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By WALT BELCHER | The Tampa Tribune

Published: March 24, 2009

In the days before the universe of 900-plus channels, just about every kid in America could recite lines from Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck cartoons.

Baby boomers and their parents knew what would happen every time Wile E. Coyote assembled one of those contraptions from Acme to catch the elusive Road Runner.

And Bugs Bunny's "What's up, Doc?" was universally recognized.

Those great Warner Bros. animated Looney Tunes, produced for movie theaters, were recycled on TV in the 1950s and '60s, providing a cultural link for several generations.

Today, children have to work a little harder to discover these classic slapstick comedies.

Some of them will be shown tonight on Turner Classic Movies as part of a tribute to animator Chuck Jones, who directed many of the best Looney Tunes.

Jones, who died in 2002, is profiled in a new half-hour documentary, "Chuck Jones: Memories of Childhood," which premieres at 8 p.m. and repeats at 10:30 p.m.

It's a charming, sentimental salute built around interviews with Jones during which some of his sketches are brought to animated life.

He recalls that he related more to the insecure characters such as Daffy Duck and Pepe Le Pew than the brash, ever-confident Bugs Bunny.

I have my own fond memories of Jones. In 1976, I briefly worked with him on a project while I was employed at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

At that time, Jones was running a small production company in Los Angeles where he produced animated TV specials. Among other things, he produced and directed the original TV special "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" featuring Boris Karloff as the Grinch.

Jones was a guest lecturer at UNLV several times, and he turned to the university to help save hundreds of original drawings (transparent sheets called "cels") from "Tom & Jerry" cartoons that he directed for MGM in the early 1960s.

MGM was clearing out a storage warehouse to make room for production facilities. The studio offered the drawings to Jones, but he had no place to store them. When he donated them to UNLV, I coordinated the media coverage.

Jones was a charming, witty, talented artist with a great sense of humor.

A marathon of his cartoons begins at 8:30 tonight and runs to 2:30 a.m. Wednesday.

Try to catch his three Oscar winners, beginning with "Duck Amuck," a 1953 surreal experience for Daffy Duck, at 9:30 tonight.

It's followed by "One Froggy Evening," a 1955 classic that introduced a bizarre singing Michigan J. Frog; and "What's Opera, Doc?" The latter is a 1957 masterpiece featuring Bugs and Elmer Fudd parodying Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen."

It was the first cartoon short to be judged "culturally significant" by the U.S. Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

OBAMA INTERRUPTS: To make room for President Barack Obama's 8 o'clock news conference tonight, the broadcast networks are making adjustments.

ABC will drop the usual 8 p.m. "Dancing With the Stars" recap show and NBC will move a two-hour "Biggest Loser" back from 8 to 9 p.m., postponing "Law & Order: SVU."

CBS will drop "Without a Trace" and move "NCIS" from 8 to 9, followed by "The Mentalist" at 10.

Fox is moving the two-hour Motown-themed performance episode of "American Idol" to 8 p.m. Wednesday. The "Idol" voting results will air Thursday at 8 p.m. That knocks "Lie to Me" and "Bones" off the schedule this week.

TUNE IN TONIGHT

"Frontline," 10 p.m., PBS

A new report on the ever-growing national debt, "Ten Trillion and Counting," looks at how it got so big and what this could mean for the future.

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