History Creator / TexAvery

* TorsoWithAView: One of the many AmusingInjuries applied many of Avery's shorts.
* TravelogueShow: Avery created the "travelogue/news parody" cartoon during his years at Warner Bros. He intended it to be a rather simple vehicle to cram in as many gags as possible into the confines of a 7-8 minute short. Sadly, these cartoons did ''not'' age well: besides their outdated cultural references, their StrictlyFormula nature of a loose theme (travel, news, sports etc.) binding gags meant they got old quite quickly - and indeed, after Tex departed the Warner Bros. studio, the other former colleagues of his moved on to the character-based comedy that became a well known trademard of that studio.

* {{Parody}}: This was a defining element of Tex's cartoons--he refused to allow Disney's idea of animation having to be believable dominate his cartoons as it had the rest of the cartoon industry in the 30's--he even made it his goal to have his cartoons do things that Disney would have never dared do. Many of his cartoons openly mocked Disney's mawkish content and subverted their idealistic characters and stories with street smart, sarcastic humor and characters, and poked holes in their naturalistic art style with realistically drawn characters doing completely ridiculous things (i.e. the animals and rotoscoped humans in his Travelogue parodies), and he used meta humor as a then-very unique way of remind the audience that they're just watching a fun cartoon. Even his less wild cartoons have a tongue-in-cheek tone to them.

* EarlyInstallmentWeirdness: The early shorts by Tex Avery at Warner Bros. are very different from his later work at MGM--with the except of a brief period in the late 30's (where he had wilder shorts like his three WesternAnimation/DaffyDuck cartoons), the pacing of his Looney Tunes is a lot slower than those of Creator/BobClampett and Creator/FrankTashlin, and instead of off-the-wall animation, he experimented with slow, tight animation that emulated the approach and timing of live action comedies in his travelogue parodies. His earliest Warners shorts, particularly shorts like "WesternAnimation/PageMissGlory", are barely recognizable as his work.

On a side note, Tex has sometimes been given the dubious honor of being the inventor of (or at least making an early precursor of) the parody remix video style of filmmaking that would be become known as WebAnimation/YoutubePoop, with the "Gold is Where You Find It" segment of ''WesternAnimation/DaffyDuckInHollywood'' being considered one of the earliest, if not the first, forerunners to the comedic dada remix video style.

* {{Homage}}: The 1997 syndicated show ''The Wacky World of Tex Avery,'' a DIC series which was allegedly patterned after Tex's classic cartoon style. It stars a cowboy [[NamesTheSame named]] "Tex Avery." It wasn't well-received.

--->'''Blacksmith:''' Listen, chief! Take it easy. We got plenty o' time...this cartoon ain't half over yet!

-->'''Bird:''' Hey! I hear that's a pretty funny cartoon.
-->'''Worm:''' Well, I sure hope it's funnier than ''this'' one!

%%* ScoobyDoobyDoors

* YourHeadASplode: Happens to Spike in ''From Wags to Riches'' after rigging a camera with a mortar shell.

* ShesGotLegs: Likely Red's most defining characteristic.

-->'''Narrator:''' Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. The next scene is quite gruesome, so for the benefit of the children in the audience, we'll split the screen -- the left side for grown ups, the right for the children. For the grown ups, a hideous Gila monster. For the children, [[TastesLikeDiabetes a presentation]].

** In Screwy Squirrel's first cartoon where he beats up a cute little Disney-esque squirrel after asking him what the cartoon the [[TastesLikeDiabetes cute squirrel]] was starring in was going to be about, afterwards [[NoFourthWall breaking the fourth wall]] to say, "You wouldn't have liked the cartoon anyway." One can assume it's a TakeThat at the cutesy cartoons coming out in the 1930's by Disney and at MGM's own ''Happy Harmonies'' series.

* AnvilOnHead: Invented and popularized this trope, then taken UpToEleven in ''WesternAnimation/BadLuckBlackie''.

* AshFace: Usually shown as a blackface caricature and usually edited when shown on American TV due to racist imagery.

%%* AccordionMan

%%* BloodlessCarnage
* BornInTheTheatre: Definitely a favorite of Tex's, from characters running off of the film they're printed on, to yelling at members of the movie theater audience, to pulling stray hairs out of the theater projectors, to passing the boundary of the Toon universe where Technicolor ends.\\

* ButterFace: Several cartoons use this gag.
%%* CartoonBomb

* EarlyInstallmentWeirdness: The early shorts by Tex Avery at Warner Bros. are very different from his later work at MGM--with the except of a brief period in the late 30's (where he had wilder shorts like his three WesternAnimation/DaffyDuck cartoons), the pacing of his Looney Tunes is a lot slower than those of Creator/BobClampett and Creator/FrankTashlin, and instead of off the wall animation, he experimented with slow, tight animation that emulated the approach and timing of live action comedies in his travelogue parodies. His earliest Warners shorts, particularly shorts like "WesternAnimation/PageMissGlory", are barely recognizable as his work.

* FurIsClothing: Many of his cartoons employ this. One famous example, though it isn't fur, was the 1940 '' [[WesternAnimation/LooneyTunes Merrie Melodies]]'' cartoon ''Cross Country Detours''. which was a parody of a nature documentary, in which a lizard shedding its skin gets on its hind legs and does a striptease dance while removing it, [[{{Rotoscoping}} rotoscoped]] off a real stripper.

See WesternAnimation/TexAveryMGMCartoons for information on the short subjects he made there.

Understudy Creator/BobClampett in many ways continued his mentor's work (not surprisingly, to a similar undoing). If Tex modernized the cartoon gag, it was Clampett who modernized the old "squash and stretch" animation techniques, shaping and accelerating them to the limits of abstraction. Clampett directed the first Tweety short, "A Tale of Two Kitties" in 1942.

* TheTwelvePrinciplesOfAnimation: Avery is notable for his very direct, broad animation, as well as his razor sharp timing, streamlined and exaggerated design sense, and clear as crystal staging--he eschewed the more detailed Disney style characters and slick overlapping inbetweens (a flaw his early MGM shorts suffered from, since many of them were ex-Disney and ex-Creator/HarmanAndIsing animators unaccustomed to his approach to animation) in favor of animation that had exaggeration, rhythm and contrast, and thus the much faster timing and comedic impact he desired. Even when MGM began slashing cartoon budgets in the early '50s, Avery relied heavily on poses which made appealing silhouettes, a practice continued to this day in low-budget animation.

* YourHeadAsplode: Happens to Spike in ''From Wags to Riches'' after rigging a camera with a mortar shell.

* FracturedFairyTale: Tex Avery is the undisputed king of fractured fairy tales. He did ''Little Red Riding Hood'' three times ([[WesternAnimation/LittleRedWalkingHood an urban version]], [[WesternAnimation/RedHotRidingHood a sexy version]] and a [[WesternAnimation/LittleRuralRidingHood hillbilly version]]), ''Cinderella'' twice ([[WesternAnimation/CinderellaMeetsFella once at Warner Bros.]] and [[WesternAnimation/SwingShiftCinderella once at MGM]]), the Three Bears once, [[WesternAnimation/TheBearsTale at Warner Bros.]] and the story of Mother Goose once, [[WesternAnimation/TheGanderAtMotherGoose also at Warner Bros.]]. Besides the usual fairy tale motif, Tex also put twists to more modern literary material, like ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' (also done twice, once [[WesternAnimation/UncleTomsBungalow at Warner Bros.]] and [[WesternAnimation/UncleTomsCabana once with Droopy starring over at MGM]] - both are now considered BannedEpisodes and are unlikely to be shown publicly anytime soon).
* FurIsClothing: Many of his cartoons employ this. One famous example, though it isn't fur, was a cartoon he did at Warner Bros. which was a parody of a nature documentary, in which a lizard shedding its skin gets on its hind legs and does a striptease dance while removing it, [[{{Rotoscoping}} rotoscoped]] off a real stripper.

* ExtremeOmnigoat: A goat eats a farmer out of house and home in one of Tex's shorts, so the goat is flown to the moon. Which he then eats.

* GettingCrapPastTheRadar: ''WesternAnimation/{{The Shooting of Dan McGoo}}'' and ''Westernanimation/{{Chilly Willy}}'' have towns named Coldernell Colder'nell, which sound almost exactly like "colder than Hell"; [[https://productioncode.dhwritings.com/multipleframes_productioncode.php Section V of the Hays Code]] specifically forbade the word 'Hell']].

On a side note, Tex has sometimes been given the dubious honor of being the inventor of (or at least making an early precursor of) the parody remix video style of filmmaking that would be become known as WebAnimation/YoutubePoop, with the "Gold is Where You Find It" segment of WesternAnimation/DaffyDuckInHollywood being considered one of the earliest, if not the first, forerunners to the comedic dada remix video style.

Finally, despite the name, he had no involvement in ''WesternAnimation/TheWackyWorldOfTexAvery'', and was in fact long dead when that show aired. The show was produced as a "tribute" to the man himself, and ''was'' endorsed by his daughter Nancy Avery but...well, see that show's trope page for more.

* GettingCrapPastTheRadar and CensorDecoy: Avery and his animators would occasionally put some risqué jokes in their cartoons. In order to get this stuff past the censors they combined it with some outrageously risqué stuff that would never get past. As they expected the outrageously risqué stuff was never used, but some of the milder stuff now DID get greenlit, simply because it looked more innocent in comparison.
** The little duck in ''Lucky Ducky'' gets out of his egg shell by performing a parody of a striptease act.
*** The lizard in ''Cross Country Detours'' also sheds her skin like a stripper. A CensorBox was put in just before things got interesting.

* DenserAndWackier: As Avery's art style became more streamlined, his humour became arguably much more manic and unruly by the time he moved to MGM, finetuning his RapidFireComedy approach.

* DenserAndWackier: His style became arguably much more manic and unruly by the time he moved to MGM.

* IFellForHours: Tex pulled this off in the WesternAnimation/BugsBunny short "The Heckling Hare", though the ending he originally wanted to do (having Bugs and his canine foil fall off yet another cliff) was cut short, prompting him to leave Warner Bros. for MGM.

** [[MadLibsDialogue "[Adjective], isn't it?"]]

* GettingCrapPastTheRadar and CensorDecoy: Avery and his animators would occasionally put some risqué jokes in their cartoons. In order to get this stuff past the censors they combined it with some outrageously risqué stuff that would never get passed. As they expected the outrageously risqué stuff was never used, but some of the milder stuff now DID get greenlit, simply because it looked more innocent in comparison.