Quotes / Tex Avery

Well...
Who's that crazy cartoon king?
The one who taught 'em all to swing?
Say his name now, let it ring
TEX AVERY!

—Lyrics from the opening theme of Cartoon Network's Tex Avery Show

"What, all this junk, the yak-yak-yak? It would've broke my heart! Dialogue gags are a dime a dozen, but a good sight gag is hard to come by."

—Tex Avery on TV cartoons, quoted from pg. 199 of Tex Avery: The King of Cartoons

"A lot of it (his comedy style) comes back from those old slapstick comedies. Chaplin- I guess everybody's copied him. You can see some of the things they contrived with wires and so forth to get impossible gags- Mack Sennett with his ford going between two trolleys. We found out early that if you did something with a character, either animal or human or whatnot, that couldn't possibly be rigged up in live action, why then you've got a guaranteed laugh. If a human can do it, a lot of times it isn't funny in animation. Or even if it is funny, a human could do it funnier. They attempted to make a Laurel and Hardy cartoon series. Well, goodness, you can't copy their reactions and all of that. But if you can take a fellow and have him get hit on the head and then he cracks up like a piece of china, then you know you've got a laugh! Because they cannot do it live! I would also say that magazine cartoons were a big influence. Virgil Partch started going crazy like that- having a guy taking a shower inside a helmet, just his head sticking out. There have been times when a magazine cartoon has built into a funny cartoon gag- twisting it, and switching it around, changing the situation or something. Or distortion, we've gotten a lot out of distortion, a character getting into something he couldn't possibly get into- a milk bottle or something. You couldn't possibly do that with Charlie Chaplin, get him in a milk bottle."

—Tex Avery in an interview with historian Joe Adamson for his book Tex Avery: The King of Cartoons

"Avery was a genius. As one of his animators in the later 1930s (at Warner Bros.), I was as ignorant of his genius as I supposed Michelangelo Buonarroti's apprentices were oblivious to the fact that they, too, were working with a genius. But Avery's brilliance penetrated the husk of my self-assured ignorance, the ignorance that encases most twenty-year-olds. In spite of myself, I learned from him the most important truth about animation: animation is the art of timing, a truth applicable as well to all comedy. And the brilliant masters of timing were Keaton, Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, (Harry) Langdon—and Fred (Tex) Avery."

—Chuck Jones on Tex Avery, pg. 97 of Chuck Amuck

"Chuck Jones' coyote can fall five miles from a precipice and still be alive when he gets to the bottom. Tex Avery's wolf would probably endure such a fall but is more likely to develop brakes on the way down. It is the creation of the director's own universe, and the maintaining of that universe, that makes animation a medium capable of individual, personal expression, and what allows us to tell one animation director from another."

—Historian Joe Adamson on Tex Avery

Sammy Squirrel: My cartoon would have been cuter!
Screwy Squirrel and Meathead and their Offscreen Teleportation doubles together: Oh, brother! NOT THAT!
(cue Big Ball of Violence)
— Screwball Squirrel

"If you don't know - and if you're interested at all in animation, then you should know - Tex Avery is one of the most influential cartoonists of all time. Not as big as Walt Disney, but someone you could consider a close second. This is the man who made Bugs Bunny who he is today, the same thing with Porky Pig; on top of that, he invented Daffy Duck and Droopy. Actually, I don't think that summarizes even half of his achievements. Any cartoon with a more energetic and out-there style, as opposed to the down to earth stories of many Disney cartoons, could be attributed to Tex Avery's influence. Shows like Spongebob and Freakazoid!; things like the Genie from Aladdin; and so much that it would take an entire retrospective to go over everything that he did in his lifetime. It's safe to say that the landscape of animation would look vastly different without him. He pretty much invented anything that you would think of as a classic cartoon gag: the endless chases; the eyes popping out their sockets; the extraneous explosives; characters walking off of a cliff before they realize what's going on and gravity set in. He had the belief that cartoons could and should do anything."

— The Mysterious Mr. Enter on Tex Avery while discussing why The Wacky World of Tex Avery is his #1 on Top 10 Worst Cartoons of the 1990s

---