Trivia / Tex Avery

• Creator Backlash
  • Tex got sick of Screwy Squirrel after only five shorts, killing him in the final one.
  • According to animator Greg Duffell, Tex disliked the one-shot musical short "Page Miss Glory" (which, while it did have some Avery-esque gags^note the snooty, high society matron who suddenly becomes a fan dancer to cover up the fact that her dress ripped off; the three singers of the title song becoming increasingly drunk, judging by the addition of more wine glasses; the visual innuendo of the champagne bottle not popping in time with the music; the iris-in on the glass suddenly becoming a mouth; the fat man ordering a large meal and only taking a bite out of an olive; and the bellboy trying to get into an elevator so he can meet Miss Glory, felt more like the early 1930s shorts that were little more than animated music videos with very thin plots to them, which Avery was trying to steer Warner Bros. away from during his time there).
• Creator Breakdown: Avery suffered from depression most of his life, often owing to his self-consciousness about his own drawing skill. His last short, Shhhhhh, was his only short to draw on this, capturing his emotional instability as his theatrical career came to an end which dogged him for the rest of his life, made worse when his son died of a heroin overdose shortly after. There's even a rumor that, on his deathbed, he claimed to have wasted his life as an animator.
  • As mentioned on the documentary on the second Tex Avery Blu-ray set, he also suffered creative burnout; towards the end of his MGM run, he remarked that he had done every gag every way it could be done, and didn't know how much longer he could stay fresh.
• Descended Creator: Avery often did the voices of heavyset characters with deep, obnoxious laughs (like the bullying bull dog on "Bad Luck Blackie") or the simpleton-voiced "Duh, which way did he go, George?"-type characters. Occasionally, he'd even step in as Droopy.
• Executive Meddling: The Bugs Bunny short "The Heckling Hare," originally contained an Overly Long Gag of Bugs Bunny and Willoughby the dog falling off three cliffs. No one knows exactly why the second and third falls were cut. Some sources say it was to censor Bugs' line, "Hold on to your hats, folks! Here we go again!", which was, at the time, the punchline to an obscene joke. Others say that Leon Schlesinger did not want audience members to think that they killed off Bugs Bunny.
  • While MGM was a little more lax, The Hays Code did force him to make some minor changes to Red Hot Riding Hood, such as toning down some of the Wolf's reactions to Red (one cut gag involved steam escaping from his collar) and changing the ending in which Granny and the wolf have a Shotgun Wedding, then take their half-wolf children to see Red at the nightclub, to the wolf blowing his brains out.
• He Also Did: Avery directed a fair few commercials in the 50s and 60s. He even got his hands on the Looney Tunes series again this way.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Although his Droopy shorts have seen release, his one-shot MGM shorts have never seen an official DVD collection. While 40 of his oneshot cartoons technically are on DVD, it's in very scattershot form, as they are individually bundled as bonus extras across many miscellaneous MGM movie DVD's. It is believed there are exactly ten of his MGM shorts that are not available outside of an occasional airing on television.^note  The shorts in question are "What's Buzzin' Buzzard", "Big Heel-Watha", "Jerky Turkey" (may be Public Domain), "Uncle Tom's Cabana", "Half-Pint Pygmy", "Lucky Ducky", "Cock-a-Doodle Dog", "One Cab's Family", "Cellbound", and "Cat's Meow". A blu-ray featuring 19 of his shorts, entitled Screwball Classics, Vol. 1, was released in February 2020, with (a slightly changed) Vol. 2 released in December 2020.
• Role Reprise: His stint in commercials let him work on the Looney Tunes franchise again for a brief while, doing a few Kool-Aid commercials featuring his iconic Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd.
• What Could Have Been: In April of 1980, Avery's former colleagues Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera brought him on to their homegrown studio in the hopes that he could train their writers to be better at gags. Two weeks later, he collapsed in the parking lot and died that day.

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