Screwball Squirrel

Tex Avery preferred doing one-shot cartoons as opposed to using a regular character or characters. He was more interested in the gags than anything else. Studios, of course, want something recognizable to the audience, to developing continuing interest and thus sell more tickets. So Avery, because MGM wanted him to come up with a character to rival the Tom and Jerry shorts done by the other principle unit at the studio (Hanna and Barbera) came up with Screwball Squirrel.

While Screwy was a decent enough character, the trouble was that he was too limited, too much a one-note character. He was a walking sight gag. There were five cartoons done with Screwy before the series ended, in typical Avery style, with Lonesome Lenny. The Screwy cartoons are funny, but also too predictable. The first one, here, opens wonderfully with a lighthearted (or maybe not) shot at cutesy little animal cartoons that were staples at "other studios" for years and takes off from there. This is probably the best of the series. Well worth watching. Most highly recommended.

MGM asked Tex Avery to develop a running character to rival Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera's Tom & Jerry, and Avery, who was gag-oriented as a director, developed a character suited to his style of animated comedy, Screwy Squirrel.

The cartoon features Avery's brand of superbly-timed and edited gags revolving around the chase theme universal to cartoons, but two gags display Avery's aversion to running characters and also hurt the cartoon's quality. Both involve a saccharine-sweet squirrel straight out of Disney central casting who is viciously pummeled to death, first by Screwy, later by both Screwy and the dog who's been chasing him throughout the short. The gratuitous nature of these assaults is repellent and unfortunately common to cartoons of the 1940s; unlike the physical gags elsewhere in the cartoon, these scenes are not done for laughs, but for sadistic joy and as such are unnecessary and ugly.

This is not the best entry in the five-short series for Screwy Squirrel, but it is a good start.

Is it just me, or does squeaky clean Sammy Squirrel, who thinks this cartoon is going to be about him and his happy little friends, represent Walt Disney, or at least his cartoons? The salty Screwball takes him behind a tree and beats the daylights out of him, then provokes a dog named Meathead and beats him repeatedly too, all while being chased all over the place. There's a particular anarchy here and while Screwy lacks the charm of similarly characters (e.g. Bugs Bunny), I liked how the characters break the 4th wall and the alienation techniques Tex Avery used, e.g. The chase skipping when the record player begins to skip, or Screwy peeling back the image at a corner to see what he's going to be up to next. The gag with Meathead's entire face peeling off with flypaper was pretty amusing too. Not my favorite character, but worth seeing.

This was the first effort of Tex Avery to give us the character, "Screwy Squirrel." Reportedly, it was the answer to the popular Tom and Jerry cartoons at the time.

Man, this squirrel is a mean rodent, almost sadistic. His pleasure, apparently, is to torment this dog called "Meathead." This poor mutt takes a bad beating, time after time, and Screwy delights in doing whatever he can to him, followed by a sadistic laugh. I could see where that laugh could become annoying if you heard it often enough, but I don't remember much of it in the other SS cartoons I saw. I can also see why Screwy didn't become a hit, even though he was funny. As a leading cartoon character, he's just a little too nasty. However, Bugs Bunny inflicted a lot of pain on others, too, but they often - at least Elmer Fudd - started trouble. Plus, there was something lovable about Bugs. Here, this dog was just minding his own business when Screwy called him on the telephone and used some psychology to get him to come over.....only so he could abuse him. Now, that's mean!

As in most Tex Avery cartoons, the jokes are more adult-oriented and the director emphasizes, through another Thumper-like "Bambi" squirrel early in this cartoon, that is is not going to be a cute and fuzzy story. Avery once said he was "the anti-Disney" type and preferred his cartoons with an edge. Screwy beats up Thumper right away, just to emphasize the point.

Avery and his main writer, Heck Allen, also were good at having the main characters stop the story and talk to us - the audience - a number of times. That, or they would hold up a sign telling us something like, "Stupid, ain't it?" These "asides" to let us know what the characters are thinking are almost always clever and add to the cartoon's humor. I particularly thought it was neat when the character would comment that he knew all of this baloney that was happening on screen was just a cartoon anyway, so he'd make some wisecrack about "this cartoon this and that." Supposedly, this was the first time this sort of thing had ever been done in a cartoon. It must have really surprised audiences in the theater. That's how inventive Mr. Avery and Mr. Allen were with their animated short features. Their "Droopy" cartoons featured a lot of those "asides," too.

After watching this, I viewed two other "Screwy Squirrel" episodes and found them spectacular.

In an idyllic forest, Sammy Squirrel cheerfully collects nuts. Screwball Squirrel is not having any of it and promptly beats him up. Screwball has a field day with Meathead, the bird dog.

I don't like the uglying up of the animal designs. He's the Deadpool of cartoons. I don't mind the irreverence of Screwball but he should have a better name. I'm even game for breaking down the fourth wall. It has too much on the nose but otherwise, it's good gags. Tex does go back to Screwball with more cartoons but there are some issues with that character.