I'm sort of amazed that anyone still remembers the Looney Tunes. That kind of goes double for the fact that a group of some of the most iconic rogues gallery of characters in the history animated cinema is still able to maintain a great deal of recognition not just from long time fans, but also from ongoing generations of newcomers. Something like that has got to be a testament to the staying power of genuine Art. If that weren't the case, would any of us still be talking about films like
Pinocchio, or
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves all these years later? The fact that make-believe figures like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Road Runner, and Wiley Coyote are able to take on a life of their own (the strange kind of half-life afforded to figments of the Imagination that sometimes makes them seem more real than reality) must also say a great deal not just about how we relate to the Arts, but also to the world around us. It's with these thoughts in the mind that I'd like to look at one of the later products from the creators of Bugs and Daffy.
The Bear that Wasn't is a story from the mind of Frank Tashlin. He was one of the original creators of the Tunes, way back when. Tashlin worked on all of this comedy gold as part of a collection of animators looking for work as the idea of cartoon pictures began to take on a life of its own in the industry.
Tashlin himself was born in the Weehawken section of New Jersey in the early 1900s. From what little is known about his personal background, I can't help but get the sense that we're dealing with one of those wayward class clown types. These are the guys (they're most often guys) who for one reason or another find trouble fitting in to the usual social hierarchies assigned to them by their parents and teachers. They tend to get along with their fellow kids as peers, more than they do the world of adult responsibility. I think George Carlin gave a pretty good description of this type in one of his stand-up routines. "Most of the time, in class, I was tempted to "Fool around, man"...You'd be bored and figure, well, why not deprive someone else of their education? And you would set about disrupting the class by "attracting attention to yourself". That is the name of this job, you know? It's called "Dig Me"! It was like, "Hey guys, didn't make the team, but bleurgh"!!! They'd say, "Hey, he's crazy, man! Hey, you wanna go to a party"?! Yeah, you went to all the parties. You got the last girl, but you went to all the parties...When I would try to attract attention in class I wasn't really like a very daring, bold youth.
"I was a little timid, really. I didn't get right into fake epileptic seizures in the aisles, you know. You'd just start out and test the water a little bit (
web)". He was speaking from his own personal experience, here, yet I can't help thinking that if Tashlin ever heard these words spoken aloud, he'd have been able to identify with pretty much all of it. That's because what Carlin said about Class Clowns is just as good a description of Tashlin as it was of himself. With that said, it just makes sense to me that Frank was the kind of brat who was willing to be
flat out stupid crazy enough to fake a seizure if meant a chance to play hooky. That's the best I can give you on this guy's character, anyway. It should come as now surprise that he dropped out of high school early on, and promptly began a successful career of drifting from one odd job to another. With guys like Tashlin, things can go either way. You either find your
niche (the one that helps you to scratch that ever nagging, restless
itch, that causes you to act out so many times) or else you remain a kind of walking-taking non-entity drifting your way through life.
In Frank's case, he turned out to be one of the luckier Class Clowns. He discovered (perhaps to his own surprise) that his skills with drawing and illustration could come in handy with a bunch of independent companies that were sprouting up across the country. These companies were in this business of making and distributing some new-fangled contraption known as "moving pictures". Some of them were even interested in seeing if they could take drawings on pieces of paper, and make them appear to come to life with a bit of camera trickery. Whatever the hell all that was, those guys were offering good money, and so Tashlin took up his first professional job in showbiz. Perhaps to his own surprise, he found the niche he'd been looking for. The then burgeoning world of cartoon animation took him from working for John Foster on an animated theatrical short series known as
Aesop's Fables. Then, in his own obvious way, Tashlin found himself drifting into the employ of Leon J. Schlesinger, a film producer working at and for Warner Bros. studios. Schlesinger is one of those major players in cinema history who seems forever doomed to never get as much credit as he deserves. The complicating factor here is that he's also one of those guys who goes out of their way toward making that very easy to do.
Schlesinger is the man with the most over-arching credit for giving us the Looney Tunes. He was the guy that the studio commissioned to set up Warner Bros. first animation unit. It was by no means the first ever created. It also wasn't anything like the second in line after the big breakout success that Walt Disney had with the creation of Mickey Mouse. For whatever reason, yet to his own credit, studio head Jack Warner decided to take Walt's success seriously enough to decide to try and see if his own people could maybe find a way to compete with the newly minted Mouse Kingdom in terms of the creation, production, and distribution of animated cartoons. They hired Schlesinger to get the job done, and it will forever be to his eternal credit that he was able to do it in such a way as to setup, for a time, the only other major competitor that Disney had in the field of American Animation. That's where his credit is due. It's also almost the point at where it all comes to an end. What Schlesinger basically did is he located a few blocks of unused warehouse space on the Warner lot, gave it a once over and called it good, then had the studio move in a bunch of animator's drawing boards into this dingy, damp, and cramped work space where the lighting was subpar (which is kind of a problem when you need it to see what you're drawing) and the heating/cooling was a mix of on the fritz to next to non-existent.
The place was later designated by all the disgruntled employees who had to work there as Termite Terrace. It was here, in the most unpromising of settings, that cinematic history would be made. All that Leon did was really just to scout around for any available animators that Disney hadn't scooped up already, and offer them a job. The punchline is that it really seems to have been the smartest course of action. His offers got accepted, and sometimes the people hired on turned out to be more than good. Guys like Warren Foster, Maurice Noble, and Bob Clampett proved to have more talent and humor in their hands and minds than you'd expect guessed just by looking at them. Others, like Irving "Friz" Freleng and Charles M. "Chuck" Jones were later brought in after being lured away from Disney. Perhaps the greatest irony of the entire Termite Terrace operation was that they were making animated legends that would be able to achieve this amazing yet somehow real timeless quality, and yet the studio that was responsible for distributing it would always seeing it as not even anything such as a marketable product, which would at least make sense from a profit oriented business perspective.
Instead, Leon Schlesinger himself kind of summed up the studio's whole attitude to their animator's ability to turn pen and ink into gold by a constant refrain he had when acting as pretty much the boss of the entire outfit. Each time he took up his accustomed viewer's spot in the screening room to view the latest finished product by the likes of Chuck Jones (even if it was classics like
Duck Amok) was to always begin the preview with the phrase: "Okay, roll the trash". Let's just say the reputation that the Tunes now enjoy today is a testament to the dedication of the fanbase over the limited thinking of the studio system as a whole. What I'm starting to realize is just how much that legacy remains reliant on those who've grown able to recognize the artistry of people like Jones, Freleng, and Tex Avery. It's pretty amazing when you consider how bad the working conditions were at the Terrace. Staff like Noble, Foster, and others would quit multiple times on the studio, and would then have to be coaxed back to work by making Schlesinger and the Warner management agree to certain terms and promises. When you consider they were all the victims of a toxic working environment, the achievements they made both in the realms of animation and comedy are more than just damned amazing.
Frank Tashlin didn't just manage to find himself in the thick of all this, he was able to leave his own mark on it. His most notable efforts for me are 1945's Nasty Quacks, which marks the only time I'm aware of that Daffy was ever given anything close to an origin story. The other is Hare Remover from 1946. That one is an entire spin on Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where Elmer Fudd tries to turn Bugs into a monster. Of all the legends in the Termite Terrace staff, Tashlin is interesting just as much for the career he would go on to have after he left Warner Bros. for good in 1946. It comes as something of a pleasant surprise to discover that one of the artists who taught us what a sense of humor was like as a child went on to have fairly successful and steady career as a comedy writer for the likes of Bob Hope and the Marx Brothers. That means he might have had a hand in creating some of Groucho's best lines. In addition, he was able to find a later decent niche for himself as a director of live action films. It should come as no surprise that most of these were laugh fests. Tashlin's most famous work in this regard is The Girl Can't Help It (1956), where he was kind enough to go a long way towards popularizing then emerging phenomenon of Rock 'n Roll to mainstream audiences.
That's a subject for another day, however. The film were here to look at now marks the last time the former Termite Terrace filmmaker ever worked in the field of animation. And the interesting part is that it didn't start out as a theatrical short, but as a book.
The Bear that Wasn't first saw life as a children's book that Tashlin seems to have written in his spare time, perhaps as he was finishing up his stint at Warner's and casting about for his next niche. It seems possible that at one point, one of the avenues he might have thought about exploring was life in the world of book publishing. If so, then the story of a normal forest bear who wakes up to discover a big city block building sight has been constructed over his cave, and now everyone he meets insists that he's not a bear at all, but just a funny little man in a brown fur coat who needs a shave, sounds like it might have begun life at or around this time. It's difficult to say for sure when Tashlin began the story, or how long he was at work on it. What I can say for certain is that in 1967, Frank reconnected with his old fellow animator Chuck Jones, and the two agreed to turn the book into an animated short subject. The results are what we're here to discuss.