Sure Disney may have had a somewhat better production value but I’d take the worst Warner short over the best Disney any day of the week.
Really,
Bugs Vs Mickey winner the Wascally wabbit
Donald Vs Daffy: Dithipicable Daffy hands down
The goofy Gophers vs Chip n’ Dale: I’ll take The Gophers Thannnnnk yo
Elmer/ Yosemite Sam vs any Disney baddy: C’mon be sewious ya varmint
EVEN THE TERMINALLY DULL, never used right Porky Pig has moments of surreal wonderfulness that are more memorable than Disney’s greatest moments.
Hell I’ll even take Tweety (whom I loathe) over any Disney character.
But not only that I think the humour is more sly and subversive in Warner’s shorts. A winking eye to the adults in the audience, and peppered with now dated, but then contemporary, references. It was post modern before post modern, meta before meta. The topper most of the poppermost baby.
Ok, maybe I over state the case and I’m willing to be convinced otherwise. Anyone able to state the case for Disney’s short cartoons?
I agree with everything you say. I’d just like to point out that it wasn’t a matter of “a winking eye to the adults in the audience.”
Years of these cartoons running on locally hosted after-school shows for kids have obscured the fact that they were made for adults in the first place, not for kids.
They were part of the regular fare (along with a live-action short, newsreel, travelogue, etc.) shown in theaters before a feature film, all intended for an adult audience.
That kids came to know and love the Warner Bros. characters was just a happy by-product.
Part of the problem is that we don’t get anywhere near as much exposure to the Disney shorts. Warner cartoons played every day on TV, but a lot of Disney stuff doesn’t get seen at all, and spends most of its time in the Vaults.
In general, I’ll take the Best Warners stuff (especially Chuck Jones/Michael Maltese cartoons from the early 1950s – the magical time that gave us the best Road Runner cartoons, the Daffy-Bugs-Elmer “Hunter trilogy”, “One Froggy Evening”, “What’s Opera, Doc?”, and “Duck Amuck”), but Disney had overall better quality and a very different sensibility. Sorry, Gerry Chiniquy and Bob MdcKimson, but I’ll take Disney over your work.
Take a look at a lot of those Disney cartoons from the 1940s and 1950s again. They had plenty of great animation and manic drive. They lacked the wisecracking and wordplay (which helped the Warner’s be so hip), but made up for it in other ways. They did have genuine wit and the Keatonesque quality of movement that one of my professors called “grace”. Warners cartoons, by and large, didn’t have much grace. It’s conspicuously missing from their made-for-TV fare.
Do you have any examples of these I can try to hunt down? As I said I am willing to be corrected.
BTW I was at the Drive in last year when a Disney Short came on. It was a Goofy Short… and I thought… hey great a classic. It started off like the old instructional movies same look and feel when suddenly I realized he was buying a new TV… and HD TV!!!
I actually quite enjoyed it as he struggled with the billions of cables and every accessory known to man. Funny thing was the football players he was watching were the same leathercap pull over sweater types from the 40’s. Very jarring the juxtaposing of the modern sensibility with the retro look.
My mother virtually never used the “F-word.” In fact I can only recall two times when I heard her say it.
One time was when I was about 6 or 7 and I was watching a Donald Duck cartoon on TV. My mother came into the room, stared at the TV and made a sour face and said “I never could understand a thing that fuckin’ duck says.”
I do think of all the Disney characters only Goofy ever approached the comedy level of the Warner Brothers lot
Disney concentrated on the quality of the animation, while WB concentrated on the jokes and the story. The result is that Disney looks great, but the characters are bland.
Of the 50 greatest cartoons (chosen by cartoonists), Disney has nine on the list. WB has 17. It helped to have Chuck Jones, who directed four of the top five. Disney didn’t have any equivalent. Then you add Clampett and Avery to the mix (whose MGM work is as good as WB, just harder to find) and it’s no contest.
One key fact that shows why WB was superior: When Chuck Jones created his forgotten classics starring Inky and the Minah Bird, Walt supposedly angrily showed them to his staff, demanding they tell him why that was funny.
Who could forget his star turn in “Duck Dodgers in the 24th and a Half Century”?
He gives Marvin the Martian a dynamite birthday cake and says, “Happy birthday you mnah mnah Thing from Another World, you.”
Genius! Daffy and Porky together were comedy gold!
As for Disney, Walt had little to no real sense of humor. I remember one cartoon demonstration he did on making something funny on Wonderful World of Disney. It was a very deliberate (as in slow and obvious) explanation of pulling a tail on a cow and thus ringing the cowbell on its neck. Um, yeah Walt, that’s fuckin’ funny man.
I’ve heard this story, too, and agree with Disney. God knows what Jones was trying to do. Jones’s early work at WB wasn’t particularly distinguished, being odd without being necessarily funny (Inki) or cutesy without being funny (Sniffles the Mouse). He did have a marvelous sense of movement and smoothness – he was the closest Warners got to the Disney sense of “Grace”. But there wasn’t much to indicate – at first – what a cartoon genius Jones would blossom into by the late 1940s.
Porky got cool under Jones’s direction. Compare the Jones Porky to Clampett’s Porky from the 1930s. Completely different character. The same goes for Daffy. The selfish and greedy miser of the 1950s was a Jones creation. He definitely remade those characters.
Not Bugs, though. The only thing he did to Bugs was to remove the fallibility Bugs had under Clampett and Avery – their Bugs Bunnys could (and did) fail and were bested by others. Chuck Jones’s Bugs Bunny was never defeated.
I also disagree with the Porky-hate exhibited in this thread. You should never underestimate the value of a good foil or straight man (or pig in this case).
And I also pick Warners over Disney. With the exception of a few Goofy shorts, Disney’s cartoons–while better produced and animated–are just too restrained. It’s almost like they were afraid to cut loose and be funny.
That’s true. Growing up, I noticed Disney treated their cartoon shorts like fine wine–they only took them out on special occasions (e.g., the Christmas and Halloween shows on “The Wonderful World of Disney”). In contrast, the Warner Brother cartoons could be seen on local TV stations every weekday afternoon and on either CBS or ABC every Saturday morning. Of course, that was due to the fact that Disney–even after the death of Walt–kept tight control over its cartoon library while Warners in 1956 sold most of its cartoons to Associated Artists Production who, in turn, distributed them to hundreds of TV stations eager to fill programming time.
Tellingly, all but one of the Disney films on the list are pre-WWII, when the films were more surreal and in touch with a slightly darker, more mischievious side. I’m a big fan of The Klondike Kid, for example, but because it’s got a breezy, more chaotic sensibility to it. The B&W animation is dense and playful, but not as sophisticated as the color shorts emerging after the war. Still, I think another selling point for the earlier Disney material is the music, which was very jazzy and rambunctious and not the more ballad-oriented songs that the brand became better known for post-Snow White.
Exactly. The early B&W Disney stuff does cut loose a bit more, so it was in their DNA, but got exceedingly tamer over time.
Yes. Oh, Inki himself is embarrassing these days (more due to the Ebony White factor), but the Mynah Bird is one of the great cartoon characters. His complete calm while creating chaos is surrealistic comedy of the highest order. And his entrances were the greatest in cartoon history.
Disney never got the Mynah Bird, which shows the limits of his comic imagination.
Porky was one of the First and longest running staple characters from WB. There is a reason he got the "That’s all folks"line.
The thing is that they had a winner they didn’t know what to do with for the longest time. I loved him in Wackyland, even the earliest shorts where he was really fat he had his charm, though Fish Tales scarred me mentally as a kid.
It wasn’t till he became the straight man that they finally knew what to do and even then it never felt like the perfect fit.
I stand by my statement. I cut the black strereotype thing slack because of the times, but that’s not why I’m not a big fan of the Fingal’s Cave-struttin’ bird.
The difference is that while Warners was just trying to make funny cartoons. Disney was trying to create an artform. His shorts may have suffered in the humor department, but he did more to advance the medium as an artform than Warners ever did.
Another difference is that with Warners cartoons, you could do anything. If Bugs wanted to bash someone over the head with a sledgehammer he just pulled it from his back. With Disney, you had to have an internal consistency. With rare exceptions, if Mickey or Donald wanted to do the same thing, there had to be a defining reason why the sledgehammer was there; he couldn’t just pull it out of thin air. That anarchic quality in Warners may have made their shorts funnier, but I would suggest that Disney’s animation was more disciplined.
I love Chuck Jones’ work. I have an autographed copy of “Chuck Amuck.” I admire him tremendously.
But I never liked what he did to Daffy Duck. I liked Daffy better as a lunatic who painted moustaches on every sign in town, and who tormented the hapless Porky Pig for no reason.
I never liked him as a greedy, dim foil for Bugs Bunny.
I disagree. Self-conscious artfulness doesn’t count for much, I don’t think. Besides, in cartoon shorts humor is an integral part of the art. Missing the humor is like not understanding the form. And Tex Avery and Chuck Jones advanced the cartoon short more than Disney.