TEX AVERY INTRODUCTION

by Bill Hanna

Ride sharing to work during World War II was an earnest civilian attempt to conserve
gas rations and assist with the national war effort. There were several people working at
MGM living in the San Fernando Valley at the time, and a few of us decided to make the
daily trip across the Santa Monica Mountains to work together.

Of the handful of folks who joined our little carpool unit every day, only Tex Avery and I
owned cars. Every morning, one of us set out and picked up the other and then made the
rounds collecting passengers.

Any ride with Tex Avery, of course, was a cinch to be one of sidesplitting hysteria. Tex's
backseat humor was as spontaneously zany as any of his wildest cartoons and often a lot
racier. Tex exerted a tremendous professional influence over my career in animation.
He was looked up to by just about everyone in the industry and was held in high regard
as an exceptionally gifted animator and director. Although he was only a few years
older than myself, he had already established himself as a kind of prodigy in our
business with his distinctive style of exaggerated timing and direction of frenetic
madcap Merrie Melodies cartoons at Warners. Like a lot of other pioneers in the cartoon
business, Tex Avery remained a kind of unsung hero in our business for many years to
just about everyone except his colleagues. But to me, he is one of the biggest
personalities in cartoon folklore that ever lived.

I admired Avery for his phenomenal sense of timing along with his imaginative flair for
wild gags which combined to make his cartoons among the funniest ever produced in the
business. Whenever time permitted, I would take the opportunity to run one of Avery's
latest cartoons and study it on the movieola, frame by frame, in order to hone my own
skills in timing.

One of the best assets that Hanna-Barbera Studio ever produced for Joe and me was the
opportunity to reunite with many of the veteran producers and animators with whom we
worked back at MGM. Both Tex Avery and Friz Freleng joined us at H-B as directors of
Saturday Morning cartoon shows, and the reunions with these guys, I'll tell you, really
helped keep the creative excitement of this business as vivid for me as it was when I was
a kid back at Harman-Ising.

When the end finally came for my old friend and past mentor on August 26, 1980, it
marked not only the passing of a great pioneer in animation, but for me, signaled an
epoch symbolic of the passing of an era.