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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface to the Paperback Edition by Matt Groening
Foreword by Steven Spielberg
Caveat Emptor
Johnson and the Birth of a Notion
Uncle Lynn’s Stubborn Liver: Comic Tales and Comic Stars
How to Become an Animator
A Few Hours’ Incursion into a Rabbit Factory
The Front Office
The Directors: Friz Freleng, Tex Avery, and How I Grew
The Writers: The Slum Kid, the Scion, and Me
Duck Dodgers: A Case History—Story Through Animation
Rabbit Transit
Never Take a Right Turn at Albuquerque
The Birth in Me of a Daffy Duckling
Teddy and Charlie
How to Make a Tennis Shoe for a Percheron
Appendix
Remembering Dorothy Webster Jones
Filmography
Major Characters
Early Animation
Photographs
Acclaim for Chuck Jones and Chuck Amuck
Copyright
I dedicate this book to my wife, Marian, and to my daughter, Linda, who together through light touch, light heart, and deep love have made these past years the happiest, the best years of a happy life.
(Je vous embrasse tendrement.)
… and to Stefan Kanfer, whose determination that there was a book lurking in the shadows of my shadowy history put me, because of my love for him, into the uneasy position of having to try to prove him right.
But without Linda Healey—superb editor, enemy of the false, friend of the true—even this wan hope would have been only fantasy.
All events related in this volume are either real or fictional—the drawings have been changed to protect the innocent.
From ROCKET SQUAD (1956)
PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION
As the twentieth century whips around its final lap, we can start contemplating how annoying the next century is going to be.
Let’s face it: in the years to come we’re going to be surrounded by increasing numbers of young whippersnappers who aren’t going to put up with our claims that, despite the wars and genocide and smog and infomercials and disco and car alarms, the good old days had some pretty great stuff going on.
“Not the twentieth century again,” they’ll whine, rolling their eyes.
But we’ve got Chuck Jones. And even though the immature ingrates of tomorrow will be marching to a different drum machine, no doubt they’ll unbegrudgingly acknowledge the joyful genius of his cartoons.
And that’s because, among other miracles, Chuck’s animation continues to make audiences laugh, year after year, decade after decade, and soon enough, century after century.
Comedy is a fragile enterprise, vulnerable to drastic changes in taste over the years, but nothing in the great cartoons of Chuck Jones ever seems musty or out-of-date. We can talk about the transcendental lasting artistic value of Chuck’s output, or better yet, we can screen Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century and sit back and laugh.
And that’s what’s great about the great art of Chuck Jones. You can’t pin it down—it’s too funny. The laughs sweep over you like a wave, bigger and more powerful than anything bubbling up from your own pitiful brain, with perfect timing, split-second pauses, and hilarious sight gags, all delivered with the relentlessly lively exuberance that came from the uniquely unsentimental imaginations of Chuck and his brilliant collaborators.
For me, the cartoons of Chuck Jones are like wish-fulfillment dreams come to life. One of the thrills of the power struggles of Bugs and Daffy and Wile E. and the rest of the gang is that they capture the heedless glee and immaturity of recurring childhood fantasies. In these feverish, wild vignettes, all the subconscious malice and frivolity and charm and surprise take center stage, anchored in reality by the emotions of humiliation and anger and wit and triumph. As humans, or even as ducks or rabbits, we can all relate.
But I’m getting carried away here. Chuck Jones is a genius—that’s for sure—but even more important, he makes us laugh our asses off.
—Matt Groening
FOREWORD
When you hear the name Chuck Jones, what is the first image that comes to mind?
For me, that generically American-sounding name always had the familiar ring of the family next door. One feels compelled to trust a name like that. It’s the type of person you might take a broken baseball bat to when your own dad is too busy to glue it … It’s the local Scoutmaster … the greengrocer … the best auto mechanic in town.
It’s not the sort of name one instantly associates with pesky wabbits, neurotic ducks, or hard-luck coyotes, is it?
If Walt Disney was the first animator who taught me how to fly in my dreams, Chuck Jones was the first animator who made me laugh at them.
With the creation of Pepé Le Pew, Coyote, and Road Runner, and as part of the team that created Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and directed over fifty Bugs Bunny cartoons, Chuck broke away from the sweet preschool characters to whom Walt Disney Productions had given eternal life.
Birdus Fleetus and Lupus Persisticus were my childhood heroes. It was out of a heartfelt respect for his cartoon wizardry that I begged Universal to pay Warners for those forty composite seconds of film that lent my first film, The Sugarland Express, its most poignant moment.
Knowing Chuck has been a treat and I thank him for teaching me so much about breaking all the laws of physics … just for the joy of it.
CAVEAT EMPTOR
An autobiography that leaves out little things and enumerates only the big ones is no proper picture of the man’s life at all; his life consists of his feelings and his interests, with here and there an incident apparently big or little to hang the feelings on.
—MARK TWAIN
This book is not a record of facts, it is not exact; it makes no claim to being exact; it is, I hope, a fond catchall, a remembrance of events and people who, consciously or not, shaped my life and character.
All memories are faulty, of
