Saturday, May 22, 2021

Cultural Literacy

This morning's serving of Saturday morning cartoons on MeTV had some gems: The Coyote & the Roadrunner in Scrambled Aches, the lone Dr. Seuss/Warner Bros collaboration in Horton Hatches the Egg, and probably the best face-off between Bugs and Yosemite Sam, 1949's High Diving Hare.


Incidentally, Wikipedia is home to a level of Looney Tunes scholarship that is otaku-level obsessively detailed:
"[C]artoonist Jeff Smith writes, "Written by Ted Pierce, High Diving Hare is a one-gag cartoon. Seriously — there is only one joke in this cartoon. Yosemite Sam falls 500 feet into a barrel of water, over and over again. And it gets funnier and funnier with each whistling plunge... The timing of Sam's high diving is all the more remarkable when you think about the fact that Warner's directors had no budget for editing after the film was finished. All the timing for action and gags was set in stone before a single frame was drawn. All Looney Tunes are fast, pared-down affairs that never waste a frame, but even by these standards, High Diving Hare is a precision masterpiece.""
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