Gold Diggers of '49 (1936) ***

Tex Avery's film debut (and thus the first "Termite Terrace" Warner Bros cartoon). It was made at a time when the Disney style of animation completely dominated the industry and every animation studio in Hollywood was looking at Disney cartoons, trying to imitate their style and appeal. Every studio, that is, except Warner Bros. There, Tex Avery and his gang from "Termite Terrace" (then-animators and later directors Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett and Robert Cannon) weren't trying to compete with Uncle Walt. They wanted to create a completely different type of cartoons. And working in a little termite-infested cottage, away from the main animation studio, they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams with their very first effort, "Gold Diggers of '49". With this single film, a new style of "screwball" animation was born. Instead of focusing on imaginative and surrealistic transformations of the characters or on improvements in the quality of animation, this new cartoon was focused on original, self-reflexive, brechtian and absurdist gags. Everything about it was new and suprising, including the title. By 1936, due to enormous success of musical films like "Gold Diggers of 1933", every filmgoer would associate "golddigging" with chorus girls trying to seduce old "sugar daddies" (the kind played most successfully by Guy Kibbee). But Tex Avery used that term literally, making a cartoon about miners actually digging for gold in the Far West. He also introduced characters that were designed to appeal to adults, rather than to children (who, until then, were the main target audience of most cartoons). "Gold Diggers of '49" was the second cartoon starring Porky Pig. In his screen debut, Freleng's "I Haven't Got A Hat" (1935), Porky was a little school kid. But here, Porky is cast as an adult (he even has a daughter), and the whole film has a sense of humor designed to attract a more sophisticated audience.