10 Favorite Cartoons of Animator Chuck Jones

"What's Opera, Doc?" showed how Chuck Jones mixed animation and music to perfection.
The Vitaphone Corp., Re. 1985 Warner Bros. Inc.

Academy Award-winning animator Chuck Jones (1912-2002) directed and created such iconic cartoon figures as Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Pepé Le Pew, and Roadrunner. His animated TV specials include Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. In the following list, compiled in 1984, Jones discussed his favorites among the cartoons he directed.

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1. "One Froggy Evening" (1955)

"It was a difficult cartoon to do, and I'm most proud of the fact that the difficulty and effort doesn't show in the product."

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2. "What's Opera, Doc?" (1957)

"We took 14 hours and cut it down to six minutes. We played the music straight -- we had a sixty-piece orchestra."

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3. "Feed the Kitty" (1952)

"A pugnacious dog is overcome with love for a kitten. It's just one of my favorites."

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4. "A Bear for Punishment" (1951)

"This was an Archie Bunker story before its time, and we had a great cast, Bea Benaderet, Billy Bletcher, and Stan Freberg."

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5. "Duck Amuck" (1953)

"Daffy has a long fight with the person drawing the cartoon. I had always wanted to do a story like that. It was a challenge, but it sure was fun."

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6. "Duck Dodgers in the 241/2th Century" (1953)

"Naturally, this was a Buck Rogers satire. We did a lot of experimenting. We did this in 1953, before there was a Cape Canaveral -- we didn't even know what rockets were. You know, our cartoon looks just like Cape Canaveral. I'm often kidded that I'm the one who really designed Cape Canaveral."

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7. "For Scent-Imental Reasons" (1949)

"This won an Academy Award in 1949. The star was Pepé Le Pew, and this is one of my favorites because I admire Pepé so much. Really, I want to be just like he was in this cartoon."

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8. "Whoa, Be-Gone!" (1958)

"I had to include a Roadrunner picture in this list. The Roadrunner has no dialogue, so it crosses all international borders. This is my favorite Roadrunner."

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9. "The Dot and The Line" (1965)

"It's quite an unusual picture, and it won an Academy Award in 1965. This is the plot: A line falls in love with a dot, and a dot falls in love with a squiggle. I got this idea from a book by Norton Juster."

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10. "The Scarlet Pumpernickel" (1950)

"Daffy tries to sell a script to Jack Warner. We had all the characters in this one, and we really had the opportunity to play with Daffy's character. It was a lot of fun."

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS:

Helen Davies, Marjorie Dorfman, Mary Fons, Deborah Hawkins, Martin Hintz, Linnea Lundgren, David Priess, Julia Clark Robinson, Paul Seaburn, Heidi Stevens, and Steve Theunissen

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