Chuck Jones, the Warner Brothers animation master, is best known for "working with" Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, Sylvester and Pepé Le Pew. You don't think of him as having directed Looney Tunes shorts starring wise-cracking mice.
A new Warner Home Video collection, Looney Tunes Mouse Chronicles: The Chuck Jones Collection, released August 28, helps flesh out Jones's early career, before the rascally rabbit took over. And it shows the early stages of his unique sense of humor and visual eye – a comedic aesthetic that would go on to influence a generation (myself included).
What young geek in the 1970s and 1980s, brought up on Saturday morning cartoons, didn't memorize and endlessly recite routines from Chuck Jones masterpieces? "Kill the wabbit!" (from What's Opera Doc?)? The frog's ""Hello! Ma Baby" dance routine (from One Froggy Evening)? Next stop, Monty Python.
This two-hour plus, two-disc collection (for DVD and Blu-ray) features 19 remastered shorts and bonus material, including a breezy documentary about the history of mice in animation, and how Warner Brothers struggled to find a mouse character that would rival Disney's Mickey.
Some of Jones's first shorts, featuring the cute and naive but not very funny Sniffles the mouse, show the early evolution of his humor. Twelve Sniffles-centered shorts are included in this release. To my mind, the best are The Egg Collector (1940), where Sniffles must confront an owl and steal his egg, and Sniffles and the Bookworm, (1939) an astoundingly creative (and geek-friendly) short about a night Sniffles and a bookwork spend in a bookstore. Various literary characters come to life (Robin Hood, a Viking), climbing out of their book-beds. There's a jazzy swing number and a chase from a Frankenstein monster. Fun.
Jones evolved Sniffles' character over the years, finally retiring the annoying little rat. Then came Hubie and Bertie. And we see the real Jones humor beginning to take off.
A classic odd couple duo, one smart one stupid, Hubie and Bertie debut in The Aristo-Cat (1943), where they torment a cat who doesn't know what a mouse looks like. There's also the Oscar-nominated Mouse Wreckers, where Hubie and Bertie again torment Claude the Cat (a favorite nemesis). Mouse Wreckers was up for an Academy Award in the Best Animated Short Film category for 1948, but lost to a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Sci-fi fans will get a kick out of House Hunting Mice (1947), where the two mice try to squat in a house of the future (designed by a "F. Lloyd Wrong") and encounter a housekeeping robot. Seven shorts featuring Hubie and Bertie are included in this collection.
As we enter deeper into the 1940s, beginning with such shorts as The Unbearable Bear (1943), we see the unmistakable Chuck Jones humor and distinctive animation fully blossom. Gone are the rich, Disney-esque, nostalgic designs and background paintings. Gone is the cutesy and naive humor. The look is sharper, exaggerated, stylized, edgier. We also see the darker Jones humor emerge: In The Hypo-chondri-cat(1950), for example, Hubie and Bertie persuade a hypochondriac cat that he's a goner. And there is no happy ending.
Looney Tunes Mouse Chronicles: The Chuck Jones Collection is a worthy addition to your collection of Warner Briothers cartoons. And it will certain whet your appetite not just for cheese, but for the even more sophisticated works in the Chuck Jones oeuvre to come – namely, Bugs, Daffy and the rest of the gang.
The shorts in the collection include:
Naughty but Mice
Little Brother Rat
Sniffles and the Bookworm
Sniffles Takes a Trip
The Egg Collector
Bedtime for Sniffles
Sniffles Bells the Cat
Toy Trouble
The Brave Little Bat
The Unbearable Bear
Lost and Foundling
Hush my Mouse
The Aristo Cat
Trap Happy Porky
Roughly Squeaking
House Hunting Mice
Mouse Wreckers
The Hypo-chondri-cat
Cheese Chasers
