Vote for the Best Warner Bros. Shorts

Jerry Beck is an animation historian and author of several books on that subject. He's currently working on another which ranks and discusses the greatest Warner Bros. shorts of all time (meaning postwar through the Sixties, really), and in creating his list he's consulting with industry leaders and other critics, but in his blog entry of last December 18 he said that he also wants to harness the Internet and get the vote of the common people (i.e. folks like me). So each and every one of us has until January 9 to go over to Cartoon Brew (the blog) and vote for the top ten, twenty, or fifty WB cartoons that have touched our lives. A list of eligible titles is also provided.

I am much too indecisive to come up with a full ten titles, let alone fifty, but here are my top five:

1. Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century

Daffy Duck faces off against Marvin the Martian in a Cold War satire that remains the greatest such film of all time (okay, okay, it ties for #1 with Dr. Strangelove). It's also the greatest sci-fi spoof ever.

2. Duck Amuck

I guess this means I'm a Daffy Duck fan. This deconstruction of the animated form is one of the greatest postmodern films ever, rivaling Godard or Gerald McBoing Boing or Chris Marker, and it's entire hilarious and accessible too. (Throw all the music of the great Carl Stalling, by the way, in that same category.) 

3. What's Opera, Doc?

You want postmodernism and satire with a little nineteenth-century opera thrown in to boot? Then this send-up of Wagner is the best thing going for you, and the best Bugs Bunny (and Elmer Fudd) cartoon ever. There's even a little Shakespearean cross-dressing, seen above, for the Anglophiles. Fantastic music, great plot, etc., etc. Amazing.

4. Fast and Furry-ous

The original pairing off of the eternal nemeses Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner is still the best, in part for its internal merits and in part for the series it launched. Wile E. Coyote is the twentieth century's Sisyphus, forever toiling at the same interminable task with the same unsuccessful results. Albert Camus might as well have written about him as the original Greek legend, but he wrote six years too early (he published "The Myth of Sisyphus" in 1942, compared to the film's 1948 premiere). And it's a cartoon par excellence: the chase stripped of every of plot device.

5. Hare-Way to the Stars

I'm also a big Marvin the Martian fan, though he only made around six films. This is his best with Bugs Bunny, with fantastic design by Maurice Noble and, again, a great Cold War send up in its denouement with a Martian invasion Orson Welles or Joseph McCarthy or anybody could have only dreamed of. Plus Marvin is the antithesis of Wile E., the antichase par excellence. 

Now, this was not on purpose, but all five of these were directed by Chuck Jones. Thus we see who I'm really a fan of after all.

Having made that list I can start to think of lots more--Duck, Rabbit, Duck; Bully for Bugs; all things Pepe Le Pew and Tasmanian Devil--but I'd best go vote myself now. Here's Duck Dodgers: