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This Exhibit Shows How Animator Chuck Jones Made Looney Tunes Great By Mixing Groucho Marx and Mark Twain

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"The coyote is a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton," wrote Mark Twain in Roughing It.  "He has a general slinking expression all over. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless." Twain could have been describing the comically scrawny predator in the Looney Tunes Road Runner series – and he was. Road Runner creator Chuck Jones based Wile E. Coyote's character on Twain's 1872 description of wildlife in the Wild West (though the raggedness of Wile E.'s tail derived from ukiyo-e woodblock prints of cresting waves).

With animation credits ranging from Bugs Bunny to The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, Jones was one of the great cartoonists of the 20th Century. A revealing new exhibition organized by the Smithsonian Institution – currently on view at the Museum of the Moving Image – shows that he was also one of the century's most eclectic artists.

The inspirations for Jones' animations came from sources old and new, near and far, high and low. Bugs Bunny was a characteristic composite, drawing on a rabbit character created for Warner Bros. by Ben "Bugs" Hardaway in 1938.  Jones totally transformed Hardaway's Disneyesque bunny. He based Bugs's carrot-munching on how Groucho Marx smoked cigars, and the way Bugs would halt mid-sprint, balanced on one foot, was adapted from Edgar Degas' paintings of ballet dancers. The content of Jones' cartoons was at least as wide-ranging. In What's Opera Doc, he managed to lampoon both Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle and Disney's Fantasia. And the bedroom in One Froggy Evening appropriates a room in a Vincent Van Gogh painting.

In the decades since Jones started loading up Looney Tunes with the whole history of culture, both haute and popular, artists have become increasingly involved in combining these sources – and they've become fixated on playing off increasingly arcane references. Jones was never preoccupied with such postmodern pretenses. Even when his parody was explicit, the source material was never his focus. (What's Opera, Doc is less about mocking Wagnerian seriousness than about comically exploring the relationship between Bugs and Elmer Fudd.)

Jones was undoubtedly a genius of appropriation, but he didn't have to show it off. His synthesis of sources was complete. The proof of his success? He always got a laugh.

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