Check it out! guerrilla humor at its finest! I was browsing amazon for a biography on Chuck Jones when I found this:
Quote:
Jones's inferno, September 5, 2004
Reviewer: Jack Maybrick (Shuttling between the streets of Whitechapel and the shadow of Coogan's Bluff) - See all my reviews
Bugs Bunny is an immensely witty and funny cartoon character, but his entertainment value pales before the harm that his creator did in other contexts.
Chuck Jones was the foremost creator of sanitized pornography in the Western world. To me, hunger doesn't seem like a subject for humor, but Chuck ran amuck in a world that he designed, in which predatory animals remain forever hungry - and in which smaller prey further torment them with their inaccessibility.
In the real world, by the way, coyotes can run twice as fast as roadrunners but rarely bother them because there aren't enough calories in a roadrunner to justify the expenditure of energy necessary to catch one, and coyotes have other options.
Predators aren't really "bad", of course, they are doing what nature intended of them, and they would become extinct if they didn't prevail a fair percentage of the time - and, by the same token, their prey would overpopulate.
So Chuck Jones's world isn't literally a "real" one, but it's a very ungodly one, in which "good" triumphs over "evil" but where smallness and obnoxiousness substitute for Judeo-Christian virtue and in which sin is represented by largeness and predation.
The most obvious examples of this, of course, are indeed the Coyote/Roadrunner cartoons. In this book, Jones disingenuously explains that they are meant to represent his own sense of futility, his lack of coordination with tools, the accidents that inevitably happen when he works with them, and his tendency to repeat the same tasks over again, no matter how dismal his record of success with them.
Jones tells an interesting true-to-life story about a half-billion dollar government project that failed due to the malfunction of a fifty-cent item. He remarks that the government was obviously poaching on the Coyote's territory and asserts that the malfunctioning item must have been bought from Acme.
Very glib and very beside the point. Jones gives the game away when he cheerfully observes that in order to make his endlessly recurring point about the foibles of human nature, he doesn't mind bruising children's egos.
Really, Mr. Jones? Is it beneficial to impart to kids an "anti-Horatio Alger" message that risk and effort don't lead to reward? How many children with bruised egos grew up tormenting small animals - or children smaller than themselves - trying to work off the psychic rage of being tormented by a mocking roadrunner? For that matter, how many adults have committed atrocities for the same reason?
Remarking on the worldwide popularity of the cartoon, Jones remarks that "Beep beep" is the Esperanto of comedy, but it just might be the Esperanto of more than that. The concept of an obnoxious land-bound bird, impervious to capture and forever teasing its pursuer, rests in the dark side of many psyches, and others actually have "bootlegged" the cartoon for the purpose of creating more explicit sadomasochistic literature.
Chuck Jones is no longer with us, having passed away in early 2002. I'd like to think that all of us will be forgiven for our sins. But the negative sensationalism of his cartoons and his inability to satisfactorily account for same in this book leave me wondering if, for the moment, he isn't in a Purgatory similar to that designed by Greek mythologists for King Tantalus, in which Jones is tormented by hunger and thirst, with food and drink placed just out of his reach - and with the added twist of being taunted by the food.
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Reviewer: Jack Maybrick (Shuttling between the streets of Whitechapel and the shadow of Coogan's Bluff) - See all my reviews
Bugs Bunny is an immensely witty and funny cartoon character, but his entertainment value pales before the harm that his creator did in other contexts.
Chuck Jones was the foremost creator of sanitized pornography in the Western world. To me, hunger doesn't seem like a subject for humor, but Chuck ran amuck in a world that he designed, in which predatory animals remain forever hungry - and in which smaller prey further torment them with their inaccessibility.
In the real world, by the way, coyotes can run twice as fast as roadrunners but rarely bother them because there aren't enough calories in a roadrunner to justify the expenditure of energy necessary to catch one, and coyotes have other options.
Predators aren't really "bad", of course, they are doing what nature intended of them, and they would become extinct if they didn't prevail a fair percentage of the time - and, by the same token, their prey would overpopulate.
So Chuck Jones's world isn't literally a "real" one, but it's a very ungodly one, in which "good" triumphs over "evil" but where smallness and obnoxiousness substitute for Judeo-Christian virtue and in which sin is represented by largeness and predation.
The most obvious examples of this, of course, are indeed the Coyote/Roadrunner cartoons. In this book, Jones disingenuously explains that they are meant to represent his own sense of futility, his lack of coordination with tools, the accidents that inevitably happen when he works with them, and his tendency to repeat the same tasks over again, no matter how dismal his record of success with them.
Jones tells an interesting true-to-life story about a half-billion dollar government project that failed due to the malfunction of a fifty-cent item. He remarks that the government was obviously poaching on the Coyote's territory and asserts that the malfunctioning item must have been bought from Acme.
Very glib and very beside the point. Jones gives the game away when he cheerfully observes that in order to make his endlessly recurring point about the foibles of human nature, he doesn't mind bruising children's egos.
Really, Mr. Jones? Is it beneficial to impart to kids an "anti-Horatio Alger" message that risk and effort don't lead to reward? How many children with bruised egos grew up tormenting small animals - or children smaller than themselves - trying to work off the psychic rage of being tormented by a mocking roadrunner? For that matter, how many adults have committed atrocities for the same reason?
Remarking on the worldwide popularity of the cartoon, Jones remarks that "Beep beep" is the Esperanto of comedy, but it just might be the Esperanto of more than that. The concept of an obnoxious land-bound bird, impervious to capture and forever teasing its pursuer, rests in the dark side of many psyches, and others actually have "bootlegged" the cartoon for the purpose of creating more explicit sadomasochistic literature.
Chuck Jones is no longer with us, having passed away in early 2002. I'd like to think that all of us will be forgiven for our sins. But the negative sensationalism of his cartoons and his inability to satisfactorily account for same in this book leave me wondering if, for the moment, he isn't in a Purgatory similar to that designed by Greek mythologists for King Tantalus, in which Jones is tormented by hunger and thirst, with food and drink placed just out of his reach - and with the added twist of being taunted by the food.
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whee ...sadly, I think this is just overzealous protestantism, not anything really fun.
edit: erm, sorry for this offtopic rant ^^; feel free to kill it later. but who else would i rant to? have you guys SEEN the general forums in this place? eek
