HISTORY OF CAROONISTS
SCOTT ADAMS
SCOTT ADAMS
Early life
Scott Adams was born in Windham, New York in 1957. He grew up a big fan of the Peanuts comics, and started drawing his own comics at the age of six.[1] He also became a fan of Mad magazine, and began spending long hours practicing his drawing talent, winning a competition at the age of eleven.[1] In 1968, he was rejected for an arts school and instead focused on a career in law. Adams graduated valedictorian at Windham-Ashland-Jewett Central School in 1975, with a class size of 39. He remained in the area and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from Hartwick College in 1979.[2] In his senior year, a vehicle breakdown almost forced him to spend a night in the snow, causing him to vow never to see a snowflake again. He took a one way trip to California a few months after his graduation.[1]
[edit]Career
Office worker
[edit]
Adams worked closely with telecommunications engineers at Crocker National Bank in San Francisco between 1979 and 1986. Upon joining the organization, he entered a management training program after being held at gunpoint twice in four months as a teller.[1] Over the years his positions included: management trainee, computer programmer, budget analyst, commercial lender, product manager, and supervisor. During presentations to upper management he often turned to his comic creations to add humor.[1] He earned an MBA in economics and management from theUniversity of California, Berkeley in 1986.
Adams created Dilbert the character during this period--the name came from ex-boss Mike Goodwin.[1] Dogbert, originally named Dildog, was loosely based on his family's deceased pet beagle, Lucy.[1] Periodic attempts to win publication with Dilbert and non-Dilbert comic panels alike failed, including with The New Yorker and Playboy (not necessarily with the same comics).[1] However an inspirational letter from a fan persuaded Adams to keep trying.[1]
He worked at Pacific Bell between 1986 and June 1995, and the personalities he encountered became the inspiration for many of his Dilbert characters. Adams first published Dilbert with United Media in 1989, while still employed at Pacific Bell. He had to draw his cartoons at 4am in order to work a full day at the company. His first paycheck for Dilbert was a monthly royalty check of $368.62.[1] Gradually Dilbert became more popular, and was published by 100 newspapers in 1991 and 400 by 1994. Adams attributes his success to his idea of including his e-mail address in the panels, thus facilitating feedback from readers.[1]
[edit]Full-time cartoonist
As he became a full-time cartoonist, with Dilbert in 800 newspapers, Adams' success grew. In 1996 The Dilbert Principle was released, his first business book.[1]
In 1997, at the invitation of Logitech CEO Pierluigi Zappacosta, Adams, wearing a wig and false mustache, successfully impersonated a management consultant and tricked Logitech managers into adopting a mission statement that Adams described as "so impossibly complicated that it has no real content whatsoever."[3] That year he won the National Cartoonists Society's Reuben Award for Outstanding Cartoonist of the Year and Best Newspaper Comic Strip of 1997, the most prestigious awards in the field.[1]
In 1998 Dilbert began as a TV series, but was cancelled in 2000. By 2000 the comic was in 2000 newspapers in 57 countries and 19 languages.[1]
Finally, I got the call. "You're number one." I still haven't popped the champagne. I just raise the bar for what would be the right moment, and tell myself how tasty it will be if I ever accomplish something special in my work. Apparently the thing inside me that makes me work so hard is the same thing that keeps me unsatisfied.[4]— Scott Adams, The Dilbert Blog
An avid fan of the science fiction TV series Babylon 5, he appeared in the season 4 episode "Moments of Transition" as a character named "Mr. Adams," who hires former head of securityMichael Garibaldi to locate his megalomaniacal dog and cat.[5] He also had a cameo in "Review", a third-season episode of the TV series NewsRadio, in which the character Matthew Brock (Andy Dick) becomes an obsessed Dilbert fan. Adams is credited as "Guy in line behind Dave and Joe in first scene".[6] Later in the episode, the character Dave Nelson (Dave Foley) hires an actor to play Scott Adams in a trick to bring Matthew back to work at the station.
Adams is the CEO of Scott Adams Foods, Inc., makers of the Dilberito and Protein Chef, and a co-owner of Stacey's Café in Pleasanton, California. Much of his interest in the food business comes from the fact that he is a vegetarian.
On November 16, 2011, Adams announced his candidacy for President of the United States on his blog, running as an independent. [7]
[edit]Personal life
He is a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. Adams is a former member of Mensa.[8]
In recent years, Adams has had two notable health problems. Since late 2004, he has suffered from a reemergence of his focal dystonia which has affected his ability to draw for lengthy periods on paper,[9] though it causes no real problem now that he draws the comic on a graphics tablet. He also suffered from spasmodic dysphonia, a condition that causes the vocal cords to behave in an abnormal manner. He recovered from this condition temporarily but in July 2008 underwent surgery to rewire the nerve connections to his vocal cord. The operation was successful, and Adams' voice is now completely functional.
Adams is a vegetarian and trained as a hypnotist.[10] He credits his own success to affirmations, including Dilbert's success and achieving a ninety-fourth percentile on a difficult qualification exam for business school, among other unlikely events. He states that the affirmations give him focus.[11]
Stephan Pastis, creator of Pearls Before Swine, credits Adams for launching his career as a cartoonist.
Adams married Shelly Miles in 2006 and currently resides in Pleasanton, California.
Adams has often commented on political matters. In 2007 he suggested that Michael Bloomberg would make a good presidential candidate.[12] Before the 2008 presidential election he said, "On social issues, I lean Libertarian, minus the crazy stuff,"[13] but said in December 2011 that if he were president he would do whatever Bill Clinton advised him to do because that "would lead to policies that are a sensible middle ground."[14]
[edit]Controversy
In March 2011, Adams wrote a blog post on the topic of men's rights after men's rights advocates responded in large numbers to his request for readers of his blog to choose his next topic.[15] In the post Adams says that men treat women differently for the same reason that men treat children or the mentally handicapped differently—because it is an effective strategy. The post generated a significant backlash and accusations of misogyny. Adams deleted the post from his blog. Several weeks later the post continued to generate controversy.[16][17] Adams responded to the continuing controversy by reposting the original text preceded by an explanation.[15] Adams argued that as in virtually all other posts to his blog, he had made extensive use of satire and sarcasm but that it seemed to have been lost on some readers.[15] He wrote that the furor that erupted on both sides of the issue only served to illustrate the point he was making: "You can't expect to have a rational discussion on any topic that has an emotional charge."[15]
In April 2011, Adams mentioned that he had used a fake identity to post on link-sharing sites Reddit and MetaFilter
Biography
[edit]Early years
Tex Avery was born to George Walton Avery (b. June 8, 1867 - d. January 14, 1935) and the former Mary Augusta "Jessie" Bean (1886–1931) in Taylor, Texas. His father was born in Alabama. His mother was born in Buena Vista, Chickasaw County, Mississippi. His paternal grandparents were Needham Avery (Civil War veteran) (October 8, 1838 - February 20, 1913, buried at Wehadkee Primitive Baptist Church Cemetery, Randolph County, AL) and his wife Lucinda C. Baxly (May 11, 1844 - March 10, 1892). His maternal grandparents were Frederick Mumford Bean (1852 - October 23, 1886) and his wife Minnie Edgar (July 25, 1854 - May 7, 1940). His paternal Great-grandparents were John Walton Avery (December 16, 1805 - January 13, 1878, buried at Rock Springs Cemetery, Randolph County, AL ) and wife Elizabeth Brannon Tomme Avery (October 17, 1809 - October 15, 1895, buried at Mount Pisgah Primitive Baptist Church Cemetery, Stroud, AL). Avery was said to be a descendant of Judge Roy Bean. However his maternal great-grandparents were actually Mumford Bean from Tennessee (August 22, 1805 - October 10, 1892) and his wife Lutica from Alabama. Mumford was son of William Bean and his wife Nancy Blevins from Virginia. Their relation to Roy is uncertain though his paternal grandparents were also from Virginia. Avery's family tradition also claimed descent from Daniel Boone.
Avery was raised in his native Taylor, and graduated in 1926 from North Dallas High School.[3] A popular catchphrase at his school was "What's up, doc?",[4] which he would later popularize with Bugs Bunny in the 1940s.
Avery first began his animation career at the Walter Lantz studio in the early 1930s, working on the majority of the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons from 1931-35. He is shown as 'animator' on the original title card credits on the Oswald cartoons. He later claimed to have directed two cartoons during this time.[2] During some office horseplay, a paperclip flew into Avery's left eye and caused him to lose use of that eye. Some speculate it was his lack of depth perception that gave him his unique look at animation and bizarre directorial style.[2]
[edit]"Termite Terrace"
Avery migrated to the Leon Schlesinger studio in late 1935 and convinced the fast-talking Schlesinger to let him head his own production unit of animators and create cartoons the way he wanted them to be made. Schlesinger responded by assigning the Avery unit, including animators Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones, to a five-room bungalow at the Warner Bros. Sunset Blvd. backlot. Schlesinger placed the Avery unit there so as not to tip off Avery's predecessor Tom Palmer that he was about to be fired.[5] The Avery unit, assigned to work primarily on the black-and-white Looney Tunes instead of the Technicolor Merrie Melodies, soon dubbed their quarters "Termite Terrace", due to its significant termite population.
"Termite Terrace" later became the nickname for the entire Schlesinger/Warners studio, primarily because Avery and his unit were the ones who defined what became known as "the Warner Bros. cartoon". Their first short, Gold Diggers of '49, is recognized as the first cartoon to make Porky Pig a star, and Avery’s experimentation with the medium continued from there.
[edit]Creation of Looney Tunes stars
Avery, with the assistance of Clampett, Jones, and new associate director Frank Tashlin, laid the foundation for a style of animation that dethroned The Walt Disney Studio as the kings of animated short films, and created a legion of cartoon stars whose names still shine around the world today. Avery in particular was deeply involved; a perfectionist, Avery constantly crafted gags for the shorts, periodically provided voices for them (including his trademark belly laugh), and held such control over the timing of the shorts that he would add or cut frames out of the final negative if he felt a gag's timing was not quite right.
[edit]Daffy Duck
Porky's Duck Hunt introduced the character of Daffy Duck, who possessed a new form of "lunacy" and zaniness that had not been seen before in animated cartoons. Daffy was an almost completely out-of-control "darn fool duck" who frequently bounced around the film frame in double-speed, screaming "Hoo-hoo! hoo-hoo" in a high-pitched, sped-up voice provided by veteran Warners voice artist Mel Blanc, who, with this cartoon, also took over providing the voice of Porky Pig.
[edit]Bugs Bunny
Ben Hardaway, Cal Dalton and Chuck Jones directed a series of shorts which featured a Daffy Duck-like rabbit, created by Ben "Bugs" Hardaway. As is the case with most directors, each puts his own personal stamp on the characters, stories and overall feel of a short. So each of these cartoons treated the rabbit differently. The next to try out the rabbit, known around Termite Terrace as "Bugs' Bunny" (named after Hardaway), was Avery. Since the recycling of storylines among the directors was commonplace, "A Wild Hare" was a double throwback. Avery had directed the '37 short, "Porky's Duck Hunt" featuring Porky Pig which introduced "Daffy Duck". Hardaway remade this as "Porky's Hare Hunt" introducing the rabbit. So Avery went back to the "hunter and prey" framework, and incorporating Jones' "Elmer's Candid Camera", gag for gag, and altering the design of Elmer Fudd. Polishing the timing, and expanding the Groucho Marx smart-aleck attitude already present in "Porky's Hare Hunt", making Bugs' a kind of Brooklyn-esque super-cool rabbit who was always in control of the situation and who ran rings around his opponents. Avery has stated that it was very common to refer to folks in Texas as "doc", much like "pal", "dude" or "bud". In A Wild Hare, Bugs adopts this colloquialism when he casually walks up to Elmer, who is "hunting wabbits" and while carefully inspecting a rabbit hole, shotgun in hand, the first words out of Bugs' mouth is a coolly calm, "What's up, doc?". Audiences reacted riotously to the juxtaposition of Bugs' nonchalance and the potentially dangerous situation, and "What's up, doc?" instantly became the rabbit's catchphrase.
Avery ended up directing only four Bugs Bunny cartoons: A Wild Hare, Tortoise Beats Hare, All This and Rabbit Stew, and The Heckling Hare. During this period, he also directed a number of one-shot shorts, including travelogue parodies (The Isle of Pingo Pongo), fractured fairy-tales (The Bear's Tale), Hollywood caricature films (Hollywood Steps Out), and cartoons featuring Bugs Bunny clones (The Crack-Pot Quail).
Avery's tenure at the Schlesinger studio ended in late 1941, when he and the producer quarreled over the ending to The Heckling Hare. In Avery's original version, Bugs and hunting dog were to fall off of a cliffthree times, milking the gag to its comic extreme. According to a DVD commentary for the cartoon, historian and animator Greg Ford explained that the problem Schlesinger had with the ending was that, just prior to falling off the third time, Bugs and the dog were to turn to the screen, with Bugs saying "Hold on to your hats, folks, here we go again!" It's thought that this was the punchline to a well-known risqué joke of the day. Schlesinger intervened (supposedly on orders from Jack Warner himself, although it's doubtful Warner would be screening cartoons unless alerted to this particular content), and edited the film so that the characters only fall off the cliff twice (the edited cartoon ends abruptly, after Bugs and the Dog fall through a hole in a cliff and immediately stop short of the ground, saying to the audience, "Heh, fooled you, didn't we?"). An enraged Avery promptly quit the studio, leaving three cartoons he started on but did not complete. They were Crazy Cruise, The Cagey Canary and Aloha Hooey. Bob Clampett picked up where Avery left off and completed the three cartoons.
[edit]Speaking of Animals
While at Schlesinger, Avery created a concept of animating lip movement to live action footage of animals. Schlesinger was not interested in Avery's idea, so Avery approached Jerry Fairbanks, a friend of his who produced the Unusual Occupations series of short subjects for Paramount Pictures. Fairbanks liked the idea and the Speaking of Animals series of shorts was launched. When Avery left Warner, he went straight to Paramount to work on the first three shorts in the series before joining MGM.
[edit]Avery at MGM
By 1942, Avery was in the employ of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, working in their cartoon division under the supervision of Fred Quimby. Avery felt that Schlesinger had stifled him. At MGM, Avery's creativity reached its peak. His cartoons became known for their sheer lunacy, breakneck pace, and a penchant for playing with the medium of animation and film in general that few other directors dared to approach. MGM also offered him larger budgets and a higher quality production level than the Warners studio. Plus, his unit was filled with ex-Disney artists such as Preston Blair and Ed Love. These changes were evident in Avery's first short released by MGM, The Blitz Wolf, an Adolf Hitler parody which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Cartoons) in 1942.
Avery's most famous MGM character debuted in 1943's Dumb-Hounded. Droopy (originally "Happy Hound") was a calm, little, slow-moving and slow-talking dog who still won out in the end. He also created a series of risqué cartoons, beginning with 1943's Red Hot Riding Hood, featuring a sexy female star who never had a set name but has been unofficially referred to as "Red" by fans, whose visual design and voice varied somewhat between shorts. Other Avery characters at MGM included Screwy Squirrel and the Of Mice and Men-inspired duo of George and Junior.
Other notable MGM cartoons directed by Avery include Bad Luck Blackie, Cellbound, Magical Maestro, Lucky Ducky, Ventriloquist Cat and King-Size Canary. Avery began his stint at MGM working with lush colors and realistic backgrounds, but he slowly abandoned this style for a more frenetic, less realistic approach. The newer, more stylized look reflected the influence of the up-and-coming UPA studio, the need to cut costs as budgets grew higher, and Avery's own desire to leave reality behind and make cartoons that were not tied to the real world of live action. During this period, he made a notable series of films which explored the technology of the future: The House of Tomorrow, The Car of Tomorrow, The Farm of Tomorrow and TV of Tomorrow (spoofing common live-action promotional shorts of the time). He also introduced a slow-talking wolf character, who was the prototype for MGM associates Hanna-Barbera's Huckleberry Hound character, right down to the voice byDaws Butler.
Avery took a year's sabbatical from MGM beginning in 1950 (to recover from overwork), during which time Dick Lundy, recently arrived from the Walter Lantz studio, took over his unit and made one Droopy cartoon, as well as a string of shorts with an old character, Barney Bear. Avery returned to MGM in October 1951 and began working again. Avery's last two original cartoons for MGM were Deputy Droopy and Cellbound, completed in 1953 and released in 1955. They were co-directed by Avery unit animator Michael Lah. Lah began directing a handful of CinemaScope Droopy shorts on his own. A burnt-out Avery left MGM in 1953 to return to the Walter Lantz studio.
[edit]After MGM
Avery's return to the Lantz studio did not last long. He directed four cartoons in 1954-1955: the one-shots Crazy Mixed-Up Pup and Shh-h-h-h-h, and I'm Cold and The Legend of Rockabye Point, in which he defined the character of Chilly Willy the penguin. Although The Legend of Rockabye Point and Crazy Mixed-Up Pup were nominated for Academy Awards, Avery left Lantz over a salary dispute, effectively ending his career in theatrical animation.
He turned to animated television commercials, most notably the Raid commercials of the 1960s and 1970s (in which cartoon insects, confronted by the bug killer, screamed "RAID!" and died flamboyantly) andFrito-Lay's controversial mascot, the Frito Bandito. Avery also produced ads for Kool-Aid fruit drinks starring the Warner Bros. characters he had once helped create during his Termite Terrace days.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Avery became increasingly reserved and depressed, although he continued to draw respect from his peers. His final employer was Hanna-Barbera Productions, where he wrote gags for Saturday morning cartoons such as the Droopy-esque Kwicky Koala.
On Tuesday, August 26, 1980, Avery died at St. Joseph's Hospital in Burbank, California at age 72. He died of liver cancer. He is buried in Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery.
[edit]Legacy
Although Tex Avery did not live to experience the late-1980s renaissance of animation, his work was rediscovered and he began to receive widespread attention and praise by the modern animation and film communities. His influence is strongly reflected in modern cartoons such as "Roger Rabbit", Ren and Stimpy, Animaniacs, Freakazoid, SpongeBob SquarePants, and the Genie character in Disney's Aladdin. In fact, an Averyesque cowboy character bore his name in the otherwise unrelated series The Wacky World of Tex Avery. His work has been honored on shows such as The Tex Avery Show and Cartoon Alley. His characters (particularly Bugs Bunny and the risqué antics of Red Hot Riding Hood) were referenced in the Jim Carrey film The Mask. In the mid 1990s, Dark Horse Comics released a trio of three-issue miniseries that were openly labelled tributes to Avery's MGM cartoons, Wolf & Red, Droopy, and Screwy Squirrel. It should also be noted that Tex Avery, unlike most Warner Brothers directors, kept many original title frames of his cartoons, several otherwise lost due to Blue Ribbon Reissues. Rare prints and art containing original titles and unedited animation from Avery's MGM and Warner Bros. cartoons are now usually sold on eBay or in the collections of animators and cartoon enthusiasts. In 2008 France issued three stamps honoring Tex Avery for his 100th birthday, depicting Droopy, the redheaded showgirl, and the wolf.
Today, the copyrights to all classic color cartoons directed by Avery at Warners and MGM are owned by Turner Entertainment, with Warner Bros. handling distribution. (WB owns the black-and-white cartoons directly.) Turner and WB are both units of Time Warner. The cartoons he directed at the Lantz studio are owned by their original distributors, Universal Studios. A few of Avery's WB shorts are in the public domain, but WB and Turner hold the original film elements.
All of his MGM shorts were released uncensored in a North American MGM/UA laserdisc set, called The Compleat Tex Avery, including the "politically incorrect" Uncle Tom's Cabana and Half-Pint Pygmy(although these were removed from the Region 2 DVD release, now out of print). Several of his cartoons were released on VHS, in four volumes of Tex Avery's Screwball Classics, two Droopy collections, and various inclusions on MGM animation collection releases, with many gags edited out for television showings left in. Avery's Droopy cartoons are available on the DVD set Tex Avery's Droopy: The Complete Theatrical Collection.[6] The seven Droopy cartoons produced in CinemaScope were included here in their original widescreen versions (albeit letter-boxed), instead of the pan and scan versions regularly broadcast on television. Also, some of his works could be found on home video releases (from VHS to Blu-Ray) of Warner Bros.' Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes shorts, and the same is true of his few Lantz Studio cartoons.
Although his complete collection of MGM cartoons were released by fans on DVD as bootlegs[7][8], Warner Home Video and Turner currently have no plans to officially re-release the cartoons themselves on DVD or Blu-Ray. Although a selection of Tex's films will appear, un-restored, on the Looney Tunes Platinum Collection: Volume 2 release.
