Tasmanian Devil (22 page)

In a little under 30 years of cinema cartoon art, a host of major animated animal characters had come to life. Aimed at children (despite plenty of adult wit and sophistication), the Warner Bros. animal stars were familiar and non-threatening: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester the cat and Tweety the canary, Michigan J. Frog, Speedy Gonzales the Mexican mouse, and Foghorn Leghorn the rooster. The men of Termite Terrace (as the animation building was known) did break out of the domestic/farm mould with their skunk Pepé Le Pew in 1945 and then the ultimate chase-and-outwit duo the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote (prompted by a wonderful personification of the coyote by Mark Twain) in 1949. All three were the creation of legendary animator Chuck Jones, already famed for Bugs Bunny.
¹⁰

Jones and his colleagues Friz Freleng, Tex Avery, Bob Clampett and Robert McKimson were responsible for much of the ‘controlled lunacy' of the
Looney Tunes
and
Merrie Melodies
output across those three decades.
¹¹
McKimson created the Tasmanian devil (it was not then called Taz) in 1954. Why? North America has plenty of interesting and unusual wild animals. Furthermore, the real Tasmanian devil has no recognisable ‘personality' and back then there was no antipodean Mark Twain to give it one—unless, of course, Errol Flynn did, through the legacy of his own dynamic, destructive, insatiable ways (three adjectives which closely fit Taz). On the other hand, McKimson had created a marsupial six years earlier, Hippety Hopper the baby kangaroo. Unlike the then-obscure devil, the kangaroo had long and famously symbolised the vast, dry Australian continent.

McKimson, whose brothers were also animators, worked with Warner Bros. for about 35 years. Jones called him ‘one of the greatest',
¹²
and credited the series of widely used model sheets McKimson drew in the 1940s for the definitive look of the characters in the
Looney Tunes
stable. And ‘in his art he was fast, he was fluid, and he was on-the-money'.
¹³

There are several explanations for the origin of Taz. The most ‘official' is found in the lavish
Warner Bros. Animation Art
:

Taz auteur Bob McKimson recalled that the character was born when writer Sid Marcus was ‘kicking around' different types of characters. And I said, ‘About the only thing we haven't used around here is a Tasmanian Devil.' He didn't even know what they were. And we just started talking about it and we came up with this character.
¹⁴

An alternative explanation, found on a number of
Looney Tunes
fan websites, is that McKimson and Marcus created the manic creature as a new test for Bugs Bunny.

Then there is the potential Flynn link:

Desperate Journey
is the first of two films in which Errol Flynn actually plays an Australian, which is what he was (Warner PR spread the word that Flynn was Irish in an effort to tone down a wild history. Then again, nobody has yet to either confirm or deny whether he was in fact the inspiration for their Looney Tunes' cartoon creation The Tasmanian Devil [aka Taz]). It is amusing to watch Flynn try to effect a mild Aussie inflection in places, but he eventually gives up and sounds like he usually does.
¹⁵

A 1998 feature article in the
Sunday Tasmanian
produced yet another explanation. The opportunity for the article arose from a visit to Tasmania by Chuck McKimson, Robert's brother, travelling with an exhibition of Warner Bros. artwork:

Fifty-five years ago in a California art studio two brothers shared morning coffee while solving a crossword. It was a ‘regular day' for Warner Bros. animators Robert and Chuck McKimson. Each morning Bob and Chuck would play teasing word puzzles. The crossword ritual primed the talented and successful siblings for a creative day inventing quirky adventures for characters such as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.

   One fateful morning back in 1953, Bob was solving a word-clue referring to a spinning creature indigenous to the Australian island state of Tasmania. Bob and Chuck, like most Americans even today, knew little about the heart-shaped island south of the Great Southern Land. But the McKimson boys did know the clue's answer—the Tasmanian devil. The question was common in 1950s crosswords. Bob and Chuck had answered it before. ‘Invariably, during that time, the clues would mention Tasmanian devil. They wanted to know what the spinning animal of Tasmania was', Chuck, now 83, recalled. ‘My brother, Bob, was a crossword addict and every morning at 9 o'clock he'd sit down to do his crossword puzzle . . . the rest of us did the same thing.'

   This particular 1950s morning Bob, Chuck and their fellow Warner Bros. animators were searching for a new character to play with their cool-as-a-cucumber rabbit, Bugs Bunny. ‘The studio manager wanted a new character and we'd done cats and rats, horses and cows, chickens and whatever . . . so Bob says, “Let's do some research on the Tasmanian devil”,'
⁷
Chuck said. ‘So we got encyclopaedias and did some research.'

They learned the Tasmanian devil was a ferocious little creature with a legendary growl and a propensity to run around creating mayhem. ‘We looked into how it behaved but there wasn't in fact too much on the Tasmanian devil in those days but whatever there was we went into it', he said. The wild creature would be an exciting counterpoint to and playmate for Bugs, and a team of about five Warner Bros. animators began sketching preliminary drawings. ‘All five of us came up with an almost identical looking critter and then my brother, Bob, took those and made the final decision on what it looked like and he made the final drawing', Chuck said.
¹⁶

Related? Despite the original Warner Bros. cartoon character being created in the
1950s when very little was known about the Tasmanian devil in the United States,
these images reveal some intriguing similarities between the real and the invented
animal. (Taz courtesy of Warner Bros. Taz, Tasmanian Devil and all related
characters and elements are trademarks of and
© Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
Bipedal devil at Bonorong Wildlife Park courtesy
The Mercury
)

And so the creature was born.
¹⁷
That first six-minute cartoon probably required about 150 story sketches, followed by up to 10 000 images painted on transparent animation cels, the whole process taking some five weeks—call it 20 working days (coincidentally about the same as the real Tasmanian devil's gestation period).

That first experimental cartoon is particularly important, for its own sake and because the ‘whirling dervish'
¹⁸
very nearly didn't survive. Here is what happens in
Devil May Hare
:

The animals flee from Taz, who will devour anything and everything, past Bugs's hole, and the wily rabbit tries to bamboozle Taz with a succession of artificial animals he could try to eat. In the end, in desperation, Bugs places a Lonely Hearts ad for a female Tasmanian devil who has matrimony in mind. One flies in immediately from, presumably, Tasmania, and Bugs, in the guise of a rabbi (geddit?), marries the pair, thereby calming Taz's savage soul. (The quasi-Freudian equation of Taz's violence with a lack of sex went remarkably unremarked-upon at the time.) As the pair flies off Bugs comments: ‘All the world loves a lover, but in this case we'll make an exception.'
¹⁹

Eddie Selzer, an executive producer at Termite Terrace in 1954, objected to the new cartoon character. He thought it too violent for a junior audience, and distasteful to parents. (Warner Bros., through eldest brother Harry in the early decades, had had a strong guiding social principle, believing that cinema could and should morally educate.) Selzer didn't appear to understand the animators. Chuck Jones refers to:

[the] twelve dreadful years of his reign . . . Perhaps his finest hour came at a story session. Four or five of us were laughing over a storyboard when once again Eddie stood vibrating at the doorway, glaring malevolently at us and our pleasure and laughter. His tiny eyes steely as half-thawed oysters, his wattles trembling like those of a deflated sea cow. ‘Just what the hell,' he demanded, ‘has all this laughter got to do with the making of animated cartoons?'
²⁰

Executive producers have power. Selzer ordered that no more devil cartoons be made. Yet someone with greater power saved Taz. Re-enter Jack Warner, who wanted the Tasmanian devil back. It was a curious decision, because that lone cartoon had seemingly been destroyed by time, never mind Selzer. Yet three years later Jack ordered his animation team to make more. And with McKimson directing, that happened—between 1957 and

1964,
Bedevilled Rabbit,
then
Ducking the Devil,
then
Bill of Hare
, then
Dr. Devil and Mr. Hare.

Dissected by Theodore, admired by Errol, punted on by Jack, the devil almost died but was resurrected again. And the rest, as they say, is history . . .

10

OWNING THE DEVIL: TASMANIA AND WARNER BROS.

In 1960s suburban Melbourne feeding his caged devils was a problem for famed anthropologist and photographer Donald Thomson, until he found a fishmonger at the Victoria Market only too willing to give him leftover fish scraps . . . The arrangement worked well until Donald discovered that his fishmonger friend was a leading member of the Australian Communist Party. This no doubt caused some embarrassment to Donald, considering his good relationship with his other friend, Sir Robert Menzies, and Sir Robert's noted obsession with communist infiltration at that time.

J
OHN
T
EASDALE
, R
UPANYUP
, V
IC
.

Taz has no evil machinations. He is not greedy in the sense of wanting power, monetary or political, over others. He just wants to eat, by all and any means. Taz is an innocent savage. He never rose to a civilized state and then reverted. He never fell from grace because he never had it. He has remained in a state of nature as its most powerful force . . . He is so outlandish as to not remind viewers of the brutes from which they evolved. Rather, Taz makes the beast of instinct look completely external, lovably innocent, and easy to outwit.
¹

T
here are tens of thousands of books about the movie industry. Hardly any indulge in academic analysis of animated cartoons. Yet in this short quote it is possible to reflect on Taz the cartoon devil from perspectives of political philosophy, evolution, psychology, and cruelty in humour (we enjoy his stupidity). But of course Taz, along with his maker, has had the last laugh, given the amounts of money he has generated. How did that come about?

Having lain virtually dormant for a quarter of a century, it may seem surprising that such an apparently one-dimensional character was selected by Warner Bros. to become a major production of its new animation studio. In 1990 the company teamed with Steven Spielberg to create syndicated cartoons for television, and the reborn
Taz of Taz-Mania!
appeared the following year with his own 65-episode series. Not only did TV guarantee far greater exposure than film, Taz now had a genuine fictional identity: eighteen years old, a cave home, parents, a brother and sister, a job, a pet, a friend, a rival and an enemy.