Tex Avery: The Definitive Screwball Classics Collection Blu-ray

When I was young, if you saw a Tex Avery cartoon coming on television, you knew you were getting something special. You could forget about ordinary cartoon logic. Avery was about to turn everything upside down, send somebody’s eyeballs flying across the screen, and leave you wondering how anyone could come up with something so gloriously ridiculous.

His cartoons were fast, outrageous and packed with sight gags. Characters stretched, exploded with emotion and sometimes seemed to know they were trapped inside a cartoon. Avery didn’t just tell jokes. He took them, pushed them over a cliff, and somehow found a way to make the fall even funnier.

The Wolf’s outrageous reactions to Red Riding Hood, Droopy’s wonderfully deadpan delivery, and Avery’s impeccable comic timing made his cartoons stand apart. You never quite knew what was coming next, and that was half the fun. In Avery’s world, subtlety was optional, common sense was missing in action, and laughter was practically compulsory.

There was an interesting story behind the man who created all this animated madness, too. Early in his career, while working at Universal on cartoons featuring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Avery lost the sight in his left eye after an incident involving office horseplay. According to historical accounts, a colleague fired a wire paperclip that struck him in the eye, permanently damaging his vision.

It’s tempting to imagine that such an extraordinary visual imagination must have been connected to the accident, but there’s no solid evidence for that. Avery’s creative instincts were what made him special, not the injury he endured.

Avery also had an unusual attitude toward his audience. His comedy wasn’t designed exclusively for children. He wanted laughs, and he wasn’t afraid to venture into adult humour, cynicism and suggestive territory. You can see that clearly in Red Hot Riding Hood, where he took a familiar fairy tale and turned it into a cheeky nightclub comedy featuring a Wolf who was very easily distracted.

Children enjoyed those cartoons anyway. I certainly did. But Avery’s work had layers of humour that adults could appreciate, too. He wasn’t interested in keeping everything polite or predictable. If a gag could be made bigger, stranger or more outrageous, he was willing to give it a try.

A definitive collection of cartoon mayhem

Warner Archive’s Tex Avery: The Definitive Screwball Classics Collection brings together Avery’s MGM cartoons in a four-disc Blu-ray set. The collection includes all 63 animated shorts he directed at MGM, presented uncut and uncensored, along with additional Droopy cartoons directed by other MGM filmmakers after Avery left the studio. The complete collection contains 74 theatrical shorts, accompanied by a 72-page booklet, archival material and special features.

The bonus features include Tex Avery: The King of Cartoons and Droopy and Friends: A Laugh Back. For animation fans, this is more than a stack of old cartoons. It’s an opportunity to revisit the work of a filmmaker who helped redefine what an animated short could do.

What’s wonderful about Avery is that his cartoons still have so much personality. You remember the bulging eyes, the wild expressions and those moments when a character’s reaction becomes funnier than the original joke. But you also begin to appreciate the craftsmanship behind the madness. The timing had to be precise. The drawings had to sell the gag. Even the most ridiculous moment required somebody to know exactly when to pull the trigger.

That’s what separates a memorable cartoon from one you forget five minutes later. Avery’s work feels mischievous, unpredictable and wonderfully unrestrained. His characters don’t politely wait for the punchline. Sometimes, they practically become the punchline.

For those of us who grew up watching these cartoons, this collection offers a chance to revisit an era when animation could surprise you at every turn. For younger viewers, it’s an opportunity to discover one of the great comic imaginations behind the medium.

Give me a cartoon with a little anarchy, a character whose eyes are about to pop out of his head, and a gag that keeps going long after common sense has left the building. That’s Tex Avery. And frankly, the world could use a little more of that kind of nonsense.