Termite Terrace by Frank Thompson

Termite Terrace by Frank Thompson Hollywood Reporter Sept. 1998

The animation legacy

Some of Warner Bros.' biggest stars never set foot on the Burbank lot.

Their enormously popular movies were made across the hill, on Sunset Boulevard and Van Ness Avenue in Hollywood, in a series of ramshackle, insect-infected buildings known affectionately as Termite Terrace.

It was at Termite Terrace that Bugs Bunny first cocked a sardonic eyebrow and inquired, "What's up, Doc?" It was where Daffy Duck leapt about like a lunatic, leaving only confusion in his wake. It was where Elmer Fudd met eternal frustration in his endless "wabbit" hunt, where Pepe Le Pew, the amorous skunk, whispered sweet nothings to terrified and perplexed female cats and where Porky Pig always wrapped things up with a sprightly wave and a stutter: "Th-th-th-that's all, folks!"

Termite Terrace was the home of the Warner Bros. Cartoon Studio, the source of some of the funniest, most inventive and most beloved films ever made. It was where a legendary group of artists, writers, musicians and performers specialized in the fast, frantic and unsentimental comedy that became the hallmark of the Warner Bros. style. Some of the greatest names in animation flourished there -- Chuck Jones, Fred "Tex" Avery, Isadore "Friz" Freleng, Frank Tashlin and BobClampett, among others.

The first releases, to get technical about it, weren't "Warner Bros." cartoons at all. These original seven-minute-long gems were produced by Leon Schlesinger, the former head of Pacific Art and Title, and simply released through Warner Bros. Schlesinger himself wasn't, by all accounts, a creative man, but he knew animation talent when he saw it. His first producers were Hugh Harmon and Rudolf Ising, ex-Disney staffers whose names combined into the most musical of trademarks -- Harmon-Ising. They had a little character named "Bosko the Talking Kid" and produced their first cartoon in May of 1930, "Sinking in the Bathtub." With an obvious nod to Disney's successful "Silly Symphonies," Harmon-Ising named this new series of sound cartoons "Looney Tunes." And "sound" was the operative word. As Ising put it: "Sound had just come in and that was what we were selling -- synchronized lip motion."

A year later, they added a second series called "Merrie Melodies," which tended to be built around popular songs controlled by Warner Bros., like "Smile, Darn Ya, Smile" and "Pagan Moon." From 1934 to 1943, the main difference between "Looney Tunes" and "Merrie Melodies" was that "Melodies" were filmed in color and "Tunes" in black and white. Once all of Schlesinger's cartoons were produced in Technicolor, the two series became interchangeable.

When Harmon and Ising left Schlesinger in 1933, he decided to open up his own cartoon studio. Moving into buildings on the old Warner Bros. lot on Sunset Boulevard, Schlesinger set up shop with brilliant animators and directors like Freleng and Clampett. They were soon joined by other young hotshots like Avery, Jones and Virgil Ross. Under Avery's direction, this team started functioning so well that Schlesinger split them off from the rest of the studio in what Avery called "a little shack ... in some old dressing room or toilet or something; a little cottage sort of thing. We called it Termite Terrace."

In that little cottage, amazing things happened. A stuttering pig gave a stirring rendition of "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" in a 1935 entry called "I Haven't Got a Hat" and was soon refined into Porky Pig. "Porky's Duck Hunt" (1937) introduced to the world a frantic maniac of a duck, appropriately named Daffy. A dim bulb of a man, whose huge head is topped by a tiny bowler, and who has trouble with R's and rabbits, first appeared in "Elmer's Candid Camera" (1939). His name? Elmer Fudd. A smartaleck, wise-cracking rabbit made a few unremarkable appearances in minor cartoons before Avery gave him an opening line remembered from high school -- "What's Up, Doc?" -- and a name borrowed from animator Bugs Hardaway -- and, voila! Bugs Bunny was introduced in "A Wild Hare" (1940).

From there, the parade of memorable characters seemed endless -- Tweety Pie, Sylvester the Cat, Pepe Le Pew, Foghorn Leghorn, Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, Speedy Gonzalez and Yosemite Sam. Some of the movies' most enduring stars were created by these giants of animation.

But in the early days, no one considered them giants of anything. Audiences didn't recognize their names. Even the heads of the studio seemed barely aware of them. Jones recalled a rare luncheon in the 1940s when he and a few animators were invited to the private dining room of the Warner brothers: "Harry Warner set the tone of our day in court by observing that he had no idea where our cartoon division was. He added, 'The only thing I know is that we make Mickey Mouse.'"

According to Freleng, when it finally sank in that Mickey Mouse was actually produced at some other Burbank location, the Warners abruptly closed down the animation department.

While that story might be apocryphal, it is true that the denizens of Termite Terrace worked under a series of bosses who had little patience for or understanding of the art of cartooning. Jones recalls the days when a Jack Warner-appointed Eddie Selzer ran the studio. "Four or five of us were laughing over a storyboard," Jones writes. "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?"'

Schlesinger, who finally sold out to Warner Bros. in 1944, also seems to have had only the dimmest idea of what went on over at Termite Terrace. But, as Avery told film historian Joe Adamson, Schlesinger at least kept out of his animators' way.

"He didn't know what you were making 'til he saw it on film," Avery said. "He might say, 'What are you doing?' and we'd say, 'Well, we're making a Western with Bugs Bunny' or whatever, and he'd say, 'Fine.' Then he wouldn't know any more about it until the rough cut." If Schlesinger liked what he saw, he told his cartoonists to give him more of the same. If he didn't, he told them to steer clear of subjects like that in the future. "As a result," Avery said, "we all had so much liberty (at Warners), and I think it showed in our cartoons."

Cartoon directors like Avery and Clampett were crucial to the success of the Warner Bros. cartoons, but there were two other elements that gave the films their distinct character -- music and voice talent. Carl Stalling, another Disney veteran (1928's "Skeleton Dance" and other Silly Symphonies), provided nearly all the music for Warner Bros. cartoons from 1936 to his retirement in 1958. While he wrote much of the music, Stalling called upon a vast catalog of songs to comment on any situation. When a scene was set in Hollywood, Stalling would pop in a little "You Ought to Be in Pictures." If a character was freezing, the soundtrack would likely offer a snatch of "Am I Blue?"

Stalling also used many of the compositions of the great novelty composer Raymond Scott; he showed a particular fondness for that driving ode to technology, "Powerhouse," which is heard on the soundtrack to countless cartoons.

Most of the hundreds of distinctive voices in the cartoons, from Porky Pig's stutter to Sylvester's lisp to Foghorn Leghorn's booming drawl, were performed by one remarkable man -- Mel Blanc. However, he wasn't the only voice actor ever hired by the studio. Arthur Q. Bryan gave voice to Elmer Fudd throughout the years, and other celebrated voice artists like June Foray and Stan Freberg showed up on occasion. There are those novelty cartoons, too, when actual star voices were used -- such as when Jack Benny, Rochester and the gang appeared as mice in "The Mouse That Jack Built" (1959). But, by and large, when you hear a voice -- any voice -- in a Warner Bros. cartoon from the 1940s through the 1980s, chances are excellent that Blanc is behind it.

The Warner Bros. Cartoon Studio actually started occupying a building on the Burbank studio lot in 1955. This office on the southwest corner of Warners was called the Looney Tunes Building, and it remained a beehive of activity until the animation division was shut down in 1969.

But the story of Warner Bros. animation does not end there. In 1987, the studio released its first theatrical short in nearly two decades: "The Duxorcist," starring Daffy Duck (voiced by Blanc) and written and directed by Greg Ford and Terry Lennon. The short was soon folded into a feature film, "Daffy Duck's Quackbusters" (1989) which combined several new sequences with clips from older Warner Bros. cartoons.

For several years, in fact, all "new" Warner Bros. cartoons were based on the usual roster of characters -- Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck and the rest. It wasn't until a new spate of TV production began in the early 1990s under TV-animation president Jean MacCurdy that new characters were introduced; though, at first, the characters were not exactly new.

"Batman: The Animated Series," debuted in 1992 and was acclaimed for its moody animation and dark, exciting tone. "Animaniacs," a co-production of Warner Bros. and Amblin Entertainment, followed in 1993, with animation that was fast and furious, in the tradition of the best of Termite Terrace. In 1995 came the subversively funny "Pinky and the Brain," also from Amblin, a science-fiction spoof with a sophisticated sense of humor that appealed equally to adults and children.

If Disney has traditionally been the leader in theatrical, feature-length cartoons, Warner Bros. has made significant inroads into the market. "Space Jam" (1996) placed basketball star Michael Jordan in a cartoon world populated by Warner cartoon veterans and the result was a smash hit. "Quest for Camelot" (1998), a musical adventure, also found favor with young viewers and is destined for a long life on video.

The Warner Bros. animation legacy continues, and the characters created during the "Golden Age" of the 1930s and '40s remaln as vital as ever. Since the animators today work in state-of-the-art studios, with tools that Avery, Maltese, Freleng and Jones never dreamed of in the early days, maybe this enduring popularity has nothing to do with where or how the cartoons were actually produced.

But it's hard to avoid the feeling that those brilliant old cartoons, with their immortal cast of anarchists, could only have been born in that run-down, practical-joke suffused, vermin crawling mythological place called Termite Terrace. Once a location, now only a state of mind, as long as Termite Terrace exists in the imagination of Warner Bros. animators, that won't be all, folks.