Tribute to Bob Clampett

This article is an announcement for a posthumous tribute to Bob Clampett.


LOS ANGELES Animation pioneer Bob Clampett once said he couldn't believe the kind of respect he was getting for work he had done decades ago.

But the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences is showing its respect for Clampett's legacy to animation with a posthumous tribute Oct. 10.

Clampett's friends and associates will join his widow, Sody, and son, Bob Jr., for a tribute to a career that began in the early years of Warner Bros. animation and included creating the 'Time for Beany' television series in 1949.

That legacy is continuing this fall on ABC's Saturday morning television lineup with an entirely new series of 'Beany and Cecil' adventures. Sody is the executive producer and Bob Jr. is associate producer of the series.

A view of Clampett's visual genius also will be available in new book this holiday season from Holt, 'That's All, Folks!' compiled by Steven Schneider.

The Academy tribute will give animation buffs a rare opportunity to see Clampett's work as it was originally intended.

'They have fresh prints of the Warner animation on the nitrate film stock,' Sody Clampett said. 'You have no idea how the colors just jump right out at you.'

Clampett, who died in May 1984, and his fellow animators -- Tex Avery, Frank Tashlin, Robert McKimson and Charles 'Chuck' Jones -- may have been responsible for putting the 'Looney' in the studio's 'Looney Tunes' cartoons.

The tribute includes eight films Clampett directed from the late 1930s to the mid-1940s, with such characters as Daffy Duck peddling an imaginary bicycle in the air and announcing, 'I'm so crazy, I don't even know this isn't possible!'

Other films include 'Baby Bottleneck,' 'Tin Pan Alley Cats,' 'The Great Piggy Bank Robbery' and 'Coal Black and the Sebben Dwarfs,' an almost surreal 1942 production that set the Snow White story in Harlem.

'It was a real tough choice to pick eight titles that reflected his work,' said Clampett Jr., 31. 'We wanted to show not only the Warner things, but the two original animated 'Beanys' and some test footage he prepared for a collaboration with Edgar Rice Burroughs, based on Burroughs' 'John Carter of Mars' stories in the 1930s.'

Clampett once considered making a feature-length 'John Carter' film with Burroughs, but the idea never came to fruition because only Walt Disney was allowed to use the Technicolor film process until the late 1930s.

'There were many instances where he would develop something that never came to be,' said Clampett Jr. 'Some day I hope to bring them out, and my mother feels the same way. But when he dropped the Burroughs idea and went back to Warner, he did some of his best work to date.'

One of the founding fathers of the Warner unit, Isadore 'Friz' Freleng, 82, said Clampett's influence could also be seen in the hit movie 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit?'

'I think that was the intention, a Bob Clampett takeoff,' said Freleng. 'The whole thing, the way it was animated, was the way we used to criticize Clampett's attack in making the 'Looney Tunes.'

'But they probably picked that up and loved it. I don't know if it was a plus or minus, myself. If it had calmed down, it would have been a better picture.'

Sody Clampett, 57, said her husband was involved in several projects before his death, including the release of the 'Beany' cartoons from the 1960s for home video.

'We had just made the home video deal, and we were in Detroit to promote it,' Sody Clampett said. 'He'd been on three television shows and a newspaper interview, and I said to him, 'Bob, you really don't have to work anymore if you don't want to. If you want to take it easy, think about it, rather than getting something else started.'

'But he was always busy creating and anxious to do something to make people laugh. I don't think he would ever have retired.'

Clampett Jr. recalled another episode that illustrated his father's devotion to his craft.

'I was with him at a showing in the late '60s or early '70s at the L.A. County Museum of Art,' he said. 'And right after the intermission, the audience was just plain worn out.

'But then they came on with 'Kitty Corner,' when Porky Pig is trying to get the cats out of the house, and right after the first joke, when the butler kicks the cats out, there was this great laughter.

'And my dad looked at me, with this glow in his eyes. I think he knew the stuff would live forever.'

By RUSSELL KISHI