I met Chuck Jones in 1998. I was not alone. It was on the Warner Bros lot in Hollywood, the place with the iconic water tower familiar to lovers of Looney Tunes cartoons. Jones was there to take his place among the pantheon of WB stars, who were being trotted out for the international press. At the time, Friends and ER, both from the WB stable, were the hottest TV shows on the planet and a dapper man who looked uncannily like KFC’s Colonel Sanders did not pique much interest. In fact, many of the journalists didn’t even bother to wait for the introduction. Their loss.
Over the course of a 30-minute Q & A, Jones offered a compelling insight into the workings of Hollywood animation during the Golden Era (his career spanned the second half of the 20th Century). Jones’ whole life was Hollywood; as a kid growing up in the shadow of the Charles Chaplin Film Studios on Sunset Boulevard, he had the Little Tramp’s distinctive style down pat. Later, when he was a kingpin in the animation industry, his studio door bore the inscription, ‘Chuck Jones and the Acme Corporation’. But this man in a tall hat and white suit was modest about his achievements. Sharp as a tack, he recalled his gallery of animation greats, from the rogue ‘wabbit’ Bugs Bunny to the amorous skunk, Pepe le Pew. "I never thought of myself as an artist", he once said of his wonderful life and work. "My main concern was simply to create pictures that made people laugh."
Jones was followed on stage by a man dressed in a three-piece pin-striped suit with a homburg on his head. He looked like George Raft in a classic ’30s gangster movie. The few journalists left in the building looked quizzically at each other. This was Joseph Barbera, one half of legendary animation legend Hanna-Barbara and creator of, among others, The Flintstones, Tom and Jerry (originally going to be a fox and a dog) and Yogi Bear. If Jones epitomised the Southern Gentleman, Barbara was the definition of his working-class Lower East Side roots and an entertainer to the tips of his spats. And the man from Little Italy, like his cartoons before him, had a roomful of hardened hacks cracking up. "Who’s that with the funny laugh?" he asked at one point.
He trawled through his back catalogue and resolved a number of Trivial Pursuit-style questions. Like who decided which went first, Hanna or Barbera? "We tossed a coin", says JB. "It was that simple. Heads or tails. We had a very unusual system of working. There were two people in the room, splitting the work (Hanna was the ace technician, Barbera was the genius animator) and it worked very well for 35 years or whatever."
He then recounted the tale of Magilla Gorilla. "Can I say this?" he asks before carrying on regardless. "Well I had this meeting with some Hollywood executive at his big Hollywood home back in the early ’60s. Well I made my pitch and I only got as far as Magilla and he said, ‘hey someone get this guy outta here!’ I never even got to say Gorilla. And Magilla Gorilla was one our most successful and best-loved characters. That’s showbiz."
Chuck Jones died in 2002 (he was 89) and Joseph Barbera shuffled off to the Great Animation Studio in the Sky in 2006 (he was 95) but their work will continue to shine from here to eternity. And that’s all folks!
Donal O'Donoghue
The RTÉ Concert Orchestra and Warner Bros. present the European premiere of Bugs Bunny at the Symphony, Grand Canal Theatre, Dublin, October 8 and 9
