Born: Frederick Bean Avery
Birthday: February 26, 1908
Location: Taylor, TX, U.S.
Occupation: Animator, Director, Writer
Years active: 1929-1980
Died: August 26, 1980

Frederick Bean “Tex” Avery was born in Taylor, Texas. After graduation from high school, he signed up for a three-month summer course at the Chicago Art Institute to become a newspaper cartoonist, but quit after one month.

Two years later, he moved to Los Angeles and worked a variety of menial jobs until he was hired by the Winkler studio where he inked cels for films the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit series. Avery then moved to Universal Cartoon Studios/Walter Lantz Studio as an inker and rapidly rose up through the ranks, becoming an animator by 1930. He animated most of the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoons there under Bill Nolan from 1931 to 1935, often inserting his own gags. While at the Lantz studio, Avery permanently lost the sight in his left eye due to some horseplay involving a rubber band and a paperclip.

Tex grew dissatisfied with his salary, his output decreased, and he was let go in early 1935. Later that year he convinced Leon Schlesinger Productions to hire him on as a director for the Warner Bros. cartoons. His unit, consisting of animators Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Sid Sutherland, and Virgil Ross produced Gold Diggers of ’49 as their first short.

Reportedly, Avery was one of the few directors to visit the ink and paint department to see how his cartoons were coming along. He open to questions and criticism from his artist, taking the time to explain his choices and rationale to them.

Avery redesigned Porky Pig to be cuter beginning with Porky the Rainmaker in 1936. He directed Porky’s Duck Hunt in 1937, featuring the debut of Daffy Duck’s character. Avery revised the early Bugs Bunny into the street-smart wisecracker character and is responsible for his iconic “What’s up, Doc?” catchphrase. Although Tex campaigned strongly for the name Jack E. Rabbit, Bugs Bunny is the name that stuck.

Tex also came up with a concept of animating mouths over live-action animal footage, but Leon Schlesinger was uninterested. Avery then approached a friend at Paramount Pictures who liked the idea and launched the Speaking of Animals series of shorts.

Avery’s creative differences with Schlesinger came to a head when he and the producer quarreled over how to end The Heckling Hare. Their bickering became public when it was reported by The Hollywood Reporter on July 2, 1941. Schlesinger gave Avery a four-week suspension without pay and made the cuts to the short without Tex.

Tex left the Schlesinger studio and went directly to Paramount to work on the Speaking of Animals series he’d created. He completed three of the shorts before leaving Paramount for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

At MGM, Tex was hired to form and direct his own animation unit with larger budgets and greater creative freedom from supervisor Fred Quimby. He also enjoyed higher quality of production leading a unit composed of ex-Disney artists like Ed Love and Preston Blair.

His first animated short for MGM was Blitz Wolf, a WWII parody of Disney’s “Three Little Pigs.” It earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Short Subject: Cartoons in 1942.

Avery’s added to MGM’s stable of stars by creating new characters like Droopy in Dumb-Hounded, Screwy Squirrel, a sexy female knowns as “Red” by fans in Red Hot Riding Hood, a slow-talking wolf, and the duo of George and Junior. He directed shorts like Bad Luck Blackie, Cellbound, Magical Maestro, Lucky Ducky, Ventriloquist Cat, King-Size Canary, and a series of films exploring the technology of the future: The House of Tomorrow, The Car of Tomorrow, The Farm of Tomorrow, and TV of Tomorrow.

MGM dissolved Avery’s unit in 1953 and he was fired, but by year’s end, Tex was hired to return and direct at Walter Lantz Productions for a salary and a percentage of the profits. From 1954–1955, he refined the character of Chilly Willy and directed Academy Awards nominated shorts, The Legend of Rockabye Point and Crazy Mixed Up Pup. Avery left Lantz when the profit sharing portion turned out to be quite unprofitable.

Avery went to Cascade Studios to animate television commercials for products like Raid insecticide, Frito-Lay’s Frito Bandito mascot, and ads for Kool-Aid fruit drinks starring the Looney Tunes characters he’d helped create a decade earlier.

For a very brief period in 1973, he formed his own company, Tex Avery Cartoons to animate commercials before returning to Cascade. When Cascade Studios shut down their cartoon department in 1978, he received an offer from Friz Freleng to write for DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, but turned it down to work as a gag writer for Hanna-Barbera Productions from 1979 until his passing.