Bugs ran amok thanks to Chuck

WASHINGTON, Feb. 25 (UPI) -- "Bugs Bunny is who we want to be," he liked to say. "Daffy Duck is who we are."

It was a remark typical of the wry, self-deprecating, misleadingly low-key genius of Chuck Jones who was arguably the cartoonist of the century, and even of all time.

Charles M. Jones, who died Friday full of years, love and honor at the ripe age of 89, very well may go down alongside his own idol, Mark Twain, as the greatest of all American humorists. He created Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. He transformed Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck into the cultural icons they have been for more than half a century.

Twain through the second half of the 19th century revolutionized American literature. Ultimately, he transformed the sensibility and awareness of the entire world. Far more than the great stylist Ernest Hemingway, long before him, and with an incomparably drier, more scathing and entertaining touch, he punctured the bombast of 19th century European and Anglo-American literary pretension.

Jones, in his own artistic heyday through the middle third of the 20th century, did exactly that through the medium of film. And he did so by taking the most overlooked, under-rated and despised cinematic form, the five- to six-minute cartoon short, and crafting literally hundreds of masterpieces and an entire population of mythic characters that have captivated children and enchanted adults alike now for seven decades.

Think of what Jones did with Porky Pig, Yosemite Sam, the Tasmanian Devil, Pepe Le Pew the romantic French skunk among many, many others. Their appeal is universal and continues unabated in its power and pleasure through every generation. Like Shakespeare, like the great masters of late 18th and 19th century German classical music, the jazz art of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington in the 1920s and the 60s rock of the Beatles, the cartoons of Chuck Jones have transcended time and place to become enduring, deeply loved popular cultural treasures of all humanity.

They are also the quintessential expressions of the American genius in the American century. Far more than any American writer, composer or even popular music artist, Jones took the populist, democratic -- but not lowest -- common denominators of the national popular culture.

Walt Disney in the 1940s and 50s was celebrated as the great visionary genius of American animation art. And it was Disney who pioneered ambitious full-length cartoon movies as well as creating the dazzling 1940 matching of classical music to cartoon art in "Fantasia."

But no one bothers to watch any of Disney's vast output of "shorts" over the decades. The only Mickey Mouse appearance that anyone remembers is, in fact, when he plays "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" in "Fantasia." Mickey, Donald Duck, Goofy and the rest only won immortality thanks to Walt's last great sales pitch, the creation of Disneyland in California in the 1950s, a franchise later expanded to Disney World in Florida and replicated elsewhere.

But in the battle of children's imaginations, by the early 1950s, the mammalian Jones with his short, sharp six-minute gems had made the ponderous, wholesome and bland Disney features as obsolete as any movie dinosaur.

It was a different world, a different America, that they celebrated. In the glorious tradition of Twain, the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields, Bugs, Daffy and their many cohorts lived in a world where you never gave a sucker an even break, and only a sucker would give you one.

This arguably is a far closer approximation to the realities of human nature than the saccharine mass-produced sweetness of the Disney-ied version of life. And it appears to prepare young children far better to robustly handle the messy challenges of whatever comes their way.

It also is a non-pacifist world. In the epic clash between Bugs and Wile E. -- the only cartoon where Wile E. ever talks, his voice perfectly modulated by the as-always magnificent Mel Blanc -- the violence steadily escalates with relentlessness which makes the Vietnam War look like a study in pacifism. Bugs and Wile E. start by beating each other over the head with metal implements. At the end, Wile E. is finally incinerated by a train carrying enough TNT to eliminate Hitler's Wehrmacht.

Indeed, what was Richard M. Nixon but Wile E. Coyote come to life, endlessly scheming, endlessly hapless? Always complimenting himself on his own ruthlessness and toughness only to be endlessly caught in his own traps? Who but the Acme Corporation, inventors of every backfiring Rube Goldberg device Wile E. ever deployed in his endless, fruitless campaigns to trap the Road Runner, could possibly have designed and installed the taping system with which Nixon brought himself down in the Watergate scandal?

Chuck Amok, as he styled himself, did more than embody and energize, define and direct the American spirit. His effect on world culture was devastating. Who has taken the ponderous, awesome music of Richard Wagner seriously since Chuck cut the more than 14-hour running time of the Niebelungen "Ring" cycle of Wagnerian operas down to exactly six minutes in the Bugs-Elmer masterpiece "What's Opera, Doc?" (Bugs, as has been pointed out, made a remarkably svelte Brunhilde to Elmer Fudd's Siegfried.)

Where did such genius come from? It came, first, from the endless sense of fun of a man who never lost touch with his own inner child. It helped that his 30 years in Warner Brothers animations were spent with gang of similarly minded creators of exceptional talent -- Mike Maltese, Fritz Freiling and Tex Avery to name but a few. It also helped, enormously, that the management of Warner Brothers Studios was exceptionally stupid and inept. Jack Warner once famously complained why the creators in his animation division had to make such a disruptive din. Why did they have to laugh all the time when they were making their cartoons? he famously asked.

To run the animation division in a crumbling set of buildings named by its inhabitants -- with good reason -- "Termite Terrace", Warner installed Leon Schlesinger, whom Jones always remembered as the most idiotic and stupid executive even in the history of Hollywood, which has boasted many of them. Schlesinger did not even recognize his own voice and behavior as the model for Daffy Duck or, in less manic moments, for Elmer Fudd. He imposed the ridiculous and arbitrary length of six minutes on the cartoon shorts, which were never seen by Warners' management as anything other than fillers to accompany the studio's output of cheaply made usually black and white thrillers. There was no sense of artistic ambition or dignity at Warners to compare with Disney or the ponderously ludicrously kitsch "serious" movies of ridiculous Sam Goldwyn. All Warners' management cared about was churning out those shorts cheaply and reliably. And because Jones and his friends did, no one ever bothered to stop them from producing masterpieces.

Like Twain, Jones could not abide affectation or pomposity. He loathed the celebrated movie critic Pauline Kael whom to him embodied both. He was the last thing in the world from being a tortured genius. He was happily married, a doting father who lived to preside over a brood of great-grandchildren.

It is impossible to imagine another artistic creator who has combined such elegance of execution and technical mastery of his field, who transformed it more, or who gave so much lasting pleasure and joy to so many people. When he was awarded his special Oscar -- he already had won a handful of them -- in 1996, he dedicated it to his pre-deceased fellow residents of "Termite Terrace" -- "where-ever they may be now."

He is with them now at last, and the laughter of their reunion must be rocking eternity.