book one redone - Coldbacon

jones.html
It is with great pleasure and necessity that I write Chuck Jones tribute
essay one jillion and one. I didn’t know it then, but I was lucky as hell to
be born when I was, and not two or three years later. For I had grown up
in sort of a golden portion of the 80s, before ABC Saturday morning
became the all-pimple channel and the NBA pre-game show had to begin
at 5 am in order to cover adequately Shaq’s myriad interests. Now this
may be hard to imagine, but they actually used to show Looney Tunes
every Saturday morning on ABC, and we would watch them.
By high school I had somehow turned my attentions away from cartoons.
Apparently there were other things. In college I quickly discovered two
more of them—drinking and regret. 1 Still no cartoons. Hmm. But then
summer came, and I went home to discover my parents hadn’t stopped
paying for cable. Now cable means two things: supporting tyranny and an
unlimited supply of cartoons, some loonier than others. And now I was
smart. It didn’t take long before I recognized the rightful place of the
cartoon short in the pantheon of higher art. So I watched. And I watched.
And I taped. And soon I had compiled enough tapes to fill a small sink if I
wanted. I noticed I was gravitating mainly toward two things: the insane
joy of the early Daffy Duck character and anything done by a guy called
Chuck Jones. Here, it was the entire product—from the animation to the
story, from the backgrounds to the spills, between the desire and the
timing, and basically damn near close to perfection of it all.
So I saved some money and bought a bunch of Chuck Jones cartoons on
laser disc. It was all you could do at the time since they weren’t on DVD.
I didn’t even have a laser disc player. But if the great flood did come for
any reason, I wanted to at least have something to hold up and say, “Hey,
don’t look at me.” But you know I did end up finding a laser disc player,
at R University near where I lived, in a special section of the main library
called the Brown Fine Arts Library, or as I called it, the 3 rd floor. I would
bring my discs in a little canvas bag and make a time of it. And it’s
actually good to watch them like this, when you’ve committed to be with
them and only them. No snack breaks (this ain’t no damn movie theatre).
1 Usually in that sequence. Only later has the reverse come more into play.
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