Robert Clampett

Robert Clampett (born May 8, 1913, Los Angeles, California, U.S.—died May 5, 1984, Los Angeles) was one of the top directors at the Warner Bros. cartoon studio and the creator of the Beany and Cecil television series.

Clampett joined Leon Schlesinger’s fledgling animation unit on the Warner Bros. lot in 1933. In 1936 he became part of director Tex Avery’s innovative animation team, where the youthful energy, zany humour, and iconoclastic attitude soon infected all the Warner Bros. shorts. In late 1936 Clampett began directing and quickly established his personal mark through an anything-for-a-laugh sense of humour that was often silly, frenzied, and full of grotesque visual puns. In his spoof of Alice in Wonderland, for example, titled Porky in Wackyland (1938), the stuttering Porky Pig finds himself in a wildly surrealistic world in which reside such oddities as a rabbit riding a swing that is supported through his ears, a ducklike creature who honks its bulbous, rubber-horn head, a three-headed man whose mother was “scared by a pawnbroker’s sign,” and an Al Jolson-like bird who continually chants “Mammy!” as he crawls through scenes.

Clampett hit his stride in the mid-1940s in shorts such as Book Revue, Baby Bottleneck, The Great Piggy Bank Robbery, and The Big Snooze (all 1946). By that time a distinguishing element in his films was a total disregard for physical reality, as evidenced in the loose, elastic stretching and distending of the shapes of his characters. Clampett was the most surreal and anarchistic of the Warner cartoon directors; “juvenile humour” in the best sense of the term characterizes his work.

In 1949 Clampett brought his energetic creativity to the art of puppetry and early television. Time for Beany, starring Beany, a little boy with a propeller cap, and his pal Cecil, a “seasick sea serpent,” started as a 15-minute puppet show on a Los Angeles TV station. Stan Freberg and Daws Butler operated the puppets and provided the voices. Eventually the series ran nationwide through 1955 and won three Emmy Awards. The humour of the show appealed to all ages; the physicist Albert Einstein cited it as his favourite TV show. In 1962 Clampett created an animated series, Beany and Cecil, based on the same characters. It had a successful run until 1967 and is regarded as the last TV cartoon series to feature full-figure animation.