h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As with i before e except after c, there are of course. exceptions to these rules.
For example. Tom can be hit in the mouth by Jerry with a huge mallet. His teeth do not just bounce back into shape but are smashed to smithereens and then the pieces fall out one by one. Of course, they grow back very quickly.
Secondly, imagine Daffy duck, he lights a match, the room is lit up to reveal a vast ammunition dump and then there is an almighty explosion. In the next scene, he is floating up to heaven with a harp and and wings. He died, boo hoo.

And yet, he's right back there in the next scene! Even when you die in Cartoon World, it's not the end. And even if it IS the end, you only need to hang about a few years for Steven Speilberg to buy you up.

And the other rule is, if your teeth DO get smashed, you are expected to remain still until every last piece has fallen out. This is not, I find, generally reflected in Real Life.

Also, regarding "bad guys", characters that seek to eat/cause bodily harm to/annoy other characters: Most of these rules have a rather large probability of causing harm to them, regardless of who initiated it. Example #1: Wile E. Coyote finds a road that dead-ends on a sheer cliff. He paints a picture of a continuing road, anticipating that the Road Runner will run through it and fall to his doom. RR enters painting instead. WEC tries, falls through, hits rock bottom. Survives due to rule #1. Example #2: Just like #1, except WEC paints a washed-out bridge on top of a normal road. RR breaks through painting, WEC enters, falls down hole, survives due to rule #1. Example #3: Buster & Babs Bunny paint a tunnel, pass through into the darkness. One second later, a train shoots out of the tunnel, running over the antagonists.

I also propose another rule: Sharp and seemingly deadly projectiles (bullets, knives, cleavers, axes, etc.) launched at someone/thing will always outline the target, maybe even piercing clothing or cutting off hair (which instantly regenerate in a few seconds), but never actually touch the target's body. This does not, however, apply to large chemically-propelled objects (cannonballs, missiles, and such). If they hit, they either explode, invoking rule #2, or go right on through, leaving a perfectly round hole with no bleeding or impairment of bodily function. This hole, of course, completely regenerates in the next scene due to rule #2.

Whew! I'm finally done.

hi Davius

Amazing how academic it can all begin to sound, isn't it?!

One other I should maybe have put in is about crashing through walls or other solid objects, and leaving a perfect outline of yourself, whatever the material you hit.


I haven't bothered doing any more work on it because having submitted it as a Guide Entry some six months or whatever ago, I've heard absolutely nothing from TPTB about it. I can't believe the editing process takes that long. I mean, I enjoyed writing it, and it doesn't really matter if it doesn't get in the Guide, but when I read some of the stuff that does get accepted...well it makes you wonder.

Yeah... however, some characters seem to have total control over the universe, i.e. Bugs Bunny (to a degree), that wacky orange squirrel with a big nose from the OLD cartoons, Gogo from Tiny Toons, the Road Runner, etc.

I sympathise with you. Not that I've actually made any entries yet, but any day (week? month?) now there'll be one from me on the server. Is it possible to complain about how long it's taking (6 months is _definitely_ enough time), and ask that they give you a response? I don't happen to know, myself.

Oh well, I could complain, but these days I'm having more fun just going around talking to people. It seemed more important to have articles accepted in the early days of the Guide when it looked destined to be the repository of wacky knowledge and not the glorious chat room it has since become. Trying to get a gold star for your essay is too much like being back at school.

Wacky orange squirrel with the big nose? Hmmm, I feel I ought to know that one...

Well, basically, in the beginning of the cartoon, the said orange squirrel meets a cute little grey squirrel who wanted a disgustingly cute cartoon (fairy princesses, magical forests, cute animals, etc.), takes her (voice sounds female; gender unknown) behind a tree & beats her to a pulp. Later, this large blue dog turns antagonist. The orange squirrel pulls nearly every trick in the book (instant motion, the seasick gag, train station in a tree, turning back the screen like a page to see what happens next, acting as sound effects guy, etc, etc, etc.). At the end, he reveals that he "was twins, all the time. Hehehehehe." The dog does likewise. The cute squirrel shows up again, says "my cartoon would have been cuter." All four others (they were both twins, remember?) say "oh no, not that! Not that!"(exactly what orange squirrel had said at the beginning) in unison & beat the cute one to a pulp again (no tree this time )

It's just as great as any Road Runner cartoon.

I'll admit I don't know that one. It sounds like a Tex Avery production though - he was always playing around with the mechanics of things. There's a famous (I think) Daffy Duck one where for some thirty seconds a hair flickers around in the bottom of the screen, as though it had got caught in the projector. Finally, Daffy stops what he's doing, turns to camera and says excuse me, then plucks the offending hair out and throws it away. Because hairs in the gate used to be a regular problem in those days, the film cans had to be marked with a warning to the projectionist.

There's more - the chase scene where they're going so fast they screech over the sprocket holes at the edge of the film, the one where they reach a sign in the woods which says "Limit of Technicolor" and everything beyond it is black and white, or the one where a small shadow of someone trying to leave their seat appears along the bottom of the screen, like you used to get in small cinemas where if you stood up your head would be in the projection beam. As the figure inches his way along the row, the action stops and Daffy angrily tells him to sit down, which he meekly does.

Chuck Jones and Tex Avery were the master rule-breakers of their day, although De Patie & Freleng, the Pink Panther guys, ran them a close second.

Exactly right - it was Tex Avery. I've seen others where the characters run off the film (a Droopy cartoon comes to mind). I haven't seen any of the others, but I did see one with Bugs Bunny and the shadow gag. It's the one where Bugs is in this little mad scientist's castle, being chased around by the big red monster in sneakers. In this particular scene, Bugs is holding a door shut, screaming "Is there a doctor in the house?" You see a shadow-guy stand up and say "I'm a doctor." Bugs, of course, delivers his "Ehhhh... What's up, doc?" line, the door bursts open, and the doctor sits down.

Yeah that's a great episode. It has stuff like the secret hideout of the mad scientist perched high on a hill where everyone can see it. In case you've missed the point, there's a huge flashing neon sign on top of the castle saying "Mad Scientist". And when Bugs gets cornered by the monster, he immediately turns into the campest hairdresser, telling the monster what terrible condition his hair's in, sitting him down and starting to do his hair, all the while keeping up a non-stop monologue of brain-death trivial chat.

Just one of many brilliant scenarios from the Wabbit.

Oh, yes. And the eye-poking bit with the pictures, and the steam-powered knight on horseback, and the pounding on the wall with the hammer followed by the home run hit with the big mallet. Do you know if the scientist guy was supposed to look like anybody, or if he was just inherently strange-looking? He was re-used in at least one other cartoon.

Well the guys at Warners were ace at spoofing the film stars of the day, so he must have been based on somebody. They've done Bogart and Baccall, George Raft, Liberace...maybe the scientist was Vincent Price? Although it may have been made before Price became big in the States. I think that episode was one of the longer ones which were often bigger budget than the Termite Terrace animators were used to, like The Rabbit of Seville for example.

My memory of some of these cartoons gets dimmer as I watch less TV - there used to be a time when they never seemed to be off British TV as they're a perfect length for rounding off an awkward length film. Maybe I should get some videos of them, or better still, use researching them as an excuse to get a DVD machine.

But TV's no substitute for watching them with a big crowd in a cinema. A few years there was a Tex Avery evening did the rounds. There must have been a dozen cartoons with a necessary interval for recovery. I've never laughed till it hurt since that screening...

In some old theaters, they play cartoons and newsreels before the movies. It's really a blast to watch you favorite wacky antics on a BIG screen.

Never heard of rounding off a movie with a cartoon before; sounds like a good idea waiting to be re-implemented.

Is Termite Terrace the animation studio where the cartoons were made?