Robert Emerson Clampett Sr. (May 8, 1913 – May 2, 1984) was an American animator, director, producer and puppeteer best known for his work on the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies animated series from Warner Bros. Cartoons as well as the television shows Time for Beany and Beany and Cecil. He was born and raised not far from Hollywood and, early in life, showed an interest in animation and puppetry. After dropping out of high school in 1931, he joined the team at Harman-Ising Productions and began working on the studio's newest short subjects, Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. Clampett was promoted to a directorial position in 1937. During his 15 years at the studio, he directed 84 cartoons later deemed classic, and designed some of the studio's most famous characters, including Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and Tweety. Among his most acclaimed films are Porky in Wackyland (1938) and The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (1946). He left Warner Bros. Cartoons in 1946 and turned his attention to television, creating the puppet show Time for Beany in 1949. A later animated version of the series, Beany and Cecil, was initially broadcast on ABC in 1962 and rerun until 1967. It is considered the first fully creator-driven television series and carried the byline "a Bob Clampett Cartoon".
In his later years, Clampett toured college campuses and animation festivals as a lecturer on the history of animation. His Warner cartoons have seen renewed praise in decades since for their surrealistic qualities, energetic and outrageous animation, and irreverent, wordplay-laden humor. Animation historian Jerry Beck lauded Clampett for "putting the word 'looney' in Looney Tunes."
Early life Robert Emerson Clampett Sr. was born on May 8, 1913 in San Diego, California to Robert Caleb Clampett and Mildred Joan Merrifield. His father was born in Nenagh, County Tipperary, Ireland in 1882, and immigrated to the United States with his parents at age two in 1884.
Clampett showed art skills by the age of five. From the beginning, he was intrigued with and influenced by Douglas Fairbanks, Lon Chaney, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Laurel & Hardy and The Marx Brothers and began making film short-subjects in his garage when he was 12. Living in Hollywood as a young boy, he and his mother Joan lived next door to Charlie Chaplin and his brother Sydney Chaplin. Clampett also recalled watching his father play handball at the Los Angeles Athletic Club with another of the great silent comedians, Harold Lloyd. He also loved to read comics from Milt Gross, Bill Holman and George Lichty, the latter of which influenced his animation style in the 1940s.
From his teens on, Clampett showed an interest in animation. He was also influenced by Salvador Dalí, Winsor McCay, Otto Messmer, Pat Sullivan, Max Fleischer, Walt Disney and Tex Avery. He had made hand puppets as a child and, before adolescence, completed what animation historian Milt Gray describes as "a sort of prototype, a kind of nondescript dinosaur sock puppet that later evolved into Cecil." In high school, Clampett drew a full-page comic about the nocturnal adventures of a cat, later published in color in a Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times. King Features took note and offered Clampett a "cartoonist's contract" beginning at $75 a week after high school. King Features allowed him to work in their Los Angeles art department on Saturdays and vacations during high school. King Features occasionally printed his cartoons for encouragement, and paid his way through Otis Art Institute, where he learned to paint in oils and to sculpt.
Clampett attended Glendale High School and Hoover High School in Glendale, California, but left Hoover a few months short of graduating in 1931. He found a job at a doll factory owned by his aunt, Charlotte Clark. Clark was looking for an appealing item to sell, and Clampett suggested Mickey Mouse, whose popularity was growing. Unable to find a drawing of the character anywhere, Clampett took his sketchpad to the movie theater and came out with several sketches. Clark was concerned with copyright, so they drove to the Disney studio. Walt and Roy Disney were delighted, and they set up a business not far from the Disney studio. Clampett recalled his short time working for Disney: "Walt Disney himself sometimes came over in an old car to pick up the dolls; he would give them out to visitors to the studio and at sales meetings. I helped him load the dolls in the car. One time, his car, loaded with Mickey's, wouldn't start, and I pushed while Walt steered, until it caught, and he took off."
Career Looney Tunes (1931–1946) As an animator
Clampett was, in his words, so "enchanted" by the new medium of sound cartoons that he tried to join Disney as an animator. While Disney wanted to hire Clampett, they ultimately turned him down due to them having had enough animators at that time, so Clampett instead interviewed with Harman-Ising Pictures, producers of Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons for executive producer Leon Schlesinger. Schlesinger viewed one of Clampett's 16mm films and was impressed, offering him an assistant animator position at the studio; Clampett was only 17 years old at the time of his hiring.
Clampett's first assignment at Harman-Ising was animating secondary characters in the first Merrie Melodies cartoon, Lady, Play Your Mandolin! (1931). The same year, Clampett began attending story meetings after submitting an idea eventually used for Smile, Darn Ya, Smile!. The two series were produced at Harman-Ising until mid-1933, when Harman and Ising broke ties with Schlesinger and signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Schlesinger immediately started his own studio, Leon Schlesinger Productions, headquartered in rented offices on Warner Bros.' older Sunset Boulevard studio lot (Warners' main operations were now situated at the recently acquired First National Pictures studio facility in Burbank). Clampett left Harman and Ising and joined the new studio. In his early years at the studio, Clampett primarily worked for Friz Freleng, under whose guidance Clampett grew into an able animator.
By 1934, Schlesinger was in crisis, seeking a well-known cartoon character. He noted that Hal Roach's Our Gang short film series consisted entirely of "little kids doing things together," and a studio-wide drive to get ideas for an animal version of Our Gang commenced. Clampett submitted a drawing of a pig (Porky) and a black cat (Beans), and, in an imitation of the lettering on a can of Campbell's Pork and Beans, wrote "Clampett's Porky and Beans." Porky debuted in the Friz Freleng-directed I Haven't Got a Hat in 1935. Around the same time, Schlesinger announced a studio-wide contest, offering a monetary prize to the staff member who turned in the best original story. Clampett's story won first prize and was made into My Green Fedora, also directed by Freleng.
Clampett was encouraged by these successes and began writing more story contributions. After Schlesinger realized he needed another unit, he made a deal with Tex Avery, naming Clampett his collaborator. They were moved to a ramshackle building used by gardeners and WB custodial staff for storage of cleaning supplies, solvents, brooms, lawnmowers and other implements. Working apart from the other animators in a small, dilapidated wooden bungalow in the middle of the Sunset Boulevard lot, Avery and Clampett soon discovered they were not the only inhabitants - they shared the building with thousands of tiny termites. They christened the building "Termite Terrace", a name eventually used by historians to describe the entire studio. The two soon developed an irreverent animation style that would set Warner Bros. apart from its competitors. They were soon joined by animators Chuck Jones, Virgil Ross, and Sid Sutherland, and worked virtually without interference on their new, groundbreaking style of humor for the next year. It was a wild place with an almost college fraternity-like atmosphere. Animators would frequently pull pranks such as gluing paper streamers to the wings of flies. Leon Schlesinger, who rarely ventured there, was reputed on one visit to have remarked in his lisping voice, "Pew, let me out of here! The only thing missing is the sound of a flushing toilet!!" During production of Porky's Duck Hunt in 1937, Avery created a character that would become Daffy Duck, and Clampett animated the character for the first time.
As a director On the side in 1936, Clampett directed test animation for a sales presentation of a potential series of animated shorts based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars, with Burroughs himself involved and planning to sell the series to MGM. Schlesinger colleagues Chuck Jones and Robert Cannon collaborated with Clampett on the animation work. Clampett filmed Cannon in live-action as John Carter and rotoscoped it into the film. Clampett planned to leave Leon Schlesinger Productions, but Schlesinger offered him a promotion to director and a higher salary if he would stay. Clampett was promoted to director in late 1936 and directed a color sequence in the feature When's Your Birthday? (1937).
In early 1937, Clampett was led to what became a co-directing stint with fellow animator Chuck Jones for the financially ailing Ub Iwerks, whom Schlesinger subcontracted to produce several Porky Pig shorts. Clampett, Jones, and Cannon were sent to Animated Pictures to work with his staff on these shorts, which featured the short-lived and generally unpopular Gabby Goat as Porky's sidekick. While Iwerks directed the first two shorts under this deal, he walked out on the project while preparing the third, Porky's Badtime Story. Ray Katz, Schlesinger's production manager and brother-in-law, assigned Clampett to take over as director, for which Clampett received his first Looney Tunes directorial credit. Clampett shared directorial duties with Jones, who drew the character layout drawings while Clampett supervised all other aspects of production.
The Iwerks deal was soon terminated and Clampett, Jones, and Cannon were returned to the Warner Sunset lot, where Clampett was given his own unit as director – albeit working in a separate Sunset lot building from the other Schlesinger staffers under a subcontractor deal Schlesinger set up with Ray Katz. Starting with Rover's Rival (also 1937), Clampett would continue as director of black-and-white Porky Pig cartoons - and two 1941 Technicolor Merrie Melodies shorts - under Katz through the end of 1941; Jones worked on and off as Clampett's uncredited co-director until Jones was given his own director's unit in the main Schlesinger building in 1938.
It was during this period that Clampett directed one of his best-known films, Porky in Wackyland (1938), in which Porky Pig enters a surreal land deep in Africa to hunt a wacky, reality-bending dodo bird. Under the Warner system, Clampett had complete creative control over his own films, within severe money and time limitations (he was only given $3,000 and four weeks to complete each short).
Clampett was so popular in theaters that Schlesinger told the other directors to imitate him, emphasizing gags and action. When Tex Avery departed in 1941, his unit was taken over by Clampett while Norman McCabe took over Clampett's old unit. Clampett finished Avery's remaining unfinished cartoons. When McCabe joined the armed forces, Frank Tashlin rejoined Schlesinger as director, and the unit was eventually turned over to Robert McKimson. Milton Gray notes that from The Hep Cat (1942) on, the cartoons become even more wild as Clampett's experimentation reached a peak.
During World War II, Clampett directed several propaganda shorts, including the Private Snafu series, but also one-shorts like Any Bonds Today? (1942), Russian Rhapsody (1944) and Draftee Daffy (1945).