Tex Avery at M.G.M.'s : Screwy Squirrel Page 1

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Screwy Squirrel is born in April 1944, in Screwball Squirrel. It is the hero of 5 cartoons producted in less than 2 years. Upon the beginning it is a completely succeeded character, as well graphically as psychologically (it will undergo only one slight graphic final improvement, his orange hair becoming sharp for the last two episodes). Screwy Squirrel is the system free electron, the absolute destructor, certainly the most violent character created by Tex Avery (if we exclude both buzzards of What's Buzzin' Buzzard). What it subjects to its partners, in particular the dog Meathead, concerns the most terrible sadism (twisting of the nose, blow of knife or bludgeon, crushing by various objects, etc.)...
Squirrel hustles the whole codes conventions, from cartoons or moral. All begins with an intruder elimination, a nice small squirrel, which was ready to live a new adventure with his/her friends with hairs and feathers. A little walk behind a tree, some fistblows and, a phone ringing further, the infernal stampede with Meathead can start. For the witness which has not understood it in the preceding cartoons (in particular with the starting of Red Hot Riding Hood, where the Little Red Riding Hood, the Wolf and the Grandmother announces that they have enough of it to always play the same role), Avery thus announces the color: here, it is a not-Disney ground. We do not know anything about the Squirrel - Meathead's confrontation origin. In the beginning, it does not have any raison (except perhaps the premature elimination of Sammy the squirrel?). Here, it is about a violence for nothing. In the following episodes, the dog represents a form of order, ready to make re-enter the squirrel in the straight way. Screwy Squirrel has, of course, no respect for this established order, that it undertakes narguer and destroy with all the means Avery places at its disposal. And, as in What's Buzzin' Buzzard, these means are without limits. As tell us Big-Heel Whata, the silly Indian of the third episode :"In a cartoon everything is possible."