The Top Tex Avery Animations That Twitter Just Discovered

Despite a number of Millennial-and-younger Twitter users learning his name for the first time this week, animation legend Tex Avery’s influence can still be felt across the cartoon industry, having helped to create classic characters like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd and Porky Pig. But that’s not all, folks.

It might be hard for a modern animation fan to imagine that, when the many Looney Tunes characters first hit the scene in the late 1930s, the antics of Bugs, Daffy and the gang were basically the burgeoning cartoon industry’s equivalent of a proto-punk-rock supergroup. As opposed to Walt Disney’s palatable, sentimental and exclusively kid-focused cartoons, the Warner Bros. shorts that Frederick Bean "Tex" Avery directed were more lively, outlandish and in-your-face than the usual Mickey Mouse affair of those early years. 

Then, when Avery left the Looney Tunes world and signed a contract with MGM in 1941, his new characters all had that same edge, and his sarcasm, his sense of irony and his affinity for absurdity manifested in some of the most original and boundary-breaking animations of all time.

But, to the generations that mostly know Avery’s work from the T-shirts sold at Six Flags, the innovations that the animator, director and voice actor introduced to the industry alongside other legends such as Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones and Frank Tashlin are sadly unappreciated — or, at least they were, until the Golden Age cartoon community took over a new corner of the Twitter algorithm this week and blasted our feeds with clips from the most ingenious works of animation ever painstakingly put to film while arguing over which era of Avery was his peak the entire time.