by Cal Meacham
In 1988 Robert Zemeckis unleashed upon the world one of the great films of all time. It was Who Framed Roger Rabbit? It wasn't great because of the acting, or the writing, or the slapstick humor (although all of these were superb). Nor was it great because of the impossibly voluptuous figure of Jessica Rabbit. It was because this film captured the sense and the meaning of animated cartoons, explaining the draw and appeal of what is, after all, a new and unique form of art.To really appreciate this film, though, you've got to step through it a frame at a time. Animators have to draw 24 frames for every second of film. It takes a long time to do this, and there's a lot of drawing in each frame. Inevitably they end up drawing a lot more than the human mind can take in during a single viewing, filling the screen with almost subliminal images and in-jokes. Video aficionados have stepped through the laserdisc frame by frame to prospect for indiscreet drawings of the lovely Jessica. But the real gold is the in-jokes. Especially in the scenes in "Toontown," which are completely animated.
When Eddie Valiant first drives into Toontown the inhabitants sing "Smile, darn ya, Smile." In the lower right is a pie with the head of a cow - a cowpie. If you listen close you can even hear Eddie's car hit it. When he gets into downtown he runs into another vehicle. Painted on the side is "Acme Overused Gags" - not merely Used gags, but Overused gags. As he walks through the back alley there's a poster on the wall for "Porky's All-Beef Sausage" - a pretty grim joke. And when Eddie and Jessica emerge from the alley onto the street you can see a street sign behind them - "Watch out for falling anvils."
It's funny, of course, but I have to ask why? We've been conditioned by cartoons - especially all those Road Runner cartoons - to think of a falling anvil as something that hits the villain on the head. It's the instrument of his comeuppance. Of course falling anvils are a danger. They're dropping from the sky all the time in cartoons. Except that anvils don't fall from the sky, except in cartoons. The joke in Roger Rabbit is funny because it evokes the memory of a situation that only exists in cartoons, which is appropriate for Toontown.
But, again, I have to ask why? How did an anvil become the standard "Heavy object that falls from the sky"? Outside of historical parks and museums, how often do people see anvils? Were it not for plummeting anvils appearing on the Saturday morning cartoons, I suspect most people would have no idea of what an anvil even looked like. The only other heavy object to deliver the animated coup de grace is the safe. But at least there's a modicum of plausibility to a safe falling on your head. As Joe Adamson, cartoon historian extraordinaire, noted in his book Tex Avery: King of Cartoons:
…Cut away to a construction site, and a close-up of a sign saying "Danger: Falling Objects. Keep Away!" Then a rope snapping on a girder, followed by an aghast foreman hollering, "The rope's broken! Run for your life!" and a panic-stricken crowd fleeing the scene…"
…and then the safe or whatever can, with some justification, land on the Bad Guy's head. I should in fairness note that Adamson is describing the way some other cartoon director might do it. Tex Avery was much more likely to have the safe fall on the Wolf's head, and damn the plausibility. But the point is that you can imagine Safe Movers in the Big City, hauling that heavy piece of office furniture up through a window, only to have the rope break. But an anvil? Who shoes horses on the twentieth floor of the Empire State Building?
I love this sort of thing - questioning our current cultural icons. Make no mistake about it, the falling anvil is one of the mid-to-late 20th century American cultural icons. It didn't exist before, and it will eventually go out of style. But you can wrap it up and put it in a time capsule, because it's a joke we all get, a joke that defines us. The animators can stick it in the background of Roger Rabbit and know we'll get it. Gary Larson can draw a cartoon about a mother warning her kids not to play under the anvil tree - and we get it! Nobody has to explain this off-the-wall image to us. Cartoon Network can have a 30 second spot on "The Anvil" without a word of explanation. It's part of our shared cultural background.
But, it is important to point out, it is a very weird image. We don't realize how weird it is, because we're used to it, the way people living in a house aren't aware of any peculiar smells. They live with them all the time, so they're part of the background. But if we brought in a visitor from, say, the early nineteenth century, they'd say that Falling Anvils was one of the things that made the start of the 21st century smell funny. So I ask again, where did this image come from?
The task of researching cartoon history is becoming easier, what with the books on animation that have been published over the last 25 years and with the recent exponential growth of the Internet. But it all comes back to the knowledge of experts, and none of the animation experts I consulted could tell me the answer in this case. Where did the first falling anvil gag appear in cartoons? As far as I can tell, it wasn't a Disney cartoon or a Fleischer cartoon. It might have been in a cartoon by one of the smaller, more obscure studios, like Ub Iwerks' or Van Beuren's. What I can tell you is that the earliest instance I have been able to turn up is "A Tale of Two Kitties," a Warner Bothers cartoon directed by Bob Clampett, written by Warren Foster, and released on November 21, 1942. It featured two cartoon cats named Babbit and Catstello, obvious parodies of the comedy team of Abbot and Costello. It also features the cartoon debut of Tweety. This early Tweety Bird isn't the cute, innocent yellow bird we've come to know and love. He was a naked pink baby bird with half-lidded half-wit eyes and a pronounced mean streak. Clampett later claimed that he'd based the character on himself, as a baby.
In any event, the action of the cartoon consists of Babbit and Catstello trying to catch Tweety and eat him. At one point Catstello finds himself suspended from a wire by one paw. Tweety plays "this little piggy" with the paw, liberating it from the wire one digit at a time until Catstello falls. ("What do you know - ran out of piddies!" exclaims Tweety in what has become, by now, a nauseating baby voice.) But Tweety throws Catstello a lifeline - with an anvil attached. Thus was an icon born. I suppose the image of a tiny baby bird suddenly pulling out a huge and heavy anvil contributed to the humor.
The Anvil of Doom showed up again in "Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips," a Friz Freleng cartoon released on April 22, 1944. This is on of those Bugs Bunny cartoons you've probably never seen, because it's not PC. It occasionally gets shown at Art Movie houses as a historical curiosity. Made during the Second World War, it portrays the Japanese as heavily caricatured Bad Guys. At one point Bugs challenges a Japanese pilot to a duel in the air. Bugs wins, and the Japanese pilot parachutes to safety. Bugs flies by and hands him an anvil. "Here's some scrap iron for Japan, Moto! Happy landings!" Said pilot drops like a rock.
Later the same year Porky Pig appeared in "Brother Brat," directed by Frank Tashlin (who later went on to direct cartoonish live-action movies). You probably haven't seen this one, either. Porky plays a babysitter for a "Rosie the Riveter" type who works at Blockheed. The kid, Butch, abuses Porky, at one point handing him an anvil that causes Porky to crash through the floor into the basement.
A lot of the people I talked to thought that Tex Avery must have been the first to use the Falling Anvil gag. It certainly seems like one of Avery's legendary Texas Tall Story gags, but the earliest Avery cartoon I can find with a Falling Anvil is the 1949 cartoon "Bad Luck Blackie," made after Avery had left Warner Brothers for MGM. Joe Adamson liked this cartoon so much that he devoted five pages to it in his book on Avery. And Avery makes up for this late appearance of the anvil gag by pulling out all the stops. The dog that is the villain of the piece receives a rain constantly escalating Falling Objects, starting with mere flower pots and proceeding to a trunk, a bomb, a cash register, four horseshoes - and a horse, a fire hydrant, a safe, a wall of bricks, and an anvil. It goes on from there, culminating in an entire battleship. Wretched excess, indeed. But falling battleships didn't become part of cartoon's slapstick shorthand. Anvils did.
A big part of the reason has got to be Chuck Jones' Road Runner series. There were no anvils in the first Road Runner cartoon - 1949's "Fast and Furry-ous" - but Wile E. Coyote did try to drop an anvil on the bird from a high wire in "Beep, Beep," released on May 24, 1952. Michael Maltese was the screenwriter. A few months later the Falling Anvil was back in "Going!Going!Gosh!," another Jones/Maltese effort, and from then on it was a staple of the series. Jones and Maltese also used the Falling Anvil in 1953's classic "Duck Amuck," a surreal breaking-the-fourth-wall piece in which Daffy Duck is assaulted and humiliated by the unseen animator (revealed in the last shot to be Bugs Bunny).
I think it was the frequent use of Falling Anvil gags in the Roadrunner series, first by Jones and Maltese and later by Friz Freleng, that cemented the image in the public mind. With the frequent showings of the Roadrunner cartoons on television the image became established, then used by other, non-Warner Bothers cartoon venues. So one answer to the question of where the Falling Anvil came from is the Warner Brothers and MGM cartoons, from the 1940s through the 1960s. Virtually all of the "classic" cartoon directors used the idea - Clampett, Tashlin, Avery, Jones, and Freleng - although Jones is arguably the one most responsible for promoting it.
None of this answers the real question, though - where did the idea come from? I've got a theory about that…
There is a circumstance in which you really, seriously have to watch out for Falling Anvils, and although I can't prove it, I'll bet at least some of those old-time animators had first-hand experience with it.
There is a tradition of old-time fun that, by today's standards, looks downright dangerous. It was, at one time, considered an excellent waste of an afternoon to watch two steam locomotives crash into each other at high speed. There are some films of this that occasionally turn up in odd places. The films were made at just such exhibitions. There were a lot more of them that didn't get filmed. The spectators were supposed to stand far away, out of harm's way, but some people still got hit by debris and were injured.
This, besides the expense, is probably why they don't do choo-choo collisions as entertainment anymore. When you go to see demolition derbies and motorcycle jumping today, you're a safe distance back from the action.
Another example of this sort of entertainment is anvil firing. The usual way to do this is to place one anvil, upside down, on the ground. There is normally a hollow at the base. This is filled with gunpowder and a fuse inserted. A second anvil is then placed, rightside-up, on top. The fuse is lit, and you run like hell. The gunpowder goes off and sends the anvil flying up into the air. Anvils weighing up to 100 pounds can be sent up to 100 feet in the air.
People still do this, at fairs and the like. You can even see examples of it online (www.ior.com/~jewell2/anvils.html and www.ravie.freeserve.co.uk/anvil.htm ). Nowadays I assume they hold you back or rope you off a safe distance, but the poor guy who lights the fuse still has to watch out for a weighty chunk of flying metal.
When I first heard of this, I assumed that this was some necessary ritual - the iron would "lose its temper" over time, and need to be re-hardened by application of sudden heat and shock. And if people have a good time because of it, so much the better. It turns out, however, that setting off small explosions in your anvil is one of the WORST things you can do. You really don't want to make the anvil hard and brittle, and you don't want to take a chance of splitting the anvil (Although one of my sources claims that "traditional" anvil firing will not hurt a wrought iron anvil). Firing the anvil thus turns out to be the ironmonger's equivalent of the demolition derby - you only do it with old stuff that you don't really care about any more.
So where does this take place? The practice started in Europe, where it was supposed to have been practiced on St. Clement's day (St. Clement was the patron saint of blacksmiths, because he was martyred by being thrown into the sea with an anvil tied around his neck). Anvil firing was widely practiced in East Anglia, then came over to America during colonial times. It was practiced in the North and the South, then went West during the Gold Rush days. Although Sturbridge Village in Massachusetts furnished me with some information, most of the places still practicing this seem to be out West. When I suggested that firing the anvil might lie at the heart of the icon of the falling anvil, the cartoon experts I talked to said "Oh, yeah, I'll bet Tex Avery knew about that!" It's a compelling idea - Tex Avery had that larger-than life Texas streak, and the yee-haw exuberance that would lead one to try and launch foundry equipment. But I have to point out that Avery was a late entry in the anvil sweepstakes. And a lot of animators came from the Midwest. In fact, an awful lot of them worked for the Kansas City Film Ad company before they became big names in California. Early cartoons are filled with barnyard settings and barnyard humor, I suspect, precisely because the animators of the Golden Age came from such a bucolic setting.
Besides, they fired the anvil in California, too.
So maybe Bob Clampett or Warren Foster remembered the ritual from his youth, or the idea was suggested by some earlier cartoon I've missed. But I suspect the image of the hard-landing falling anvil was suggested by the real-life diversion, then made its way into cartoon history in the 1940s. There were a lot of false fires, but then Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese latched onto it and explored the many variations on the theme, and after that everyone just started to take it for granted. Of course anvils can fall from the sky! We'd be stupid to think any differently!
But imagine a parallel universe in which Wile E. Coyote repeatedly gets sandwiched between two colliding locomotives, each time in a new and witty way.
References
Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Guide to the Warner Brothers Cartoons, by Jerry Beck and Will Friedald (1989), was invaluable in tracking down details on the old Warner Brothers Cartoons. Even though the following books didn't provide any information on anvils in cartoons, they were still valuable: Joe Adamson's Tex Avery: King of Cartoons (1975), Leslie Cabarga's The Fleischer Story (Revised edition, 1988), and The Encyclopedia of Disney Animated Shorts by Patrick Malone (Eutychus). Sometimes you need negative information.
I'd also like to thank Rob Lyon of Old Sturbridge Village and David Mruz of many animation journals for their help.