Robert Clampett

Clampett used to spend his summers in the small (2.2 square miles!) Los Angeles County town of Hermosa Beach in the 1970's. He sometimes met science fiction writer Ray Bradbury there, and they and their wives spent time there during the mild summers Hermosa Beach and Redondo Beach were famous for since the 1920's.

Clampett, at the time the longest serving employee at the animation studio, finally left in 1947.

After a brief stint at Columbia, and a one-off cartoon at Republic It's a Grand Old Nag (1947) he was inspired by the new innovation of television to resurrect his old sea-serpent puppet, and created the phenomenally successful Time for Beany (1949)_ puppet television show, which was acclaimed by the likes of Albert Einstein and Groucho Marx, and even inspired the AC/DC line "Dirty Deeds, Done Dirt Cheap".

While most other Bugs Bunny cartoons portrayed Bugs as the generally clever and collected character who always wins, Clampett's cartoons sometimes portrayed Bugs as being on the losing end of things (e.g. Falling Hare (1943), Tortoise Wins by a Hare (1943)).

Seuss book Horton Hatches the Egg (1942), the controversial all-black cast musical Snow White parody Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (1943), the Fantasia (1940) parody A Corny Concerto (1943) and John Kricfalusis's favorite cartoon The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (1946) featuring the acerbic irreverence of Daffy Duck -- easily the most Clampett-esque of all his characters.

Amongst his famous fare was the Dalí inspired Porky in Wackyland (1938), his loving adaption of the Dr.

Between 1931 and 1947 Clampett was an animator and later director for the legendary Leon Schlesinger Productions (later Warner Brothers Animation) where alongside his one time boss Tex Avery he became known as the wackiest and most archetypally cartoonish of all the directors. During this time he also developed a test for a animated adaptation of 'John Carter of Mars' however, despite the support of the author Edgar Rice Burroughs it failed to materialize.

Born in San Diego, California, the young Robert Clampett was monumentally moved as a child by the film The Lost World (1925), inspiring him to create a sea-serpent sock-puppet that he used in puppet shows to entertain the neighborhood kids. This led him to create a stuffed Mickey Mouse toy, which became a prototype for the first mass-produced Mickey Mouse doll.