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Bob Clampett got his start in comics
The Looney Tunes animator began his artistic journey in newspapers.
Did you know that before he was an animator, Bob Clampett was considered a child prodigy? We classic cartoon fans know Clampett from his fifteen years of genre-defining animation directing at Looney Tunes, but before Termite Terrace, Clampett was a little boy with a wildly impressive talent for drawing.
In the documentary, Man From Wackyland, Bob Clampett's daughter, Ruth Clampett, shared, "My father was recognized as having extraordinary talent from a very young age. When I've seen drawings that he had done at the ages of four and five, they were just unbelievable. So he had recognized and known from the earliest days that he wanted to do art, but he especially loved cartooning."
Growing up in California during the height of the silent film era, Clampett was largely influenced by Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and the Marx Brothers, and began making short films in his garage at age 12. Even Walt Disney took notice of the local child creative genius and tasked Clampett with designing the first-ever Mickey Mouse dolls. Clampett, who worked at a doll factory and also enjoyed puppet-making, designed the Mickey Mouse dolls after taking a sketchpad to the movie theaters and drawing Mickey.
Clampett's greatest inspiration for his cartoons came from his lifelong love of comics, especially comics by Milt Gross, Bill Holman, and George Lichty. If you pay close attention to your Looney Tunes lore, the Dick Tracy comic series gets several mentions throughout Clampett's cartoons.
In middle school, he drew comics and cartoons for the school newspaper. One comic strip, "Teddy the Roosevelt Bear," was such a hit that the school newspaper let new generations of students continue it long after Clampett graduated. In high school, Clampett drew a full-page comic for the Los Angeles Times. Clampett was hired to work weekends and school vacations in the LA Times art department, with a full-time cartoonist's contract set to begin after he graduated high school. He used his earnings from the newspaper to pay for art classes at Otis Art Institute.
Ruth Clampett described Clampett's transition from comics to cartoons, saying, "(The LA Times) had awarded him a contract that when he was done with school, he was going to come be a comic strip artist there, but when he saw animation for the first time, he knew that's where his love was going to be. He was so drawn to the art of animation that he had to go to Hearst and negotiate out of his contract. He actually started at Warner Bros. when he was only seventeen years old."
