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The eyes of Tex Avery
One prank gone wrong changed cartoons forever.
Tex Avery is known as one of the pioneers of the Golden Age of Animation, his wacky characters breaking barriers with their actions and reactions fighting against time, space, and even gravity! One of Tex's signature animation techniques was having character's eyes blow up to wild sizes or even pop out of their sockets to express excitement, attraction, or even fear. Tex Avery is also known for a legendary eye injury, which over the years has been subject to rumor and speculation. Let's connect the dots surrounding the eye injury and assess how it affected the animator's technique.
In the early 1930s, Avery was an animator at the Walter Lantz Studio working on the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit series. The environment at the studio was reportedly very prone to pranks and horseplay, including animators snapping rubbing bands and shooting spitballs at each other. Fellow animator Fred Kopietz recalled the incident in an interview with animation historian Michael Barrier: "Charlie called, ‘Hey, Tex,’ or did something, and snapped one of these clips, a regular oval clip, with a rubber band, and caught Tex right in the eye.”
According to Kopietz, fellow animator Charles Hastings was the thrower of the clip from across the room, but another animator, Ed Benedict disagreed and said that Avery was seated right in front of Hastings, making the attack more of a direct hit. In an interview with animation Professor Tom Klein about the incident, Benedict even provided a seating chart of where he remembered the desks were. Both men were interviewed about the incident in the 1990s, about 60 years after the actual incident. Avery's own account of the incident was: "One of the boys yelled, ‘Look out, Tex!’ and I turned and caught the clip in my left eye. That lost me one eye in a split second." Slowly over the course of a few months, Avery completely lost vision in that eye while still working on Oswald cartoons. While sources disagree on who threw the paper clip, if it even was a paper clip, and how far, they do agree that this incident majorly affected the way Tex Avery created cartoons after this incident.
Many animation historians believe that Avery's impaired vision led to a lack of depth perception. This would have changed his perspective of not only every day life, but also the cartoons he was drawing. The alleged changed depth perception allowed him to develop his bizarre, over-the-top animation techniques. But another area that's discussed less in the mythos of the Tex Avery Eye Incident is how he animated the eyes of his characters. Especially with his Wolf character at MGM cartoons, whose eyes often popped out of his head, Avery stretched the limits of what was physically possible in a cartoon, paving the way for future animators to use step outside of the box in their cartoons. It could be argued that Avery's injury gave him a new perspective and led to him looking at eyes and their ability to feel in a new way, a way that led to eyes popping out of their sockets in desire or pulsating with joyful anticipation or growing in fear.
Funnily enough, this incident did not deter Tex Avery from his position of lead prankster wherever he worked. In their respective memoirs, Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna both mention his commitment to and encouragement of pranks at the MGM cartoon studio, including throwing thumb tacks, rubber bands, and paper clips at the wall.
