seeking a particular WB cartoon

~ Greetings, Hugh! Love this cartoon! It has many of the Disney-like qualities that only Chuck Jones could have brought to Warner Bros. cartoons. Here is what I found on The Big Cartoon Database;

Much Ado About Nutting

• Merrie Melodies Theatrical Cartoon Series
• Warner Bros. Cartoons, Inc.
• Distributed by: Warner Bros.
• Cartoon Characters: Squirrel.
• Voice Actors: Mel Blanc.
• Directed By Chuck Jones.
• Produced By Edward Selzer.
• Animated By Lloyd Vaughan, Ken Harris, Ben Washam.
• Written By Michael Maltese.
• Originally Released on May 23, 1953.
• Originally Released Theatrically.
• Running Time: 6:51 minutes.

~ I hope this helps, Hugh! ~sidestreetsam

Good catch, Sam, that matches the sought cartoon's parameters. Good sleuthing. :thumbsup:

This short probably inspired Scrat's running gag in the "Ice Age" films, as well as the upcoming animated feature, "The Nut Job."

~ Howdy, Pokey J.
Good point about no voice actors used in "Much Ado About Nuttin'". The action is all done in pantomine as you pointed out. Chuck Jones completely owned this type of approach to animation at Warner Bros. No other director at the studio was as successful with this sort of genre. A very early example of this can be found in Chuck Jones' B&W Looney Tunes release "Joe Glow, The Firefly" from March 1941. I got a copy from a good friend of mine who transfered all his WB cartoon laser disks to VHS tape for me back in the early 1990's. Finally started to wear the tapes out so I had to transfer them to DVD's! This cartoon is virtually silent with minimal sound effects and background music.

Good of you to make the distinction that Charles M "Chuck" Jones excelled at non-dialog, pantomime slapstick cartoons at the Warner Brothers Studios. However, I believe this was a case of Greener Grass Syndrome, in that MGM Studios were having great success with Joe Barbera and Bill Hanna's Tom and Jerry series, characters specializing in going speechless throughout their filmography.

~ Howdy, oneuglybunny!
You may be on to something there regarding the "Greener Grass Syndrome". However, the whole thing is a bit more complicated than all that. Warner Bros. paid the lowest salaries in the industry for animators and were very stingy with film budgets. Typically, cartoons short budgets were between $8,000 to $12,000 back in the classic animation era. Disney cartoons could cost as much as a $100,000 and they reshot corrected animation often on Walt's orders to improve the films. No such luxuries existed at Warners. MGM's budgets were also quite lavish. So I'm sure everyone at Warners was envious of these budgets. Chuck Jones was a late-bloomer at Warners. He lost out to Bob Clampett for the cartoon director position open in 1937 when Tex Avery went to MGM. When Chuck started directing his own films in 1939 his first character was the Disney inspired cute little Sniffles the Mouse. These films are much slower paced and methodical than the usual WB fare at the time. Bob Clampett's wild and wacky fast paced cartoons became the house style most people associate with the classic years of WB animation. Chuck didn't tighten up the pacing in his films until later. Finally, Hanna and Barbera released "Puss Gets the Boot", the first MGM cat-and-mouse film as a one-shot cartoon in Feb. 1940. Tom was called Jasper in this film. The first official Tom and Jerry cartoon, "The Midnight Snack", wasn't released until July 1941. "Joe Glow, the Firefly" was realeased by Jones/WB in March 1941 and plods along so slow it's difficult to watch. Tom and Jerry didn't become huge hits until the WWII years and afterward when foreign markets allowed these non-dialogue films to be well received world-wide.

This can't be the same MGM in-house animation department that produced Tom and Jerry. That one was run by Fred Quimby, every bit as ruthless and tightfisted as Leon Schlesinger, among others. And to his credit, Quimby was able to amass a remarkable talent pool, mostly from Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising's studios and from Van Beuren studios. Bill Hanna started out at Harman-Ising, rising to director for To Spring while Joe Barbera had worked for Van Beuren. Later, Quimby would even capture Fred "Tex" Avery after his falling out with Leon Schlesinger. Nevertheless, Quimby hounded his animation staff like a tax auditor, insisting on cartoon footage for every penny spent. It seems Walt Disney was the only studio mogul not to use bullwhips and blowtorches on his animation staff.

* Pink text is hyperbole; not to be construed as fact or speculation.

~ Hey, oneuglybunny!
Yep... one and the same MGM in-house animation department. It wasn't that Quimby was a ruthless and tightfisted cartoon producer. It was the fact that when it came to animation he was clueless. He would constantly complain about how the films contained "too many drawings" (huh?), how too much animation paper and pencils were being wasted, etc... He would wonder out loud what all the laughing and goofing off he observed within the department had to do with making cartoons. Let's say he made no friends there and was universally despised by everyone involved. The fact remains that MGM studios, who boasted to have more stars than there are in heaven, had on average the largest film budgets per film of all the Hollywood studios in the Golden Age. The Tom and Jerry cartoons averaged between $35,ooo to $45,000 per cartoon. Often more as budget overuns were common. All the cartoon units utilized pencil tests and reshot animation as it felt necessary to improve the films. Harman and Ising were finally booted from MGM for disregarding budget overuns on their cartoons which often exceeded $100,000 or more.
Here is little profile I found that will tell you all you need to know about Fred Quimby;

Fred Quimby joined MGM in 1927 to head its short features department. In 1937, he was assigned to put together its animation department. In 1939, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera presented him with their project for a series of cartoons featuring a cat and a mouse. Quimby approved, and the result was Puss Gets the Boot, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Initially he refused to pursue more Cat and Mouse cartoons after Puss Gets the Boot but success and money earnings that were for the cartoon he agreed to make Tom and Jerry an official cartoon for the MGM cartoon studio. As producer, Quimby became a repeated recipient of the Academy Award for Animated Short Film for the Tom and Jerry films without inviting Hanna and Barbera onstage and his name became well known due to its prominence in the cartoon credits. Even though Quimby had taken sole credit for approving and producing the Tom and Jerry series, he was not involved in the creative process. Besides, Quimby had a difficult relationship with animators, including Hanna and Barbera, who believed that Quimby was not fit for a real animation leader;

“...unfortunately for a cartoon producer, he had no sense of humor to call upon... He knew nothing of animation and cartoons were a strange thing to him. Cast in the role of high school principal opposite the animators' boyish enthusiasms, he acted as liaisons between them and the front office, usually it seemed, turning down requests for bigger budgets, raises and special dispensations of funds.”​

~Hello, sidestreetsam.
Some of that seems to conflict with the accounts that I've read in Bill Hanna's biography A Cast Of Friends and in Joe Barbera's biography My Life In Toons. These creators of Tom and Jerry recall making "Puss Gets The Boot" behind Quimby's back, as their initial story pitch was met with, "Cat and mouse has been done. There's nowhere left to go with it. Cat and mouse is dead." When "Puss Gets The Boot" debuted in February 1940, the reviews were very positive, vindicating Joe and Bill's decision. However, they were admonished to not do that again ... until one of MGM's biggest distributors phoned Quimby and asked, "When you gonna make another one?"

Those figures of $35 thousand to $45 thousand were accurate for the early MGM productions. However the 1948 Superior court ruling that movie studios could not lawfully compel theaters to play the newsreels, serial and cartoons, a practice called package marketing, cartoon funding shrank considerably, until MGM ultimately shut down their animation department.

But I'm getting off-topic here. Apparently, the initial success of "Puss Gets The Boot" served as a benchmark for Warner Brothers animators, who tried dialog-free cartoon shorts as a test of directorial skill. Whereas with MGM, the Tom and Jerry cartoons are mostly speechless as a matter of canon. Therefore, "Much Ado About Nutting" was Charles M Jones trying his hand at dialog-free direction, which in his case, worked. However, Warner Brothers also had Mel Blanc on staff, so that studio had little motivation to keep cartoons silent.