This post is part of the Friz Freleng blog-a-thon hosted by Brian of Hell on Frisco Bay. Commemorating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Friz Freleng, one of the great American animated filmmakers, bloggers across the world focus their attentions on this unique artist’s life and work.

Like many of my generation, my first exposure to Warner Bros. animation was not projected onto a theater screen but on Nickelodeon, in half-hour blocks of programming (three seven-minute shorts per half-hour) that informed my young animation viewership. My youth didn’t allow for me to appreciate the subtleties of, for example, the late work of Chuck Jones, perhaps the most celebrated director in the Looney Tunes stable, and as such it was late before I grasped the genius of his most endearing creations - the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, Yosemite Sam, Duck Amuck and What’s Opera Doc and One Froggy Evening and especially Feed the Kitty. Similarly, I felt a profound disconnect watching the rambunctious hijinks of early Daffy and Bugs in Bob Clampett’s work. Later Looney Tunes, which really define the characters as we know them today, offers a decidedly less daffy Daffy and a decidedly cooler Bugs, and so it was hard for me to connect those raving lunatics fluttering about the screen.

No, my favorite cartoons at that time were undoubtably the Freleng cartoons. Efficient, uniformly strong - never quite aiming for the transcendence of Jones or the sheer manic energy of Clampett and Avery. These were the cartoons that we plebs could connect to and feel with - decidedly middlebrow (as far as cartoons go) but terrific nonetheless.

I don’t think I liked any cartoon quite as much as Three Little Bops, a work which by juxtaposing some of its era’s most problematic representational tendencies and some of the more forward-thinking work of Warner Bros animation allows us to come to terms with the special place Freleng’s art holds in our collective conscious. A radical update of the Three Little Pigs tailored to the post-UPA era, it’s the story of a Big Bad Wolf trying to break into a series of three nightclubs being played by a trio of pigs. The wolf’s problem? He’s not cool - they can’t jive his embarrassing trumpet playing, and he doesn’t make the problem any easier by uh, being a wolf. See what I’m getting at with problematic representation?

First off - this cartoon is excellent. Eschewing the tried-and-true WB sound collaborators (Carl Stalling, Milt Franklyn, and Mel Blanc) for music by Shorty Rogers and a fantastic vocal performance by Stan Freberg (as the narrator, the pigs, and the wolf), it bops along with an insanely catchy beat, with colorful, beautiful figures and more than a few background compositions that integrate the look and flow of modern art (or, more appropriately, UPA animation) into a perfect visual representation of the swing being played. Dig the title card, with the stylized guitar that brings to mind Picasso’s Mandolin and Guitar. Watch how specific figure animation is recycled - the dancing humans, the pigs playing their instruments. This isn’t the lazy recycled animation of Hanna-Barbera television - here repetition is used as a pointed cinematic motif.

If its use of jazz as a signifier of upper-class (white) decadence (surely an emblem of a specific historical moment if ever there was one) irrevocably places the film within the context of the tangibly political, what to make of the film’s emphasis on, and even justification for, the exclusion of the wolf? Moments throughout the film that are played for laughs now give us pits in our stomach - the sign on the brick nightclub reading ‘No Wolves Allowed’, the disconcerting shots of white consumption of a black artform being played by pigs voiced as white (note the wolf’s voice,decidedly more ‘black’).

I don’t have any simple answers for this - surely I can’t harangue this magnificent work - its racial codifications are buried enough to be imperceptible to those audiences who might be impacted by it. I will say though that even at a young age watching the wolf actually die and go to hell was a startling moment - what sort of morality story is this? The pigs are justified in their exclusion, the wolf had no place in the place of white consumption, and it’s through the violent self-immolation of the wolf that he is redeemed and made palatable. It’s one of the first really palatable recognitions of human mortality I was ever presented with as a child. Why did he have to get real hot to play real cool?

For another insightful take on Three Little Bops, jazz:animated has an excellent look at the music of the piece, as well pointing out what should have been obvious to me: the pre-title credit sequence’s Calder influence. Evidently a popular cartoon, Supernatural… Baloney puts the Bops within their cultural context.

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