Slap Happy Lion

This cartoon is a prime example of Tex Avery's brilliance and how producer Fred Quimby could pick'em. Slap Happy Lion show's us how too much confidence can run short to the unlikeliest of foes. Avery delivers gag after gag with the goofiest lion flexing his king of the jungle muscles with roaring laughter. This is truly one of the reasons why I've always been a fan of vintage cartoons from the MGM studios in a time when shorts such as these were seen only at the theater. A true hidden treasure of the Avery archives...8 out of 10.

Slap Happy Lion can also be found appropriately as a special feature on the classic Thin Man series finale "Song of the Thin Man" on DVD.

Slap Happy Lion (1947) is another short from cartoon king Tex Avery. In this short, a mouse is the only creature in the jungle who'll stand up to the king of beasts. The lion scares the hell out of every creature in his domain except some dumb mouse. This troubles the lion who tries to do everything he can to teach this mouse a lesson.

A bizarre animated short from Tex Avery. Not only is the story crazy but the visuals and sight gags are outrageous and over the top. Another winner from the man!

Highly recommended.

A+

The old circus lion is a mess. He's scared of a mouse. The mouse recounts how he used to be the king of the jungle until the day he met a fearless mouse.

This is a Tex Avery MGM cartoon. It's billed as a Tom and Jerry Cartoon although I don't think the mouse is supposed to be Jerry. Maybe it's a deconstruction of the Tom and Jerry cartoon. I would change the mouse narrator in the circus into another circus animal. It makes no sense that a mouse is scared of another mouse. You know what. It should Tom the cat and the mouse should be Jerry. There you go.

Just watched this Tex Avery cartoon on YouTube in which we see a lion in a wheelchair seeming a little docile. When he and the one pushing him pass a mouse, that mouse tells his story in flashback of when that lion used to roar real loud in the jungle and scare every animal. Then this same mouse came along...Boy, the way Avery milks all those scare gags, one after another, with constant visual expressions that go in places that made him one of the wildest of the animators during the wildest of cartoon decades: the '40s. Describing it truly won't do it justice, you just have to watch this thing like you would any Tex Avery of this period. So on that note, I highly recommend Slap Happy Lion.

A mouse tells the tale of how he drove a lion insane with terror in this Tex Avery cartoon.

It's a fine cartoon, and had anyone but Avery directed this, it would have been a classic. Avery's MGM cartoons, however, were so continually brilliant, that they have to be considered by the standards of his work, and so this one is just standard brilliant. It's one comic cartoon bit after another, in seemingly endless parade, until he's filled up the time limit, and it ends quickly. That's a standard feature of Avery's cartoons: it's series of gags linked by a situation, less than the story-telling techniques that almost every other cartoon maker used. True, there is a story of sorts, but that disappears under the constant barrage of jokes, leaving the capping joke at the end fairly weak.

Still, even standard Avery is among the best. If you don't know this one, it's tremendous fun.