Review by BrianDanaCamp

The Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon, "Cross Country Detours" (1940), is one of a number of Tex Avery-directed animated parodies of the kind of all-encompassing travelogue and documentary short that the studios used to turn out for theaters to show with their movies back in the golden age of Hollywood. These cartoons use a narrator who sounds exactly like the kind of narrator such films used (and may indeed have been one of them). This cartoon focuses on sights and sounds in America's national parks in the west and up north (Alaska). There are 13 gag sequences in all. (The segments involving the dog headed from Alaska to California and leading up to the Redwoods finale all count as one gag.) One of the gag segments involves a frog "croaking" (figure it out) and has been cut from TV prints of this. (Beware of TV prints of Warner Bros. cartoons, especially the older ones, pre-1947.)

The gags tend to be more clever than funny. They often involve interaction between the syrupy narrator and the animals being observed, who speak up to counter the narrator's invariably smug assumptions. (E.g., the polar bear stuck on a floating slab of ice taking issue with the narrator's insistence on how "warm" the bear is.) The animals are very realistically drawn and animated, even when they behave out of character, e.g. the bobcat having a meltdown or, most famously, the lizard "shedding its skin" by doing a striptease, to the tune of "It Had to Be You." In one of the documentaries I've seen on the Warner Bros. animation unit, there was black-and-white live-action footage of a woman executing the movements of a striptease filmed expressly for use in rotoscoping the drawings for this segment. As a masterpiece of rotoscoped animation (in which the drawings are traced over live-action movements), this sequence should be celebrated, never mind that it's also funny and pretty risqué for the era. Also, the cartoon boasts remarkably detailed background paintings of such landmarks as Yosemite Park, Bryce Canyon, Grand Canyon and, in one sequence showing beavers at work, Hoover Dam.

In the Grand Canyon "echo" sequence, I believe the tourist is a caricature of Tex Avery himself and that Avery supplies the voice for the character. (He occasionally supplied a big booming laugh to characters in his cartoons, like the hippo in the audience in "Hamateur Night," 1939.) Other Avery films like this, filled with spot gags, include "Detouring America," "Land of the Midnight Fun," "Screwball Football," "Holiday Highlights," and "Wacky Wildlife."