Chuck Jones Dinosaurs
That should be reason enough for watching Caveman Inki (1950). It should be noted that at this point Chuck Jones has become a little more tasteful than his peers when drawing black characters. The great animation of the dinosaur chasing Inki, the lion cub, and the Mynah bird is by Ken Harris.
Thad i can’t thank you enough for posting this. I have not seen this cartoon for 40 years and was beginning to think I had dreamed it. The scenes of the brontosaur charging and shaking the earth have haunted my subconscious for decades.
Didn’t McKimson reuse some of the animation of the dinosaurs for “Pre-Hysterical Hare”?
I love Chuck Jones’ Inki cartoons, especially this one and the previous two. They are so wonderfully bizarre and cerebral, not to mention beautifully animated. I wish he did one more, imagine what Maurice Noble would have done with the settings!
Inki still has vestiges of the old-timey “big lips” look, but it’s certainly an improvement from All This and Rabbit Stew or even Angel Puss.
I don’t think Chuck’s relatively young age really affected how much he
tried to eschew racial stereotypes, since he wasn’t that much younger than Tex Avery, Bill Hanna or Joe Barbera. Maybe his art institute education did, perhaps?
I love the Inki shorts, I think this one has the best timing of the bunch.
Truthfully I never found Inki to be too racist. The mynah bird was one of the coolest minor Looney Tunes characters ever created. I love how he always seemed to hop in sync to his own theme song.
This was really the last of Chuck’s multiple character chase cartoons, like “Fair and Wormer”, “Snow Time for Comedy” and “The Unbearable Bear”, where he had multiple storyline threads crossing and intermingling. From here on out, he and Maltese would focus their chase storylines on the one-on-one relationship between the Road Runner and the Coyote.
None of Chuck’s Inki shorts going back to Charlie Thorsen’s original design in 1939 really pushed the stereotypical distortions other cartoons did with black characters, probably because of Chuck’s obsession at the time with small, quite child or child-like characters. The design is more streamlined here, probably in part to the changing times by the late 40s, but also as part of Jones’ general polishing up the look of all his characters by the end of the decade (the Inki-like character Chuck used in “Porky’s Ant” is a little more problematic, but mainly because of his un-PC role as a native bearer for Porky and the source of avarice by the pigmy ant over his bone knot).
I love these Inki cartoons. The timing is certainly excellent, especially on those chase scenes.
I remember this cartoon in that “old” Poky Pig Show.