The Cuckoo Clock

This starts completely atypically for an Avery short. It's moody and slow, with a sense of dread. That lasts for maybe twenty seconds before turning into a cat trying to kill a cuckoo clock bird. You can almost hear Tex Avery's ghost from the projector booth cutting forward…

Branson Reese

I thought this would be really good

Capybara King

Poe-themed horror parody cartoon by Tex Avery, something I had to find as soon as I learned of its existence (thanks to the excellent book Tex Avery: The MGM Years, 1942-1955 by John Canemaker). A slightly Roderick Usher-like cat is tormented by a maybe a little less…

Joe

Tex Avery is the best to ever do it in the American animation realm.

Stringer Bell

Tom and Jerry if it was made by Edgar Allen Poe who then ripped off his lifelike Edgar Allen Poe mask to reveal he was Tex Avery this whole time!

HAL

A pretty terrific Poe parody for the brief stretch of the opening when it is such a thing; great backgrounds drawn in monochrome with lots of scrawled, pencil-thin detail, like an intoxicatingly atmospheric illustration from a book of Victorian ghost stories. And still…

Tim Brayton

A cat is driven to madness by the bird inside of a cuckoo clock, and tries to put an end to it once and for all through various means. Obviously the crazy-eyed bird keeps getting the better of him, though, and it's pretty funny. Better still: it ends on a dark note.

evil

I love the existential angst of the voice-over narration and then the ambiguous ending (did a cartoon finally bite it?). The little-guy-beats-up-big-guy theme was a favorite of Avery and would be seen a few times over (it’s basically what makes Droopy who he is), and even…

M.D. Perkins

The cuckoo feels almost like Tex's version of the Roadrunner, maybe? A strange, flamboyant bird creature beholden only to its own whims.

Christopher Brown