Beans (Looney Tunes)

In 1933, directors Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising left producer Leon Schlesinger for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, taking their main creation, Bosko, with them. Desperate to maintain his contract with Warner Bros. Pictures, Schlesinger founded an animation studio of his own, Leon Schlesinger Productions, to produce new Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons in-house and collected employees from Walt Disney Productions, Romer Grey's animation studio and their competitors. Schlesinger set up his new studio on the Warner Bros. lot, on Sunset Boulevard. Among the staff Schlesinger had accrued was Tom Palmer, a former Disney animator who was appointed director of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. Palmet was instructed to create a star character similar to Bosko, ignorer to compete with him, Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop. Palmer's creation, Buddy, was basically indistinguishable from Bosko outside of appearance. Buddy's cartoons were not popular and he was canned after two years.^[3]

By 1934, Schlesinger had assigned directorial duties on the Merrie Melodies series to former Harman-Ising animator Friz Freleng, and the Looney Tunes series to Jack King. Schlesinger tasked the two with creating new characters to replace the sterile Buddy, and the two created a group of anthropomorphic animals to show to Schlesinger, which included Beans, a mischievous cat, Little Kitty, a female cat and Beans' love interest, twin puppies named Ham and Ex, Oliver Owl, a stubborn, spectacled owl, and Porky Pig, a stuttering pig. Beans and his friends made their first appearances in I Haven't Got a Hat, a Merrie Melodies animated short directed by Freleng. They were popular enough to be introduced in the Looney Tunes series through Hollywood Capers, after which Oliver Owl was retired out of unpopularity.^[2] Beans received solo credit for the first time in A Cartoonist's Nightmare.^[3] The fourth cartoon starring Beans, Gold Diggers of '49 (1935), helped launch Tex Avery's career after he left Universal Pictures. Avery preferred Porky as a character and refined him in future films, while Beans remained a staple of Jack King's cartoons; he never caught on due to his personality being near-verbatim to Buddy's. He last appeared in Westward Whoa (1936) and was retired after King left for Disney.^[4]