TheLittleSongbird Love animation, it was a big part of my life as a child, particularly Disney, Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry, and still love it whether it's film, television or cartoons.Also have much admiration for Tex Avery, an animation genius whose best cartoons are animated masterpieces and some of the best cartoons ever made by anybody. 'Cross Country Detours' is not one of Avery's best but for a travelogue cartoon, or for a travelogue of anything, it doesn't fare too shabbily at all, actually it fares well. It may not be one of his overall funniest or most imaginative and at all structurally it's a little episodic, but it's well made and clever.It is no surprise that, as with a vast majority of Avery's cartoons regardless of the period, the animation is excellent. Beautifully drawn, very detailed and the colours are vibrant. The highlight animation-wise are the different locations brought to remarkably vivid and superbly detailed life.Carl Stalling's music score is typically lushly and cleverly orchestrated, with lively and energetic rhythms, it's also beautifully synchronised with the action and gestures/expressions and even enhances the impact.While not hilarious, 'Cross Country Detours' is very clever, with the frog and lizard scenes very daring for their time and still shock. Timing is spot on and the narration is suitably sardonic. Avery directs splendidly and distinctively. Voice acting is very good.On the whole, a lot of fun. 8/10 Bethany Cox

Vimacone Tex Avery came up with the spot gag formula when he was at WB. The structure was a series of sight gags based on a theme with no plot. Most of these were in the form of travelogues or wild life documentaries, lampooning the dullness of those films. Two problems with these shorts is that the gags overtime repeat themselves in other spot gag cartoons that they become predictable and lose their edge. The other is that they rely (sometimes heavily) on topical references which has made these extremely dated, that the jokes now appear as non-sequitors to modern audiences. Fortunately, this short is the greatest of Avery's spot gag cartoons and one of his best WB cartoons hands down. Everything is perfectly timed and the sequences and gags flow together so perfectly. Two gags are still edgy even by today's standards. The frog croaking still maintains it's shock value so much so that it many television stations censored it. The lizard shedding her skin via striptease should be a reminder that the WB cartoons were never intended as for children. I always loved the rendition of It Had To Be You that plays during that sequence (very 40's). Only a couple of gags are dated that would need an explanation to modern viewers. Nonetheless this is an Avery masterpiece that every animation fan should see.

Edgar Allan Pooh . . . Warner Bros. courageously attempted to warn America of the Lizard People Threat with this animated short, CROSS-COUNTRY DETOUR. In a vain attempt to translate this concept into visual terms that even Confederate Nazi Red State dolts would understand, Warner's fellow traveling in-house Southerner--Tex Avery--paid Big Bucks to a Real Life Bump-and-Grind Bare-Naked Stripper Lady to create a template for a Deplorable Antebellum Lizard Belle shedding her skin. Alas, Warner's Ultra-Explicit message shot way over the noggins of their target audience, leaving America at the mercy Today of such Lizard Gals as Kellyanne Conwoman, Betsy "Amway Calling" DeVos, and Iwanna "Buy My Stuff!!" Rump. You owe it to yourself to watch CROSS-COUNTRY DETOUR at your earliest convenience. Then, when Melancholia Rump waltzes on-stage with that infamous Trombone Glissando and begins shedding stuff in a desperate effort to divert attention from her Hubbie's Impeachment Trial, you'll be able to tell your friends that you saw all of this coming in the Looney Tunes first.

Brian Camp 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."