Tasmanian Devil

by David Owen

  At the university, Professor Flynn’s duties were divided between lecturing, examination and research, part of which was a requirement to research the diseases of plants and animals. He made no mention of disease affecting any dasyurid. Within a year he had completed one of his more important papers, which today is still regarded as a standard Tasmanian devil reference text.2

  Ranked somewhere between low soap opera and high intellectual and artistic achievement, the Flynn family saga is a compelling one, though father and son tend to be treated as different species in the literature, while Marelle is variously described as vivacious, fun-loving, cruel to Errol and incompatible with Theodore; Flynn was:

  a tall, handsome man, patient with Errol, overfond of alcohol, somewhat shabby for a distinguished professor [and] as a contrast to his wife, so full of life and gaiety, Professor Flynn was often moody and looked ill at ease in the company of others . . . wishing that he was back at his home or at the University laboratory surrounded by his beloved animal specimens.3

  Despite personal difficulties, including separation from Marelle, Theo went on to a career of considerable personal achievement. In 1930 he left for Belfast where until retirement he held the Chair of Zoology at Queen’s University and became a member of a number of eminent societies, a far cry from the early years of bringing up naughty Errol—including the occasion Theo found himself in trouble with the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery from which he had borrowed skeletons of a devil, thylacines and platypuses for research purposes and not only not returned them for years but Errol had apparently damaged them.

  All the while Warner Bros. Pictures Inc. was benefiting from utilising animals. Soon after setting themselves up in Hollywood the brothers began producing short serials using tame animals from a nearby zoo, in which a heroine would be ‘chased’ by a doddery old lion, tiger or gorilla and the serial suspended at a climactic moment until the following week. Then, in 1923, Jack Warner had the prescience—or luck—to take on a script in which a dog rescued a Canadian fur trapper (Where the North Begins). The search for a canine actor uncovered Rin Tin Tin, a highly trained German shepherd. The dog became Warners’ first superstar, earning millions in a seven-year career. After Rin Tin Tin’s death Jack kept up the animal flavour by introducing a horse, Duke, and its faithful owner, a young John Wayne. It is not surprising that Warner Bros. then took to the animated cartoon business with such gusto, since the brothers knew how positively audiences reacted to animals.

  Errol Flynn refers a few times to the Tasmanian devil in his autobiography, including this (his father’s?) definition:

  ‘A Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus ursinus) is a carnivorous marsupial known for its extreme ferocity’. Errol had a deep interest in the natural world from early boyhood. He loved the sea and its creatures and much of this came from Theodore, who also kept marsupials at home for research purposes. They were pleasures in a place of friction: according to Errol his mother found him unmanageable, and

  a devil in boy’s clothing . . . My young, beautiful, impatient mother, with the itch to live—perhaps too much like my own— was a tempest about my ears, as I about hers. Our war deepened so that a time came when it was a matter of indifference to me whether I saw her or not . . . The rapport was with my father . . .

  When school finished, I raced home to be at his side, to hurry out into the back yard, where we had cages of specimens of rare animals. That courtyard was a fascinating place for a small boy.

  Tasmania is the only spot in the world where three prehistoric animals, the Tasmanian tiger, the Tasmanian devil and the animal Zyurus are found. Father had specimens of all of these in his cages, as well as kangaroo rats, opossums, sheep. I got to know these creatures very well, even the most savage, and I hated it when he had to chloroform one and dissect it . . . Occasionally I went with him on a trip in quest of one of the rare Tasmanian animals. We headed for the western coast, a difficult terrain, where there were huge fossilised trees. We hunted the Tasmanian tiger, an animal so rare it took Father four years to trap one.4

  Errol alone knew what a Zyurus was, though he may have been relying on memory. His father had made a major palaeontological discovery in Wynyard in northwest Tasmania of the oldest known marsupial fossil, Wynyardia bassinia. At a nearby site was the fossil Zygomaturus, a wombat-like member of the megafauna.

  After a period of adventuring as a young man in Australia and beyond, Errol acted in a cheap movie in England (his second) which came to the attention of Jack Warner. According to Flynn, ‘Warner saw me popping around on the screen with a lot of energy.’5 According to Jack, ‘I knew we had grabbed the brass ring in our thousand-to-one-shot spin with Flynn. When you see a meteor stab the sky, or a bomb explode, or a fire sweep across a dry hillside, the picture is vivid and remains alive in your mind. So it was with Errol Flynn.’6 The year was 1935: a wild, virile, dashing, swashbuckling Tasmanian devil had arrived in Hollywood.

  Jack teamed him with the equally unknown Olivia de Havil-land in Captain Blood. The movie made him instantly famous. Yet despite the rewards for the disgruntled, rebellious Hobart youth who’d struck the Hollywood jackpot, Errol Flynn came to begrudge as much as appreciate his luck:

  You were assumed to be Irish, your name being Flynn . . .

  Nobody knew or cared that my whole life was spent in Tasmania, Australia, New Guinea, England . . . Nobody believed me when I talked of that background. They didn’t want to hear of it. They wanted me to be Flynn of Ireland.7

  Still, he went on to make over 50 films, mostly with Warner Bros., until his death from a heart attack in 1959. That output of over two films a year, mostly in lead roles, is considerable, while he also found the time and energy to become the era’s most colourful and controversial Hollywood identity. But he never lost his love for the sea, in particular, nor for animals. He sometimes arranged whale-watching cruises, one eminent guest being Professor Hubbs of the Scripps Oceanic Institute. He bred champion lionhounds, a breed more familiarly known today as Rhodesian ridgebacks.

  Inspired by his father Theodore, Tasmanian-born actor Errol Flynn developed a lifelong devotion to animals. In the United States he was the first to breed lion hounds, also known as Rhodesian ridgebacks. The first chapter of Errol’s biography is entitled ‘Tasmanian Devil, 1909–1927’. (Courtesy Steve and Genene Randell, Errol Flynn Society of Tasmania, www.geocities.com/errolflynn1909)

  Flynn acrimoniously parted company with Warner Bros. in 1952, after ‘a violent argument with Jack Warner . . . although we laugh at it today’.8 And no doubt they did. In his autobiography Flynn claimed that he was one of the very few able to saunter into Warner’s office and expect to be treated as an equal. Given Flynn’s dominating and uncompromising personality, the outwardly gregarious Jack must have been pretty formidable himself. According to his son Jack Jr:

  [He was] the most complex and confounding of all the brothers. For years I have tried to find the keys to the labyrinth of my father’s mind, but it remains now what it was throughout most of his lifetime: boxes within boxes, rooms without doors, questions without answers, jokes without points, scenarios based on contradictions, omissions, and deceit. His was the anguished story of a man driven by fear, ambition and the quest for absolute power and control . . .9

  It’s a harsh sketch. As harsh as those caricaturing Flynn as a rapist-paedophile-Nazi. How would two such apparent demons get on in a closed room? Even Hollywood might struggle to script it . . .

  Flynn’s subsequent battles with drugs and legal troubles overshadowed a successful quarter-century of moviemaking and it’s hard not to imagine a degree of sympathy for him from his former employer, which he had served very well. Less than two years later, in 1954 (as Flynn, in Jamaica, steadily lost his looks and highly conditioned physique), Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes produced a feisty, energised, crazy, ravenous, fearless, wild cartoon character, unlike any yet seen: the Tasmanian Devil.

  How and why did this animated marsupial come about? There is no docume
ntation, or official confirmation, from Warner Bros. or anyone else, linking Errol Flynn and Taz. Flynn himself makes no reference to the cartoon character in his autobiography, but just three Taz cartoons had been made when he wrote his book, and he may not even have known of their existence—back then they were a combined eighteen minutes of obscurity.

  In a little under 30 years of cinema cartoon art, a host of major animated animal characters had come to life. Aimed at children (despite plenty of adult wit and sophistication), the Warner Bros. animal stars were familiar and non-threatening: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Sylvester the cat and Tweety the canary, Michigan J. Frog, Speedy Gonzales the Mexican mouse, and Foghorn Leghorn the rooster. The men of Termite Terrace (as the animation building was known) did break out of the domestic/farm mould with their skunk Pepé Le Pew in 1945 and then the ultimate chase-and-outwit duo the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote (prompted by a wonderful personification of the coyote by Mark Twain) in 1949. All three were the creation of legendary animator Chuck Jones, already famed for Bugs Bunny.10

  Jones and his colleagues Friz Freleng, Tex Avery, Bob Clampett and Robert McKimson were responsible for much of the ‘controlled lunacy’ of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies output across those three decades.11 McKimson created the Tasmanian devil (it was not then called Taz) in 1954. Why? North America has plenty of interesting and unusual wild animals. Furthermore, the real Tasmanian devil has no recognisable ‘personality’ and back then there was no antipodean Mark Twain to give it one—unless, of course, Errol Flynn did, through the legacy of his own dynamic, destructive, insatiable ways (three adjectives which closely fit Taz). On the other hand, McKimson had created a marsupial six years earlier, Hippety Hopper the baby kangaroo. Unlike the then-obscure devil, the kangaroo had long and famously symbolised the vast, dry Australian continent.

  McKimson, whose brothers were also animators, worked with Warner Bros. for about 35 years. Jones called him ‘one of the greatest’,12 and credited the series of widely used model sheets McKimson drew in the 1940s for the definitive look of the characters in the Looney Tunes stable. And ‘in his art he was fast, he was fluid, and he was on-the-money’.13

  There are several explanations for the origin of Taz. The most ‘official’ is found in the lavish Warner Bros. Animation Art:

  Taz auteur Bob McKimson recalled that the character was born when writer Sid Marcus was ‘kicking around’ different types of characters. And I said, ‘About the only thing we haven’t used around here is a Tasmanian Devil.’ He didn’t even know what they were. And we just started talking about it and we came up with this character.14

  An alternative explanation, found on a number of Looney Tunes fan websites, is that McKimson and Marcus created the manic creature as a new test for Bugs Bunny.

  Then there is the potential Flynn link:

  Desperate Journey is the first of two films in which Errol Flynn actually plays an Australian, which is what he was (Warner PR spread the word that Flynn was Irish in an effort to tone down a wild history. Then again, nobody has yet to either confirm or deny whether he was in fact the inspiration for their Looney Tunes’ cartoon creation The Tasmanian Devil [aka Taz]). It is amusing to watch Flynn try to effect a mild Aussie inflection in places, but he eventually gives up and sounds like he usually does.15

  A 1998 feature article in the Sunday Tasmanian produced yet another explanation. The opportunity for the article arose from a visit to Tasmania by Chuck McKimson, Robert’s brother, travelling with an exhibition of Warner Bros. artwork:

  Fifty-five years ago in a California art studio two brothers shared morning coffee while solving a crossword. It was a ‘regular day’ for Warner Bros. animators Robert and Chuck McKimson. Each morning Bob and Chuck would play teasing word puzzles. The crossword ritual primed the talented and successful siblings for a creative day inventing quirky adventures for characters such as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck.

  One fateful morning back in 1953, Bob was solving a word-clue referring to a spinning creature indigenous to the Australian island state of Tasmania. Bob and Chuck, like most Americans even today, knew little about the heart-shaped island south of the Great Southern Land. But the McKimson boys did know the clue’s answer—the Tasmanian devil. The question was common in 1950s crosswords. Bob and Chuck had answered it before. ‘Invariably, during that time, the clues would mention Tasmanian devil. They wanted to know what the spinning animal of Tasmania was’, Chuck, now 83, recalled. ‘My brother, Bob, was a crossword addict and every morning at 9 o’clock he’d sit down to do his crossword puzzle . . . the rest of us did the same thing.’

  This particular 1950s morning Bob, Chuck and their fellow Warner Bros. animators were searching for a new character to play with their cool-as-a-cucumber rabbit, Bugs Bunny. ‘The studio manager wanted a new character and we’d done cats and rats, horses and cows, chickens and whatever . . . so Bob says, “Let’s do some research on the Tasmanian devil”,’7 Chuck said. ‘So we got encyclopaedias and did some research.’

  They learned the Tasmanian devil was a ferocious little creature with a legendary growl and a propensity to run around creating mayhem. ‘We looked into how it behaved but there wasn’t in fact too much on the Tasmanian devil in those days but whatever there was we went into it’, he said. The wild creature would be an exciting counterpoint to and playmate for Bugs, and a team of about five Warner Bros. animators began sketching preliminary drawings. ‘All five of us came up with an almost identical looking critter and then my brother, Bob, took those and made the final decision on what it looked like and he made the final drawing’, Chuck said.16

  Related? Despite the original Warner Bros. cartoon character being created in the 1950s when very little was known about the Tasmanian devil in the United States, these images reveal some intriguing similarities between the real and the invented animal. (Taz courtesy of Warner Bros. Taz, Tasmanian Devil and all related characters and elements are trademarks of and © Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

  Bipedal devil at Bonorong Wildlife Park courtesy The Mercury)

  And so the creature was born.17 That first six-minute cartoon probably required about 150 story sketches, followed by up to 10 000 images painted on transparent animation cels, the whole process taking some five weeks—call it 20 working days (coincidentally about the same as the real Tasmanian devil’s gestation period).

  That first experimental cartoon is particularly important, for its own sake and because the ‘whirling dervish’18 very nearly didn’t survive. Here is what happens in Devil May Hare:

  The animals flee from Taz, who will devour anything and everything, past Bugs’s hole, and the wily rabbit tries to bamboozle Taz with a succession of artificial animals he could try to eat. In the end, in desperation, Bugs places a Lonely Hearts ad for a female Tasmanian devil who has matrimony in mind. One flies in immediately from, presumably, Tasmania, and Bugs, in the guise of a rabbi (geddit?), marries the pair, thereby calming Taz’s savage soul. (The quasi-Freudian equation of Taz’s violence with a lack of sex went remarkably unremarked-upon at the time.) As the pair flies off Bugs comments: ‘All the world loves a lover, but in this case we’ll make an exception.’19

  Eddie Selzer, an executive producer at Termite Terrace in 1954, objected to the new cartoon character. He thought it too violent for a junior audience, and distasteful to parents. (Warner Bros., through eldest brother Harry in the early decades, had had a strong guiding social principle, believing that cinema could and should morally educate.) Selzer didn’t appear to understand the animators. Chuck Jones refers to:

  [the] twelve dreadful years of his reign . . . Perhaps his finest hour came at a story session. Four or five of us were laughing over a storyboard when once again Eddie stood vibrating at the doorway, glaring malevolently at us and our pleasure and laughter. His tiny eyes steely as half-thawed oysters, his wattles trembling like those of a deflated sea cow. ‘Just what the hell,’ he demanded, ‘has all this laughter got to do with the making
of animated cartoons?’20

  Executive producers have power. Selzer ordered that no more devil cartoons be made. Yet someone with greater power saved Taz. Re-enter Jack Warner, who wanted the Tasmanian devil back. It was a curious decision, because that lone cartoon had seemingly been destroyed by time, never mind Selzer. Yet three years later Jack ordered his animation team to make more. And with McKimson directing, that happened—between 1957 and

  1964, Bedevilled Rabbit, then Ducking the Devil, then Bill of Hare, then Dr. Devil and Mr. Hare.

  Dissected by Theodore, admired by Errol, punted on by Jack, the devil almost died but was resurrected again. And the rest, as they say, is history . . .

  10

  OWNING THE DEVIL: TASMANIA AND WARNER BROS.

  In 1960s suburban Melbourne feeding his caged devils was a problem for famed anthropologist and photographer Donald Thomson, until he found a fishmonger at the Victoria Market only too willing to give him leftover fish scraps . . . The arrangement worked well until Donald discovered that his fishmonger friend was a leading member of the Australian Communist Party. This no doubt caused some embarrassment to Donald, considering his good relationship with his other friend, Sir Robert Menzies, and Sir Robert’s noted obsession with communist infiltration at that time.

  JOHN TEASDALE, RUPANYUP, VIC.