MGM Studio - Tex Avery and Tom & Jerry Animation Drawings & Book Illustration Art

Most people are probably unaware that drawings for the great MGM short cartoons from the 1940s, when that studio absolutely dominated the academy awards for animated shorts, are much rarer than are Disney drawings. The reason is simple. In the early 1970s, due to changes in federal tax legislation with respect to the taxation of inventories, including studio holdings of moldering animation art, both MGM and Warner Brothers sent their archives of animation drawings to the dump. The story goes that a security guard filled up his car with as many scenes of MGM drawings as would fit, and those drawings are, for the most part, the only MGM animation that surives today for many of the greatest Tom and Jerry and Tex Avery cartoons from the 40s. Fortunately, and probably by pure luck, the savior of this artwork grabbed scenes of drawings from a few of the very best cartoons, e.g., Northwest Hounded Police and Mouse Cleaning, so we are not left only with drawings from less memorable shorts. To my knowledge, less than 200 scenes of MGM drawings were salvaged; the rest are landfill. Of those 200, there were a lot of scenes from Slap Happy Lion, Jerkey Turkey, and Screwball Squirrel. cartoons which are not that well known by the general public. And most of the other extant scenes did not contain very many great drawings per scene. I was fortunate to know almost all of the right people (those who first bought up the MGM drawings after they were sold for very little money to a cinema book store), and I was even luckier that these kind people let me choose my MGM drawings from the complete scenes, before they were broken up and spread all over the world. As a result, I honestly believe that, drawing for drawing, my MGM collection is of higher quality than almost any of my other collections of comic related art.