This coming Tuesday, there's a kind of Chuck Jones Celebration on Turner Classic Movies. They'll be running a new documentary, Chuck Jones: Memories of Childhood, created by John Canemaker and Peggy Stern. This film, which I haven't seen yet, is built around one of the last filmed interviews with Jones and it includes clips from cartoons he directed and new animation based on drawings he made during the conversation.
They'll also be running a mess of short cartoons directed by Mr. Jones and the not-often-seen feature he did in 1969, The Phantom Tollbooth. The first time I met Chuck was shortly after that film had been released and he was explaining to a small group of his admirers why it had disappeared suddenly from theaters…so suddenly, in fact, that few of us had the chance to see it then. I can't quote the whole explanation now but it was a long narrative about high-level takeovers at MGM and of one regime promising theaters a slate of "kids' movies" for matinees and how by the time the film was done, there was new management reneging on that commitment. It sounded like he was blaming "the suits" for its failure but then he added, with a Bugs Bunny twinkle of candor, "…and I guess the film I made just wasn't good enough to overcome all that."
It's not Jones at his best or even his near-best but C-grade Jones is still better than a lot of folks operating at the tops of their games…and it's also, like I said, not a film you get to see often. A DVD release is said to be on the horizon but I think they've been saying that for a while.
TCM is also, of course, showing some of the best Jones work, including (inevitably) What's Opera, Doc?, One Froggy Evening and Duck Amuck. In fact, the full schedule is here. I wouldn't count on the short cartoons starting exactly when they say they're going to start.