Qua 142
Bugs Bunny's
Winnipeg Connection
Bugs Bunny has had more creators than Liz Taylor has had husbands. Ten
years ago Jim Korkus explained it this way: "In Funnyworld, Bob Clampett tells how he created
Bugs Bunny But in [the original] Take One, volume 2, number 9, Tex Avery tells how he created
Bugs...in the TV Times (from the Los Angeles Times) Chuck Jones says he created Bugs...in that same year
there was an ad for a cartooning course, and the originator of the course, Bugs Hardaway, was
identified as the creator of Bugs Bunny. But in Cecil Smith's television column, again in the [L.A.]
Times, Fritz Freleng was identified as the creator of Bugs Bunny."

For some reason, Korkus left out Bob Givens and Leon Schlesinger, the laissez-faire
studio head of animation at Warner Bros., who was more than happy to take credit
for an employee's work. He omitted Mel Blanc too, even though Mel claimed that
he did more than just supply the voice for Bugs. At the risk of fuzzing the matter
even further, I'd like to add another name to the list: Charlie Thorson. In the preface
to his children's book Keeko, Thorson is called the creator of "that brash creature
Bugs Bunny."
Never heard of him? That's not at all surprising. Charlie Thorson worked for all
the big animation factories during the golden age of animation, but he moved
around a lot, never staying at one studio long enough to establish a profile. His
tenure at Schlesinger's studio, for instance, lasted less than a year. In
addition, Thorson was not an animator or an animation director. He was a
character designer, and this part of the animation business and his
contribution to it has never been adequately examined.
Charlie Thorson was 10 years older than Walt Disney and twice the age of most
animators when he left Winnipeg in late 1934 to try his hand at animation. Before this
he had been an illustrator for Eaton's mail-order catalogues. Back then the entire
catalogue was meticulously hand-drawn—everything from clothes to jewellery to saddles
to houses. After almost 20 years of seeing his best work consigned to Prairie outhouses,
Thorson packed his portfolio and headed for Los Angeles. Walt Disney gave him a job on the
spot. At first Thorson was just another cog in the Disney machinery that was gearing up for
feature animation. But he was an irrepressible storyteller with a flair for drawing cute, cuddly
animals in precise, attractive poses. As Disney's operation grew more specialized, Thorson
became more and more responsible for drawing the model sheets that animators and their
assistants would refer to for the precise dimensions and key poses of the characters
in every movie. Thorson designed the characters and did the model sheets for
some solid Disney classics: The Old Mill, Wynken, Blyken and Nod, Country
Cousin and Toby Tortoise Returns. Two shorts were among his all-time favourite
works—Elmer Elephant and Little Hiawatha. On both movies he did more than
30

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1887

 BY GENE WALZ

All sketches courtesy of Dr. Stephen Thorson

the character designs; he contributed
storyboards and story suggestions. In fact, Walt
Kelly, who was a friend of Thorson's from their
days together at Disney, claimed that Little Hiawatha
was entirely Thorson's doing.
When Kelly quit animation and turned to newspaper
comic—stripping, he was so impressed with the tutoring Thorson
had given him that he created a special character in his famous Pogo
comic strip. The little raccoon, or "rackety—coon," is a Thorson—style
creature according to Kelly. If you look at the menagerie of forest animals
in Little Hiawatha and Snow White, you can easily see where the raccoon
came from.
Around Winnipeg, however, Thorson is not known for his adorable
animals, if he is known at all. He is a local legend among the Icelandic
community (the largest collection of Icelanders outside of Iceland) as
the man responsible for making Snow White an Icelander. It seems
that Thorson let it be known that his character designs for Snow
White were based on his romanticized sketches of a Winnipeg
waitress who spurned his amorous attentions. The
similarities between the Icelandic girl and the Disney
character with the suspiciously Icelandic (or
Canadian) moniker were uncanny. So
many artists contributed to the design of
the character, however, that it is
impossible to state for certain that
Snow White was Charlie Thorson's
personal dream vision.
By the time Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
was released in 1938, Thorson had battled with
Disney and quit his job there. Although his role in
story conferences are acknowledged in books on the
film, Thorson's name is conspicuously absent from the
credits. It drove him to fits of spluttering rage for the rest of
his life, but oddly ensured that his contribution to animation
would not go unrecorded. Because of Disney, Thorson kept a
private archive of his favourite creations.

 ter his stint with Disney Studios, Thorson moved
to Harmon-Ising Studio and then quickly switched to MGM
when offered a better position at an increase in salary. He was
put in charge of redesigning the characters from comic strips.
So when Leon Schlesinger decided to increase Warner's
output of short animated movies, he found it easy to woo
Thorson away from MGM by hiring him as his chief character
designer. Schlesinger had just lost a couple of his veteran
animators and likely hired the character designer to bring
along two of his company's neophytes—Chuck Jones and
Ben "Bugs" Hardaway.
Thorson had a profound affect on the young Chuck Jones,
who spent his fledgling years imitating Disney-style
animation. Jones's early films are anchored by cute Thorsondesigned creatures such as Sniffles the adenoidal mouse, Inki
the politically incorrect African boy, his inscrutable mynah
bird antagonist, and the curious puppy. Bugs Hardaway relied
less slavishly on Thorson's Disney-honed expertise, but his
debt to Thorson is still unmistakable.

Thorson's character drawings for Stone Age, above,
and the revamped Popeye, below.
At the height of his career Thorson moved easily from one major studio to
another and was paid handsomely for his work.

When Porky's Duck Hunt became a hit in 1937, thus beginning
the long career of Daffy Duck, the studio's response was
predictable: take the same plot and main character and invent
a new antagonist. The rabbit that appeared in the
pre-Thorson Porky's Hare Hunt was as physically nondescript
as a character could possibly be, but the idea was a good one.
When Hardaway sought to revive it, Tedd Pierce, head of
Schlesinger's story department, approached Charlie Thorson
for a new design. Thorson could have easily dusted off a
familiar character from his Disney days, Max Hare, whom he
had designed for Toby Tortoise Returns. Drawings in his
portfolio indicate that he considered it. But he settled on a
goofier, more bottom-heavy version. He completed the model
sheet and left it on Bugs Hardaway's empty desk. To ensure
that there was no mistaking his efforts, he printed "Bugs
bunny" on the bottom of the sheet with typical Thorson-style
disregard for the niceties of apostrophe usage. Thus the
bunny not only got a new look but a name. A year later Tex
Avery asked Bob Givens to redesign the bunny again. Givens
went back to Thorson's design of Max Hare and came up with
the lankier, more erect version of Bugs that is closer to the
Bugs we all love today.
Thorson designed one other world-famous character for
Schlesinger's studio, Elmer Fudd, basing the image on the
precocious infants he had drawn for Disney and perhaps
appropriating the name from one of his favourite Disney
creatures. The footloose Charlie Thorson stayed less than a
year at Warner's before he was lured to a similar position in
Miami at the studio built there by Max and Dave Fleischer.
He was brough in specifically to punch up the design of the
Fleischers' first feature, Gulliver's Travels. His contribution is
the distinctive Twinkletoes character, but Thorson was so
dissatisfied with his rushed, last-minute work that he refused
to allow his name to be cited in that film's credits. It was his
last chance for movie recognition.
Thorson's work at Fleischer studios marked the peak of his
output. He redesigned the children's book characters Raggedy
Ann and Andy for the screen; he also redesigned all of the
Popeye characters to make them more amenable to the new

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 assembly-line production of animation (one of the few things
for which he can be faulted). Most importantly, he designed
over 100 whimsical, wonderful creatures for the ill-fated
Stone Age series, an obvious prototype for Hanna-Barbera's
Flintstones. When that black-and-white, Disney-style series
failed and Fleischer Studios was taken over by Paramount,
Charlie Thorson moved on to Terrytoons, and then
Columbia/Screen Gems and finally George Pal Studios. By
then he was interested in other things and just didn't have
the free hand and encouragement he previously enjoyed.
After the Second World War, Charlie Thorson returned to
Winnipeg to pursue his new interest in children's book
design. For this Canada and Canadians will be forever in his
debt. Two of Canada's most familiar characters were created
by Thorson during this period. In 1947, he designed a cuddly,
Disney-style bear with an unruly shock of orange hair. He
gave the bear the same affectionate name he used for his own
son—Punkinhead. The bear made his debut as Santa's
sidekick at the Eaton's Christmas parade in Toronto. The
following Christmas, Eaton's distributed a small, free
children's storybook called Punkinhead, the Sad Little Bear,
illustrated by Thorson. Although (or perhaps because) it was
a virtual ripoff of the Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer story
and was used for the same bluntly commercial purposes, it
proved immensely popular. For the next 10 years Eaton's
produced a new Punkinhead booklet every Christmas.
Thorson contributed precise, beguiling illustrations and major
story ideas for the first three booklets. Then he had a boozy
falling out with an Eaton's executive, and the series declined
in quality and appeal.

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Little Hiawatha, for Disney, above,
Elmer the Safety Elephant, below.
Elmer was Thorson's lasting gift to Canadian children
for a generation of road safety.

own on his luck, Charlie Thorson volunteered his
es to help the Toronto police department with its

formerly successful but faltering traffice-safety program.
Discarding their full-sized silhouette of a real elephant,
Thorson reached back to his Disney days and created Elmer
the Safety Elephant. The winsome pachyderm was
unmistakably a copyright infringement but Walt Disney
himself gave it his blessing, surely one of the few times this
has happened.
Thorson spent his declining years in advertising. His
distinctive creatures were featured on billboards, in
magazines, newspapers and brochures across the continent.
His final creative burst came at the Winnipeg studios of
Phillips-Gutkin and Associates (PGA) in 1956. Although he
was past official retirement age, Thorson spent a few
months quietly providing fuzzy bunnies and other cartoon
creations for PGA's nationwide animated television
commercials. He then moved to Vancouver to be near his
son. He died there in 1967.
Charlie Thorson created hundreds of distinctive characters,
many of which still have a firm place in the world's
imagination. And he designed many hundreds of model
sheets to help his co-workers bring these characters to life
through animation. At the height of his career he moved
easily from one major studio to another and was paid

handsomely for his work. Thorson was modest about his
accomplishments, preferring to see himself as one part of a
creative team. Because he died before the serious study of the
golden age of animation began, Thorson's artistry has been
overlooked. It is only now that his role in the creation of Bugs
and Punkinhead and the two Elmers—and who knows what
else—is starting to be acknowledged. ■
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