Doggone Tired (1949)
A hunting dog is told to rest up before the morning's rabbit hunt, so the rabbit spends all night sabotaging his sleep with an escalating string of pranks, leaving both of them too exhausted to hunt by dawn.
Doggone Tired wrings an entire cartoon out of a single premise — keeping an adversary awake — that Tex Avery treats as a pure engineering problem in escalating gags, and it’s one of only a small handful of MGM cartoons whose lapsed copyright renewal put it in the public domain.
Background
Doggone Tired is a 1949 MGM cartoon directed by Tex Avery, made during his time at the studio’s cartoon unit. Avery’s MGM work was known for fast gags and characters who play directly to the audience. The short follows the pattern of many of his cartoons, built around a single premise and a run of escalating comic sequences. Its copyright was not renewed, which put it in the public domain. The MGM cartoon studio was among the theatrical animation units that closed in the 1950s.
What to watch for
The premise is simple: a hunting dog is told to rest, and the rabbit sets out to keep him awake. Watch how Avery builds escalating pranks, each more elaborate than the last. The gags depend on timing, and the sleeplessness of both characters becomes its own visual joke by the end. Avery’s characteristic loud reactions and quick cuts appear in the staging. The cartoon runs only about eight minutes, and its economy reflects Avery’s approach to the short as a pure engine of gags, with every sequence working toward the same running joke.
