Chuck Jones grew up drawing on towering stacks of embossed stationery left over from his father’s failed businesses, so when an art school instructor warned that every artist must produce 100,000 bad drawings first, Jones calculated he had already passed 200,000. This episode traces his path from paying tuition as a janitor and washing paint off celluloid at Ub Iwerks’ studio to the ramshackle Termite Terrace at Leon Schlesinger Productions, where he and colleagues like Tex Avery and Bob Clampett built a laboratory of slapstick anarchy.

The conversation covers his early, sluggish attempts to imitate Disney with Sniffles, the 1942 breakthrough of The Dover Boys and the smear technique, the studio’s attempt to fire him that was thwarted by wartime labor shortages, and his role in the animators’ strike. It follows the Private Snafu cartoons made with Dr. Seuss, the golden age of Wile E. Coyote, Marvin the Martian and Pepe Le Pew, his 1962 firing over Gay Purr-ee, and the second act at MGM that yielded The Dot and the Line and How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

• What cell washing and in-betweening taught Jones about the anatomy of motion
• Why the 14-frame pause before the Coyote falls is where the comedy actually lives
• How Jones removed racially insensitive caricatures when he took over Tom and Jerry
• The unpublished 1975 letter challenging Bob Clampett’s claims of sole credit
• Why Robin Williams called him the Orson Welles of animation at the 1996 honorary Oscar ceremony