I confess that until researching this post, I was unfamiliar with Tex Avery’s MGM cartoons. Like many people, I know and love the Warner Brothers stuff by Avery, Fritz Freling, and Chuck Jones — Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird, Daffy Duck, and that lot. But I’ve learned that in 1941, Avery left Warner’s for MGM, where his greatest creation was the phlegmatic basset hound Droopy.

Northwest Hounded Police (1946) is like a Road Runner cartoon not so much on steroids as mescaline. A prisoner up in the Yukon, Wolf, escapes and is pursued by a Mountie, Droopy. And I mean pursued. Wolf ventures to the highest mountain peak and the depths of the ocean, and as soon as he arrives, who should he see but the Droop-ster. Wolf does a double and usually a triple take, his eyes bulge out of his head by twenty feet or so, and he hightails it out of there at warp speed.

Both Warner’s and MGM cartoons were larded with self-conscious fourth-wall breaking, and indeed, such a joke was the reason for Avery’s leaving Warner’s. According to Wikipedia, in Avery’s original version of The Hunting Hare (1941)

Bugs and the hunting dog were to fall off a cliff three times, milking the gag to its comic extreme. According to a DVD commentary for the cartoon, the historian and animator Greg Ford explained that the problem [producer Leon] Schlesinger had with the ending was that, just before falling off the third time, Bugs and the dog were to turn to the screen, with Bugs saying “Hold on to your hats, folks, here we go again!”, a punchline to a potentially risqué joke of the day.

In the first scene in his first movie, Dumb-Hounded (1943), Droopy looks at the audience and says, “Hello, all you happy people … you know what? I’m the hero.”

Northwest Hounded Police offers a new level of meta, as Wolf literally runs out of the frame of the film and takes a seat in a movie theater, only to see …

If you’re interested in seven and a half minutes of fun, here’s the whole movie.