Bob Clampett - Legacy

Legacy

Since 1984, the Bob Clampett Humanitarian Award is given each year at the Eisner Awards. Clampett's Tin Pan Alley Cats (1943) was chosen by the Library of Congress as a "prime example of the music and mores of our times" and a print was buried in a time capsule in Washington, D.C. so future generations might see it. Porky in Wackyland (1938) was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2000, deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

John Kricfalusi, best known as the creator of The Ren & Stimpy Show, got to know Clampett in his later years and has reflected on those times as inspirational. Kricfalusi calls Clampett his favorite cartoon director and calls The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (1946) his favorite cartoon: "I saw this thing and it completely changed my life, I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever seen, and I still think it is." Animation historian Leonard Maltin has called Clampett's cartoons "unmistakable." Milton Gray believes that Schlesinger put Clampett in charge of the black and white cartoon division in order to save it, and many historians have singled out a scene in Porky's Duck Hunt in which Daffy exits as a defining Clampett moment. Maltin called it "a level of wackiness few moviegoers had ever seen." Historian Charles Solomon noted a rubbery, flexible animation quality visible in all Clampett's shorts, and Maltin noted an "energetic, comic anarchy." Clampett's cartoons were not as well known in the latter half of the 20th century because television syndicators only had the rights to the post-1948 Warner cartoons, however, his creations have increased in notoriety and acclaim in recent decades.