As you may know, blogs everywhere are participating in a great Friz Freleng Blog-a-Thon today, in honor of the great man's 100th (maybe) birthday. So here's a Friz tribute I wrote a long, long time ago–it appared in Animato #18, which cover-featured Jerry Beck's Friz interview, back in 1989. (Amazing in retrospect to think that back then, not only was Friz still with us, but I wrote of his career as a Warner Bros. director in the present tense.)

If I was going to write about Freleng today, I might come to different conclusions, or discuss them more artfully–or maybe not–but I decided to present my essay exactly as I wrote it back in the 20th century. In fact, after initially planning to OCR it into ASCII text, I decided I liked the scanned image–Times Roman type, crummy newsprint, and all (including at least one typo). It reminds me of the fun we had desktop-publishing Animato, back in the era when communicating with animation fandom required printing up magazines and begging comic-book distributors to take them so they could wind up in retail stores.

So here's to you, Friz: