Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

Brilliant and touching

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

. . . he may have realized that his text would require a few footnotes after five or six centuries, school funding cutbacks being what they were and all. But that really doesn't excuse the Warner Brothers for producing so many "Merrie Melodies" and "Loonie Tunes" that are virtually incomprehensible without explanatory pop-up bubbles five or six DECADES later. The Merrie Melodie entitled THUGS WITH DIRTY MUGS is a case in point. The "Killer Diller" character bogs down the flow of this crime story to do an impersonation of someone named "Fred Allen." No matter how funny this may have been when there were people alive for whom Mr. Allen was a living memory, how did the Brothers not realize that this would not stand up to the test of time, UNLESS folks of the future were as diligent as Shakespeare's groupies in constantly updating the increasingly arcane topical references embedded for little reason into otherwise simple animated shorts? Just goes to show what happens when you try to create "art" to shill your sheet music library!

Tex Avery's 'Thugs With Dirty Mugs' is one of the director's great classics. Though less discussed than many of Avery's pictures, 'Thugs With Dirty Mugs' is a masterclass in parody and the visual gag. In fact, there are so many extraordinarily inventive and original sight gags on offer here that you can't quite believe Avery packs them all into seven minutes. The main concept of the cartoon is a parody of all those great Warner Bros. crime movies of the time (the main villain is a caricature of Edward G. Robinson) and this is observed wonderfully but instead of focusing on plot, 'Thugs With Dirty Mugs' quickly establishes itself as a series of spot gags with a loose cops and robbers throughline. Spot gag cartoons can sometimes be slow moving or hit and miss but 'Thugs With Dirty Mugs' has a ridiculously high hit rate and moves at such a lick that the few misses barely register. I don't want to spoil any of the gags by describing them here but 'Thugs With Dirty Mugs' features one of the best and silliest sight gags in history. Just listen out for the phrase "Take that you rat" and you'll see what I mean. One of the all-out funniest shorts in the entire Warner library, 'Thugs With Dirty Mugs' is a classic which everyone should make the effort to see.

I don't think Tex Avery directed a bad cartoon. While this one isn't one of my absolute favorites, it's still a very good cartoon (which basically makes it a cartoon that a lot of directors would be pleased to have considered as one of their best). I want to discuss some of the specific details here, so here there be spoilers: The title strikes me as a play on the movie title Angels With Dirty Faces, the main caricature is one of Edward G. Robinson and the short is a very good send-up of the gangster movies that were popular in the 1930s. But it's clearly a Tex Avery short first and foremost. When a police officer is shown in silhouette appearing to strike someone and saying, "Take that you rat! And that! And that!" and the picture becomes clear that he's actually throwing cheese to a rat sitting on a stool, that's an Avery moment. Then the officer says, "That's all you get-I need the rest for my lunch!" and the rat begins to throw a tantrum and cry! This short is full of those types of gags, from beginning to end, though they don't quite come quite as fast and furious as they would later on in his career. Call it a formative Avery-he was beginning to find his style a bit more around this time. Throughout the cartoon, he takes various conventions of film in general and the gangster genre in particular and turns them on their ear. Newspaper headlines spin in with headlines which are usually funny while ostensibly advancing the "plot", a movie theater patron who came in in the middle of the picture tries to get up and leave, only to be ordered back to his seat by "Killer" and then informs the police what the "Killer" has planned because he's already seen the ending! The final newspaper headline and closing gags are priceless! This short is available on the Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Vol. 3 and is well worth getting. Recommended.

Excellent spoof of the gangster genre of its day! Very fast-paced and funny -- perhaps a bit slower in pace than, say, the "gasping-for-air-by-the-end" pace of Bob Clampett, but that in and of itself is a pace matched by few, with the possible exception of Frank Tashlin. On the whole, there are plenty of Avery trademarks and gags throughout, from the great split-screen-gag to the great audience member silhouette moments, where an apparent audience member directly addresses characters in the film. Avery's claim to fame, of course, was that he was responsible for "breaking the fourth wall," acknowledging the presence of the audience and, in many cases, trying to incorporate the audience within the actual plot via various signs and, of course, the silhouettes. I'd love to see some of these silhouette scenes on a big screen someday, as they look a bit odd on an enclosed TV screen now where proportions are concerned, but it's still brilliant.Interestingly enough, Avery's "Gonna pin it on ya, see? Pin it on ya!"-gag resurfaces some seven years later in Clampett's "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery" -- proof positive that, long after Tex Avery was gone from the Warner Brothers studio, making the raucous MGM-cartoons he is now more famous for, he was hardly forgotten by his Warner pupils.Very worth checking out, if one is able.