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 ma ...