After dropping out of high school in 1931, he joined the team at Harman-Ising Productions and began working on the studio's newest short subjects, Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies.

He left Warner Bros. Cartoons in 1946 and turned his attention to television, creating the puppet show Time for Beany in 1949.

His Warner cartoons have seen renewed praise in decades since for their surrealistic qualities, energetic and outrageous animation, and irreverent, wordplay-laden humor.

[1][2] His father was born in Nenagh, County Tipperary, Ireland in 1882, and immigrated to the United States with his parents at age two in 1884.

[5] From the beginning, he was intrigued with and influenced by Douglas Fairbanks, Lon Chaney, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, and began making film short-subjects in his garage when he was 12.

Clampett also recalled watching his father play handball at the Los Angeles Athletic Club with another of the great silent comedians, Harold Lloyd.

In high school, Clampett drew a full-page comic about the nocturnal adventures of a cat, later published in color in a Sunday edition of the Los Angeles Times.

King Features allowed him to work in their Los Angeles art department on Saturdays and vacations during high school.

King Features occasionally printed his cartoons for encouragement, and paid his way through Otis Art Institute, where he learned to paint in oils and to sculpt.

Around the same time, Schlesinger announced a studio-wide contest, with a money prize to whichever member of the staff turned in the best original story.

They were moved to a ramshackle building used by gardeners and WB custodial staff for storage of cleaning supplies, solvents, brooms, lawnmowers and other implements.

[5] They were soon joined by animators Chuck Jones, Virgil Ross and Sid Sutherland, and worked virtually without interference on their new, groundbreaking style of humor for the next year.

This led to what was essentially a co-directing stint with fellow animator Chuck Jones for the financially ailing Ub Iwerks, whom Schlesinger subcontracted to produce several Porky Pig shorts.

When McCabe joined the armed forces, Frank Tashlin rejoined Schlesinger as director, and that unit was eventually turned over to Robert McKimson.

Milton Gray notes that from The Hep Cat (1942) on, the cartoons become even more wild as Clampett's experimentation reached a peak.

His cartoons grew increasingly violent, irreverent, and surreal, not beholden to even the faintest hint of real-world physics, and his characters have been argued to be easily the most rubbery and wacky of all the Warner directors'.

Clampett was heavily influenced by the Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, as is most visible in Porky in Wackyland (1938), wherein the entire short takes place within a Dalí-esque landscape complete with melting objects and abstracted forms.

Warner Bros. had recently bought the rights to the entire Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies studio from Schlesinger and, while his cartoons of 1946 are today considered on the cutting edge of the art for that period, at the time, Clampett was ready to seek new challenges.

[11] That same year, Republic Pictures incorporated animation (by Walter Lantz) into its Gene Autry feature film Sioux City Sue.

The show, featuring the talents of voice artists Stan Freberg and Daws Butler, would earn Clampett three Emmys.

[13] In 1952, he created the Thunderbolt the Wondercolt television series and the 3D prologue to Bwana Devil featuring Beany and Cecil.

He also created an animated version of the puppet show called Beany and Cecil, whose 26 half-hour episodes were first broadcast on ABC in 1962 and were rerun on the network for five years.

"[24] Beginning with a magazine article in 1946, shortly after he left the studio, Clampett repeatedly referred to himself as "the creator" of Bugs Bunny, often adding the side-note that he used Clark Gable's carrot-eating scene in It Happened One Night as inspiration for his "creation".

Some argue that, based on a viewing of the early Bugs cartoons of the late 1930s and early 1940s, the character was not "created" by one director, but evolved in personality, voice, and design over several years through the collective efforts of Clampett, Avery, Jones, Freleng, McKimson, Mel Blanc, Cal Dalton, Ben Hardaway and Bob Givens.

In Bugs Bunny: Superstar, Clampett also takes credit for drawing the model sheet for the first Porky Pig cartoon, I Haven't Got a Hat (1935), even though it was actually drawn by Friz Freleng.

Gray, a personal friend of Clampett, calls the controversy "a deliberate and vicious smear campaign by one of Bob's rivals in the cartoon business".

[citation needed] Clampett died of a heart attack on May 2, 1984, in Detroit, Michigan, six days before his 71st birthday,[28] while touring the country to promote the home video release of Beany & Cecil cartoons.

Recipients of the award include June Foray, Jack Kirby, Sergio Aragonés, Patrick McDonnell, Maggie Thompson, Ray Bradbury and Mark Evanier.

[7] Porky in Wackyland (1938) was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2000, deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.

"[32] Animator John Kricfalusi, best known for being the creator of Nickelodeon's The Ren & Stimpy Show, got to know Clampett in his later years and has reflected on those times as inspirational.