An important development of the slapstick tradition took place in American animation from 1937 to 1943. During this period of time, Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies—the theatrical animated cartoons produced by the studio of Leon Schlesinger and distributed by Warner Brothers—started to show an innovative approach to the re-interpretation of comic routines and to the construction of complex soundtracks rich in sounds of the slap-of-thestick. On the one hand, taking advantage of the possibilities of the animation medium to transgress the physical laws of time and space, the artists from Termite Terrace (as animator Tex Avery famously dubbed Schlesinger’s studio) rendered conventional comic routines in ways that were impossible to achieve on the stage or in live-action film. The mockery and abuse of the body develops into absurd squashes and stretches, giant impacts or impossible collisions; the grotesque movement turns into long falls from the sky, back flips without gravity, or impossible acrobatics. On the other hand, the orchestration of a rich variety of sounds of the slap-of-the-stick with a continuous medley of musical genres played by a symphonic orchestra and with an exaggerated comic dialogue, gives rise to a complex soundtrack in which all the elements are tightly synchronized to the beat and to the image. The new slapstick approach did not disappear after 1943; it was matured, stylized, and became the trademark of Warner Bros. animation for the next twenty years.