The Dover Boys

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The Dover Boys at Pimento University or The Rivals of Roquefort Hall (better known as simply The Dover Boys) is a 1942 Merrie Melodies cartoon produced by Leon Schlesinger Productions and directed by Chuck Jones. It was released by Warner Bros. on 19 September 1942. The cartoon is a parody of the Rover Boys, a popular juvenile fiction book series of the early 20th century.

This cartoon is notable for being one of the earliest examples of stylized animation, a technique which used shape-heavy designs with minimal movement, as opposed to the type of animation done at that time by the Walt Disney studio.

Jones has said that Schlesinger and the Warner Bros. studio executives were less than pleased when they screened The Dover Boys, and went through the process of attempting to fire him. A replacement for Jones could not be easily found, so he was kept aboard.

Stylized animation would later be made famous by the artists at startup animation studio UPA, for which Jones moonlighted to direct the political film Hell-Bent for Re-Election in 1944.

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