Friz Freleng

Isadore "Friz" Freleng (August 21, 1906 - May 26, 1995) was an animator, cartoonist, director, and producer best known for his work on the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons from Warner Bros. He introduced and/or developed several of the studio's biggest stars, including Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Tweety Bird, Sylvester the cat, Yosemite Sam (to whom he was said to bear more than a passing resemblance) and Speedy Gonzales. The senior director at Warners' Termite Terrace studio, Freleng is also the most honored of the Warner directors, having won four Academy Awards. After Warners shut down the animation studio in 1963, Freleng and business partner David DePatie founded DePatie-Freleng Enterprises, which produced cartoons (notably The Pink Panther Show), feature film title sequences, and Saturday morning cartoons through the early 1980s.

Biography courtesy of wikipedia.org.
Photograph courtesy of animationarchive.org.

The Pink Panther

Friz Freleng's opening cartoon for The Pink Panther (1963) became an icon of pop culture, appearing in a number of sequels and eventually its own television series. Freleng's cool contemporary design style, the use of spinning letters and unscrambling words, along with the distinctive theme music from Henry Mancini was a complete departure from the cheaply made theatrical cartoons of the time.

“They just flipped when they saw it! When we finally got it onto the screen and they previewed it, the comment from the press was that the titles were better than the picture”.
--- Friz Freleng

Information taken from Motion Graphic Design and Fine Art Animation by Jon Krasner

“The Pink Panther” sequence