cartoons, usually throwaway bits. He also occasionally filled in for Bill Thompson as Droopy. Personal life and death Two days after being fired from Universal in Spring 1935, Avery married his girlfriend, Patricia. She was also employed at Universal Studios as an inker. The newlyweds spent a long honeymoon in Oregon, but had to return to Los Angeles when they ran out of money. On Tuesday, August 26, 1980, Avery died of lung cancer at St. Joseph's Hospital in Burbank, California at the age of 72. At the time of his death, he was developing a character named "Cave Mouse" for a new Flintstones series. His last words according to Chuck Jones, when watching a baseball game with another animator, were "I don’t know where animators go when they die, but I guess there must be a lot of them. They could probably use a good director though." He is buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood Hills. Influence and legacy Avery's influence can be seen in modern cartoons such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Ren & Stimpy Show, Animaniacs, The Mask, and SpongeBob SquarePants. An Avery-esque cowboy character bore his name in the otherwise unrelated series The Wacky World of Tex Avery. Avery's work has been featured on shows such as The Tex Avery Show and Cartoon Alley. In the mid-1990s, Dark Horse Comics released a trio of three-issue miniseries that were openly labelled tributes to Avery's MGM cartoons, Wolf & Red, Droopy, and Screwy Squirrel, in which other characters make appearances in the comics such as George and Junior, Spike, and the one-shot characters. Tex Avery, unlike most Warner Bros. directors, kept many original title frames of his cartoons; several were otherwise lost due to Blue Ribbon Reissues. Rare prints and art containing original titles and unedited animation from Avery's MGM and Warner Bros. cartoons are now usually sold on eBay or in the collections of animators and cartoon enthusiasts. In 2008, France issued three postage stamps honoring Tex Avery for his 100th birthday, depicting Droopy, the redheaded showgirl, and the wolf. All of his MGM shorts were released in a North American MGM/UA laserdisc set called The Compleat Tex Avery. While two cartoons in the set were edited versions---the blackface gags in Droopy's Good Deed and Garden Gopher---others, including the controversial Uncle Tom's Cabaña and Half-Pint Pygmy were included intact (although they were removed from the