stuttering pig. Beans and his friends made their first appearances on I Haven't Got a Hat, a Merrie Melodies animated short directed by Freleng. The Merrie Melodies series lacked continuing characters by this point. But the film served as a showcase for the new characters, that were being groomed to replace Buddy as the stars of the Looney Tunes series. Schlesinger hoped that some of them would catch on with audiences and become bankable stars, and when the characters became popular with audiences, Buddy was discontinued and Beans became the star of Looney Tunes. Beans' first "crack at stardom" was his first solo Looney Tunes film, A Cartoonist's Nightmare. The film was directed by Jack King, who would go on to direct a total of eight animated shorts featuring Beans before returning to Disney in 1936. Michael Barrier describes Beans under King's direction as resembling the Mickey Mouse version of the early 1930s. Their designs were certainly similar, with both characters having a white face and black body. But in characterization Beans was a pint-sized hero, resembling the plucky, boyish, and heroic Mickey featured in The Klondike Kid (1932) and The Mail Pilot (1933). Beans was voiced by Billy Bletcher and Tommy Bond. Also in 1935, the studio gained a third full-time director, working in addition to Freleng and King. He was Tex Avery, a former inker for the short-lived Winkler Studio and the Universal Studio Cartoons. Avery had started working as an inker in 1928 and was promoted to an animator by 1930. While at Universal, he used to work under director Bill Nolan. Nolan used to delegate work to Avery, and Avery reportedly was the uncredited de facto director for a couple of films credited to Nolan. Avery had lost his job in Universal in April 1935, and was hired by Schlesinger a few months later. According to a later interview with Avery, Avery had falsely claimed that he was an experienced director when applying for the job: "'Hey, I'm a director.' Hell! I was no more a director than nothing, but with my loud mouth, I talked him [Schlesinger] into it." Avery's production unit received its own building within the studio lot. Avery got exclusive use of four animators for his unit: Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Sid Sutherland, and Virgil Ross. The first animated short film produced by this unit was Gold Diggers of '49 (1935), the