The Importance of Being Ernest: A Title Design Retrospective

Lightning strikes. The organ clangs. A long-faced, ball-capped man rises into the frame, his eyes bulging and his head trembling in fright. For the next two minutes and 20 seconds, this man’s impossibly elastic face – framed in close-ups as intimate as The Passion of Joan of Arc – will embody a spectrum of emotions: arrogance, befuddlement, trepidation, distaste, and deep, primal fear. In Sunset Boulevard, the faded silent queen Norma Desmond says, “We didn’t need dialogue – we had faces then!” If only she had lived to see Jim Varney.

These are the opening titles from Ernest Scared Stupid (1991), and Varney is playing his signature character, Ernest P. Worrell. Ernest emerged in 1980 in a series of TV commercials from the Nashville-based advertising agency Carden and Cherry, and directed by the company’s executive vice-president, John R. Cherry III. The ads stuck to a dependable formula: Ernest, a know-it-all dumbbell in a denim vest, aggressively pitches goods and services to his long-suffering neighbour “Vern.” Dairy products, local newscasts, orange juice, Coca Cola, Mello Yello, Elvira’s Movie Macabre… there was nothing for which Ernest could not muster enthusiasm. (Though the commercials became nationally popular, Ernest’s endorsements meant little to Vern, who would violently shut his window on the neighbour’s hands).

Ernest took on a life of his own, spawning an unlikely franchise that would encompass 10 feature films (all but one directed by Cherry), a children’s television show, a TV special, numerous short films, and hundreds upon hundreds more commercials until Varney’s death in 1999. In the popular imagination, the Ernest films are lowbrow entertainments for children. The popular imagination is not wrong, but even hard-nosed adults must respect the relentless energy of Jim Varney, who rivalled James Brown as the hardest-working man in show business.

And if you’re anything like this adult, you’ve probably regularly dropped by YouTube to revisit some of the franchise’s most iconic sequences: their opening titles. These scenes distill the Ernest saga down to its essence. Four sequences in particular stand out: Ernest Goes to Jail (1990), which set Varney’s stark silhouette – running from guards, dragging a ball-and-chain, grasping the bars of his cell – against brightly-coloured backdrops; Ernest Scared Stupid (1991), which alternated Varney with clips from vintage horror movies; Ernest Rides Again (1993), which imposed Ernest’s face on a series of historical engravings, set against a pompous song about his bravery and valour (“Even as a lad he was sensitive and caring / As cunning as a fox and as slippery as a herring”); and Hey Vern, It’s Ernest! (1988), the short-lived TV show whose credits are a cross between Terry Gilliam and Pee-wee’s Playhouse.

Series mastermind John R. Cherry III was both a professional illustrator and an adman with visual flair and financial resourcefulness. In an interview with Art of the Title, he said, "None of these had big budgets. They were $3,000 or $5,000. So we had to come up with ways for it to be interesting." When asked about his aesthetic strategy, he said, "My guiding light was: as weird as you can get it." 

All four sequences were designed by BARBARA LASZEWSKI GARNER, former assistant art director at Carden and Cherry and animation designer for the Ernest films and TV show. Art of the Title spoke to Garner in 2013 about her work on Ernest Scared Stupid, and in this follow-up interview we explore the full range of her work for the Ernest P. Worrell universe.

What was your path from Carden and Cherry to the Ernest movies?

Barbara: I was a graphic designer, and I really wanted to do motion graphics, because I took some animation classes in art school. I fell into…

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