
A significant leaning toward Looney stories from Warner Brothers today, with only two titles in our discussion coming from the ranks of other studios. We’ll be doing some backtracking to cover several I inadvertently bypassed in chronological sequence, then proceed up to May of 1953 with more studio-wise in-jokes, and two more notable instances when animated characters take charge of their own destinies by dabbling into the art supplies.
First, a turn back of the chronological clock, as it again occurs to me that a few brief dialogue lines from earlier Warner cartoons classify such episodes for mention in this survey’s pages, denoting characters’ awareness of their cinema presence. A Tale of Two Kitties (Warner, 11/21/42, Robert Clampett, dir.), marked the first appearance of the hatchling Tweety, known to his creators as Orson, a featherless baby bird in a nest. And the first appearance (and only appearance as cats) of clever knockoffs of Universal’s top comedians, Christened Babbitt and Catstello. It tracks the turmoil of a single day from morning to night, as the two cats attempt futilely to obtain their supper via capture of the wily canary-to-be. In an early sequence, Catstello is induced to scale a high ladder to reach Tweety’s nest, by means of Babbitt sticking a pin into his rear. Insistent Babbitt calls to him from far below: “Give me the bird. Give me the bird!” Commenting upon his own screen obligations, and the present state of film censorship since the strict enforcement of the Motion Picture Code, Caststello turns to the audience, and confides in us: “If the Hays office would only let me, I’d give him the bird, all right.” (Slang for uttering a flatulent raspberry.)
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Nothing But the Tooth (Warner, Porky Pig, 5/1/48 – Art Davis, dir.) and “What Makes Daffy Duck?” (Warner, Daffy Duck, 2/14/48 – Art Davis, dir.). present almost the same gag as one another. Davis apparently had his ideas about how the Warner stable of characters conducted their love lives, particularly in their come-on lines for attracting women. In “Tooth”, Porky, a pioneer seeking to reach the gold rush in California (though the only gold there is actually another pioneer’s gold tooth, to which a second pioneer has aggressively staked a claim – hence, the title of the picture), enters Indian country, and is pestered and pursued by a single puny bulb-nosed Indian, who seeks Porky’s scalp. Porky attempts to ignore the little guy’s efforts, calling him “Pee wee” and telling him to go back to his teepee. But the little not-so-brave begins laying traps for Porky along the trail. One of them involves what appears to be a hitch-hiking Indian princess. In reality, its head and body are a mere mannequin, manipulated from the back by the Indian. Porky dismounts from his horse, leaping into the arms of the “princess”, and begins his own brand of mild-mannered seduction. “Haven’t I seen you s-s-somewhere before, Pocahontas? You know, we could make beautiful m-m-music together. Why, you’re pretty enough to be in the m-m-movies. Now I could do a lot for you – I c-c-could get ya into the cartoons.” He then asks the princess to give “Daddy” a little kiss, and steals a smooch – but in the process pulls away with his lips the mask of her pretty face, revealing the little Indian behind it, who has all this time been tracing a dotted line around Porky’s cranium, and stands with tomahawk raised to do his dirty work. Porky grabs away the weapon, commenting to the audience, “I sh-sh-should have known it all the time.” Porky smacks the weapon into a rock, causing its handle to develop a case of vibrating jitters. He then hands the tomahawk back to the Indian, and leaves him there, vibrating atop the ground from the reverberations still pulsing through the handle. Porky eventually makes it to California (raining at the borderline and all), and enters the shaft of a dark gold mine. All he finds inside is another glittering gold tooth – still attached to the little Indian. “You again?”. shouts Porky. In reference to the recent box office success of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”, the Indian responds, “You were expecting Humphrey Bogart?”
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What Makes Daffy Duck sets up a similar romantic interlude between Daffy and another faker. A routine day of dodging bullets from the shotgun of Elmer Fudd turns into anything but routine, when a fox also barges in on the act, as determined as Elmer to catch himself a duck dinner. Ingenious Daffy does a magnificent job of playing one side against the other, keeping the two rival hunters bickering and brawling about ownership rights of the feathered morsel, while the little black duck repeatedly makes his escapes from both. At one point, Elmer resorts to disguise, concealing himself inside an oversize female duck costume. Daffy isn’t too picky about the female’s lack of natural curves, and begins another seduction, considerably more aggressive than that of Porky. However, Daffy catches on quickly, briefly diving below the pond waterline to observe Elmer’s booted feet sticking out from under the costume. Knowing he has “an imposter”, Daffy mercilessly pours on the romantic talk for all he’s worth. “Let me take you away from this. Let us flee to glamorous Hollywood. I can get you a screen test with Warner Brothers.” Daffy then quotes a line apparently lifted from a James Thurber panel cartoon from The New Yorker magazine, botching a cliche come-on line to lure single girls to a man’s dwelling. “By the way, I have some lovely etchings in my apartment – Wait here until I bring ‘em down!” Daffy uses this excuse to get the fox to chase and capture Elmer by mistake, putting the two hunters at odds again. Eventually, an all-out brawl erupts between the two in a fight cloud. A heretofore-unseen game warden enters the shot, posting two signs, proclaiming “Duck Season Closed. Fox Season Open.” This is all that Elmer needs to regain the upper hand, and the warden even supplies Elmer with an appropriate horse for the new sport. “Tally-ho!”, shouts Elmer, as he pursues the fox on horseback over hill and dale. Back at the tree, the “warden” rips off a mask, revealing Daffy’s face underneath. “I am obviously dealing with inferior mentalities”, he remarks to the camera, for the iris out.
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The Scarlet Pumpernickel (Warner, Daffy Duck, 3/4/50 – Charles M. (Chuck) Jones, dir.) – A behind the scenes view of how a cartoon star sells a Hollywood script. At the private office of J. L., Daffy Duck is heard to shout “You’re killing me!” No, he is nor acting in a murder mystery. Instead, he’s complaining to Mr. Warner how he is being type-cast to death. Always the “woo woo” guy for screwball comedy. Daffy begs for a dramatic role, and insists he has the perfect script for just such a thing – a manuscript piled so high against the wall, iy is up to Daffy’s neck. “The Scarlet Pumpernickel”, by Daffy Dumas Duck. “Once upon a time – – Great opening, huh?”, Daffy begins. The story is told in cutaways, presenting a period piece with most of the Looney Tunes regulars appearing in character roles (excepting Bugs, whom Daffy would never write into his own script anyway). Daffy of course plays the title swashbuckler, making repeated references throughout the film to resident swashbuckling star Errol Flynn. A new character is introduced, in the form of a yellow female duck playing The Fair Melissa. Porky Pig plays the furious Lord High Chamberlain, in powdered wig, moustache and goatee. He plots to marry off Melissa to the Grand Duke, played by Sylvester (in possibly his only speaking role in a Chuck Jones cartoon), to lire the Pumpernickel to town, and sends message to the Duke by way of courier Henery Hawk. Mama Bear from Jones’ Three Bears makes a cameo as a lady-in-waiting to Melissa, playing a harp with deadpan face. Elmer Fudd also cameos as an innkeeper, wearing an ill-fitting brown wig. (Arthur Q. Bryan misses the voice session, so Elmer’s lines are delivered for one rare occasion by Mel Blanc.) Much of the film is played comparatively straight, with brief gags of Daffy missing his horse in jumping out the window of an inn, and later improving upon it by wearing a parachute – a wrinkle “Errol” never thought of. Daffy scales a castle wall by sticking himself with a pin in the rear, the pin obtained from a carton labeled. “Ye Little Olympic High Jumper”, He intrudes upon the wedding, but Melissa literally carries Daffy off and out of the castle instead of the other way around, leaving Daffy to comment, “So what’s to save?” At the inn, a sword battle is waged with Sylvester…and back in the present, J. L. begs to hear what happens next. It seems that Daffy hasn’t really decided on an ending, despite the length of his script, and he starts to ad lib. “The dam broke…The cavalry rode to the rescue, but they were a little too late…The volcano erupted…” and finally, “The price of foodstuffs skyrocketed”, an image showing a Kreplach selling for $1,000.00. “Is THAT all?”, retorts a disappointed J. L. Daffy can see he’s written himself into a corner, and a chance of losing the project entirely, so he resorts to his desperation ending. “There was nothing for the Scarlet Pumpernickel to do, but blow his brains out, which he did.” Daffy in real life pulls out a pistol, aims it at his head, fires, and falls. But Daffy’s head rises, revealing the shot has only gone through a small beret Daffy has been wearing throughout the picture, missing his scalp. Daffy closes by addressing the audience. “It’s getting so you have to kill yourself to sell a story around here.”
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The Turn-Tale Wolf (Warner, Merrie Melodies, 6/28/52 – Robert McKimson, dir.) – For reasons unknown (except possibly the violence of some of its gags), this film feels like one of the least-frequently seen of McKimson’s works. It seems to have been withheld from TV airings until the NBC run of “The Daffy Duck Show”, where it was seen once in heavily-edited form, running, to my recollection, only about four and a half minutes. It surfaced in longer form on Nickelodeon’s Looney Tunes show much later, but never seems to achieve any regularity of screenings since and to this day. It is a bit unusual, in presenting McKimson spoofing a well-known fairy tale – a task normally reserved for the likes of Friz Freleng, or in rarer instances Chuck Jones. Tedd Pierce provides the script, perhaps another sign that the project may have been originally envisioned for the hands of rival directors with whom Pierce more frequently collaborated. Most probably, the assignment fell to McKimson simply because of his use of the characters of an aggressive set of Three Little Pigs in a prior episode for Bugs Bunny (“The Windblown Hare”), such that personalities for the pigs would not have to be rethought and re-invented for this short by a director who had not previously spoofed the characters. The final film is not all that bad, though possibilities for better timing may have existed had the usual directors for this genre been chosen. In many ways, it shows marked similarity to “The Trial of Mr. Wolf”, suggesting that Freleng might have ultimately been the better selection to handle it, and was probably the first intended choice.
A little wolf (no direct resemblance to Disney’s, and with voice and personality matching Sylvester Jr.) marches home from school in a state of moral outrage. “Oh, the shame of it. Flesh of my flesh. Blood of my blood!” He heads straight for the home of B. B. Wolf, his uncle, where uncle wolf, wearing derby hat, tough-guy sweater, and chomping a cigar, is busily engaged in distilling home brew from a still. Uncle quickly covers his distillery with a curtain at the approach of little wolf, and pretends to be tidying up the place. But little wolf is now in a mood to see through his facade. He displays the daily reading material he has received from school – a copy of “The Three Little Pigs”. “For shame, uncle Big Bad.” “Now, wait, a minute, kid,” responds Uncle, “I never done nothin’ of the kind. That was a bum rap.” Big Bad attempts to set the record straight as to who blew whose house down, weaving his tale Iin a flashback. In his tale, Uncle portrays himself as an innocent young juvenile in a sort of Little Lord Fauntleroy suit, merrily tripping through the woods and cavorting with nature. His path forces him to pass the houses of the three pugs – something he dreads, as he fears them. But he thinks to himself that he must not let them know of his fear, so attempts to pass, exchanging a hesitant “Hello” to them as he goes. The pigs respond cheerily enough, but as soon as the wolf’s back is turned, change their countenance to evil grins, and produce slingshots, peppering the wolf with pebbles. “Why must you always torment me when I pass your houses?” states the wolf in widdle kid tones. One of the pigs declares he’s not such a bad guy after all, and invites the wolf to play slingshot, offering Big Bad the opportunity to hold the biggest one – as tall as the wolf. The pig then loads the weapon for him – in a shot duplicating Chuck Jones’ gag from “Rabbit Punch”, extending the sling to full length, and loading it with a boulder aimed directly at the wolf’s face. The same stars animation is repeated from the Jones’ cartoon for the impact.
The pigs engage in further instances of convincing the gullible wolf to join in their games. “Surprise, surprise” – a game in which the pigs place an object in the wolf’s hands behind his back, then let him see what it is on the count of three – a lit stick of dynamite. “Swat the fly”, with the wolf wearing wings, and the pigs bashing him with wooden paddles. As if things couldn’t get worse, a bounty sign appears on a tree in the forest, offering a $50 bounty for wolves, claimable by sending in by mail a wolf’s tail, cut off at the dotted line. Big Bad looks at his own tail, realizing a dotted line is appearing upon his fur from nowhere. The pigs see it too, their eye irises transforming into dollar signs. The wolf attempts to hold onto his tail possessively, but the pigs assure him that they’d never do that to him, and offer to treat him like a king – complete with his own throne chair (the tall back of which is a guillotine). They allow the wolf to pull a golden cord to ring out the glad tidings of his coronation – actually releasing the guillotine blade. The wolf stands up just in time to miss the fall of the blade upon his rear, and quickly gets the picture. The pigs pursue him to his home, and ultimately blow the wolf’s house down. The scene reverts back to the present, as Big Bad concludes his story. “Oh, Unc, what a lot of malarkey”, responds little wolf. “Does this look like malarkey?”, shouts Big Bad, turning his backside to little wolf, displaying trousers covered in bandages covering the stub of what once had been a tail. The scene irises out, with little wolf finally convinced that maybe the book was wrong. However, one side of the screen opens, as if there is a sliding wooden peephole panel installed within it, and the big wolf’s head pops through, directly addressing the audience. “Of course, we know I lost it in the swingin’ door!” He slides the panel shut again, as the story really ends.
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Pill Peddlers (Terrytoons/Fox, Heckle and Jeckle, 12/13/52 – Connie Rasinski, dir.) – Does the answer to fatness lie in the marvels of medicine and science? Or in good old-fashioned blood-and-sweat physical exertion? Based on this cartoon, we may never know. The “pro” side of the issue is presented in the form of a burly bulldog, owner of a “Body Building School” gymnasium with a “large” clientele. While the bulldog instructor takes five in his office chair, his students labor at their respective improvement programs. A weak dog bats around a punching bag, only to have the bag punch back the minute he is through with it. Another dog appears to be performing wondrous feats on the exercise rings suspended from the ceiling, seen in close-up appearing to lift his whole weight with one finger. Actually, it’s quite easy, as the camera pulls back to reveal that the dog is so tall, his feet have never left the floor. An old Terrytoons gag is revisited with a pig on a rowing machine, bloating to expanded width on the forward strokes, then retracting from the camera to become pencil thin on the backstrokes. The pig, however, along with the rest of the members, is getting pooped. Enter the “con” side of the debate – and I do mean “con” – with calls heard from outside the building of Heckle and Jeckle, engaged in a fast-talking sales pitch as sidewalk vendors of an alleged miracle pill that renders exercise obsolete. From their portable sales table protruding from a suitcase, they produce charts on curtain pulls to show scrawny passers-by the god-like physique they claim their pills can produce. Jeckle states the pills are the cure for an “overextended pot”, molding the flab of an overweight dog upwards into his arms to allegedly “turn it into muscle”. Upstairs in the gym, the pig sees these pills as the road to easy street, and abandons his oars to hurry down to make a purchase. The entire membership follows in droves, stampeding by the bulldog on their way out, spinning his swivel chair clean out of its base, and causing the center pole of the chair to drill a hole into the floor. The bulldog awakens with a start, surveying the now empty premises. He determines to settle the score with the two meddlesome troublemakers.
Heckle is engaged in another round of sales talk, with repeated touts of “Ya can’t go wrong”, and attempts to use another puny person from the crowd as an example of the way exercise will only run you down. The bird describes the subject as “knock-kneed and pigeon-toed, with arms like toothpicks and built like a bent hairpin.” Just then, the bulldog steps between Heckle and the little guy, unseen by the magpie. “Just look at that thing he calls a chest, folks!”, Heckle continues. His hand suddenly brushes against a medal pinned to the bulldog’s shirt, which Heckle reads – “Champ?” Looking upwards, he spies the dog for the first time, breaks into an embarrassed grin, and begins to polish the medal respectfully. The bulldog advances, telling the birds to “Get outta here.” “I say, we can take a hint, you know”, says Jeckle, as the magpies grab their sales table and retreat around a corner. Thinking the job is done, the bulldog goes back inside. Not so fast, boy. From a basement elevator opening in the sidewalk, the birds appear again, right back to their old spiel. The angry bulldog emerges, grabs the birds by the necks, and drags them both back inside the building. “Don’t go away, folks”, says Jeckle to the crowd outside, “We’ll be right back.” Heckle, on the other hand, is like a broken phonograph record, continuing in his sales-talk without missing a beat, all the way upstairs and into the gymnasium, where he is still repeating the phrase to no one in particular, “Ya can’t go wrong.”
The bulldog tosses the birds upon the floor, and demands that they prove their boasts. Pointing to a barbell, the bulldog commands, “Let’s see how good your pills are. Lift that.” As usual, the cunning magpies are calmly prepared for any situation. “It’s much too small”, insists Jeckle. “Get us a bigger one”, says Heckle. The dog obliges, sliding in a barbell with larger weights. “Bigger”, request the magpies. Larger and larger weights are pushed in, but the birds remain unsatisfied, until a barbell about twenty times heavier than the first one is placed before them. “After you, chum”, quips Heckle, turning the tables. With Herculean strength, the dog struggles, strains, and succeeds in lifting the bar over his head. To add to his burden, the birds perch themselves on each of the two massive weights fastened to the bar. “I say, he is strong, isn’t he”, observes Jeckle to Heckle. In a “lift” from Disney’s “Goofy Gymnastics”, the birds’ added weight is too much for the flooring, and in a perspective shot looking down, the dog plummets five stories through a hole in the floor. True to their word, the birds quickly return to the crowd outside.
The bulldog, however, rejoins them, emerging from a manhole in the street under the building. The trio run back inside, with the dog getting tangled up in a revolving door, from which he spins out looking like a triangular slice off a chocolate cake. By the time he makes it back upstairs, the birds seem to have disappeared. However, a matching set of dumbbells leaning against the wall include pairs of eyes and notable splashes of yellow on both ends. It is the magpies, with their beaks and feet curled up to match the shape of the other weights, creeping away to leave the bulldog feeling like the real dumbbell. The bulldog lifts a heavy steel weight, and hurls it at the magpies. It misses, landing on the forward end of a teeter-totter upon which they stand. Like a circus act, Jeckle shouts, “Allez-oop” as they are launched skyward. The birds land together back on the teeter-totter, flipping the metal weight backwards to land in the bulldog’s arms. Bowled over from the flying weight, the bulldog stumbles backwards, and is temporarily knocked unconscious, falling upon a massage table. Jeckle appears, wearing a chef’s hat, and reading from what appears to be a cookbook. “How to tenderize one tough bulldog”, he reads aloud. Heckle performs the culinary magic, as Jeckle instructs him to “Knead thoroughly, working with both hands back and forth. Then add a dash of liniment, six reducing pills, and sprinkle with talcum powder. Then turn over gently, and roll out until a nice gooey consistency.” The final step is to “place in a hot steambox and bake until well done.” Heckle again obliges, closing the steambox doors upon the dog and setting the heat indicator to “Phew!” The dog awakens, calling for help, until the steambox doors burst open, with the tried-and-true gag of the dog’s body shrunken to a size barely bigger than his head. He nevertheless resumes the chase after the birds, regaining his normal height as he runs.
The finale chase takes place outside the perimeters of the gymnasium, as the magpies dart into an elevator for the tower building, while the bulldog catches a second elevator in the next shaft. By way or only lights seen through the exterior windows of the tower, the camera follows the progress of the elevator cabs – defying all laws of physics and structural design by moving sideways, diagonally, back and forth – even crossing paths with each other in the course of the pursuit. Inside their own cab, the magpies watch the light panel of buttons for the respective floors – until the dot of light escapes the mounted bulbs of the panel altogether, descending past them and to the floor of the cab. A curious Heckle opens the elevator door to see where they are – and finds himself staring into the face of the devil himself. “Oops. Too low!”, responds Heckle, slamming the door. With a push upon a panel button, the elevator begins to rise again. Only this time, from the tower exterior view, we see the light of the bulldog’s cab descending from directly above the magpies’ rising cab. A head-on collision between the two shatters the tower, hurling the magpies and bulldog into a vacant lot behind the tower. The dazed bulldog is still clutching the operator’s handle of his elevator cab, now entirely disconnected from anything, and the dog lapses into the dialogue of a department-store operator: “Second floor. Women’s wear. Stockings. Girdles. Garter belts.” The magpies take this last opportunity to escape the situation, the only way they know how – by climbing through the circle of the closing camera iris, appearing in front of the screen on the other side, as the Terrytoons logo and “The End” appear on the screen behind them. In a delightfully Avery-esque ending, lost to television for decades, Jeckle reacts to this information: “I say, we’re safe. It’s the end of the picture.” The birds strike g a pose, preparing for the fade out, but are shocked when the screen bursts open behind them, with the bulldog reappearing through the hole. “Not yet, it ain’t!” he barks, grabbing the two birds by the neck, and dragging them back into the vacant lot behind him. The background seen through the hole erupts into a fight cloud. One of the birds tries to crawl back out the hole, but is dragged back in again by the feet. Amidst verbal ad libs of “Ouch”, “You win”, and “We give up”, the pummeling and struggle finally die away, as the bulldog again appears at the hole, gives us a satisfied wink, and sweeps his hand around the tattered and folded edges of the torn screen, miraculously mending it shut, so that the end card can briefly be read normally, allowing for the final fade out.
Duck Amuck (Warner, Daffy Duck, 2/28/53 – Charles M. (Chick) Jones, dir.) – A landmark film for our subject category, pushing the envelope of what can go wrong in an animated cartoon. After credits suggesting another swashbuckling epic, Daffy appears in musketeer garb with sword, stating that “They shall sample my blade.” As he parries and thrusts across the background, he quickly discovers that it has not been colored in for a scrolling panning shot, and he has walked off the painted image entirely into a blank frame. Daffy ducks behind the frame edge, then peeks out, calling for the studio artist. “Whoever’s in charge here? The scenery. Where’s the scenery?” A paintbrush enters the frame, for someone to quickly paint additional scenery upon the background. Except that it is not castles and medieval settings that are painted, but a standard barnyard set. Daffy re-enters, repeating his musketeer lines – but one look at the backdrop, and he feels out of place. Looking upwards off the drawing board, Daffy smugly remarks, “All right. Have it your way.” Zipping out of frame, Daffy returns, in farmer’s hat, blie jeans, and carrying a hoe. He sings a chorus of “Daffy Duck, he had a farm”, but his E-I-E-I turns to an “Ohhh”, when he sees that, by walking further along, he has entered a new section of the painting, depicting an ice-covered landscape and an igloo. “Would it be too much to ask if we could make up our minds?”, he asks the unseen powers-that-be. He changes garb again to a winter coat, hat, and skis – but the next section of background has switched to Hawaiian palms. Daffy reappears as an island boy with ukulele – and walks right off the painted area again, into another white void. Turning to the artist, Daffy tries to lay down a few ground rules. “It may interest you to know that this is an animated cartoon, and in animated cartoons, they have scenery…” Before he can finish, the top of a pencil has entered the shot, rubbing Daffy away with an eraser to shut him up. With no image, the voice of Daffy is heard: “Well, where am I?”
Pencil and paintbrush return to quickly sketch in an image of Daffy, now dressed as cowboy with a guitar. Daffy takes in his new outfit, then shrugs his shoulders, willing to go along with it. He opens his mouth, and strums a first note on guitar – but no audio is heard/ Disgruntled Daffy holds up a small sign a la Wile E. Coyote, reading, “Sound, please.” The scratchy noise is heard as if someone just placed a needle on a phonograph record. Treg Brown has his fun, as the strumming, then breaking of Daffy’s guitar comes out sounding like a machine gun, claxon horn, pistol shot and mule bray. When Daffy speaks up to complain, the sounds of a rooster crow and a kookaburra cry are heard. Daffy breaks into a frustrated scream, and suddenly finds his voice, uttering a shout of “and I’ve never been so humiliated in all my life.” Catching himself at having audibly lost his cool before the public, Daffy’s red eyes pause for a moment of introspection – how next to deal with this unexpected offscreen menace? “Let’s get organized, hmm? How ’bout some scenery?” The pencil draws in outlines of a scenic that would befit the talents of a five-year old child. “Ho ho, that’s rich. Now how about some color, stupid?” The paintbrush appears, coating Daffy himself with solids, stripes, and polka dots. “Not me, you slop artist!”, screams Daffy. The pencil eraser re-enters, erasing everything but Daffy’s eyes and beak. “Where’s the rest of me?” In a gag that would reappear more than once in the post-Termite Terrace years, the unseen artist draws Daffy as a weird hybrid monster, with flower petals worn like a mane around his head, a blue polka-dotted body with frog flippers for front legs and bird’s feet at the rear, and a flag flapping from a vertical tail, depicting images of a screw and a ball (derivative of a sign held by Bugs in Frank Tashlin’s “Hare Remover”). Daffy fails to notice the change at first, merely walking along on all fours and muttering that it isn’t as though he hasn’t lived up to his contract – until the artist paints in a full-length mirror for Daffy to see himself. Daffy screams in shock, then shouts to the artist, “You know better than that!”
Suddenly, Daffy is erased, then redrawn properly against a bare screen, dressed as a sailor. “Sea epic, eh?”, says the duck, calling again for some appropriate scenery. The artist draws in an ocean, and a simplistically-sketchy volcanic island. Except the island is far in the background, and Daffy is left standing on water. Splash! In the far reaches of the background, a miniature Daffy crawls out of the water onto the island, then shouts for the camera to give him a close up. Instead of moving the camera, the outline of the outer frame shrinks to leave Daffy in a postage-stamp sized square, with the rest of the screen black. “This is a close-up?” Daffy screams again at the artist, and the image suddenly zooms so close, all you can see is the top of Daffy’s beak, and his looming, bloodshot eyeballs. “Thanks for the sour persimmons”, mutters Daffy, walking away from the camera to maintain a proper distance. “Now what?” he reacts, as the top edge of a blank screen begins to fall in upon him, as if it were made of a heavy black fluid. Daffy tries propping it up with a pole, then bracing against it with his bare hands, but it falls upon him, nearly smothering him in one corner of the screen. “ARRRGHHHH!!”, screams Daffy, clawing like a wildcat to tear the blackness away, leaving only dangling remnants as if made from frayed fabric. “Let’s get this picture started”, Daffy demands. The artist does the opposite, placing a “The End” sign over the frame. “No, NOOO!”, screams Daffy, pushing away the end title. He tries to sweet-talk the artist into going his separate way, then asks the audience to forgive the interruptions, as the duck breaks into a soft-shoe dance in attempt to entertain. Games are now played with the projector, replicating a common problem in projecting reel to reel film – adjusting the top and bottom of the film frame to match the dimensions of the projection screen. The frame line is deliberately misadjusted, leaving the top half of one frame visible at the bottom of the screen, and the bottom half of the next frame visible at the top of the screen. Thus, two half-Daffys dance simultaneously. They each become aware of the other, the top one wondering what another Daffy is doing down there, and the other wondering what a Daffy is doing up there. Both climb into the same frame, and suddenly the projection is fixed to confine them together. One Daffy threatens, “If you wasn’t me, I’d punch ‘ya right in the nose.” “Don’t let that stop you, Jack”, taunts the other. The first takes a swing – but the eraser comes into play again, obliterating the second Daffy before fist contact is made, leaving Daffy #1 spinning around from having socked only air.
Daffy suddenly finds himself drawn inside a small red plane, and wearing an aviator’s cap and goggles. “Oh, brother, I’m a buzz boy”, remarks Daffy, eager to accept his new role. But his path is already booby-trapped, as the artist draws in a high mountain peak. An offscreen crash is heard, then Daffy and the cockpit windows pass in the sky, minus any plane. “Time to hit the ol’ silk”, says Daffy, and jumps, pulling a ripcord which opens a parachute for him to float gently down. Unfortunately, the eraser enters again, removing the parachute, and replacing it with an anvil above Daffy’s head. Daffy and the anvil drop like the proverbial lead weight. On the ground, a dazed Daffy hammers at the anvil with a hammer that has appeared from nowhere, reciting an intoxicated-sounding rendition of the poem, “The Village Blacksmith” by Longfellow. The paintbrush and eraser re-enter, substituting an aerial bombshell for the anvil, to fall under the blows of Daffy’s hammer. Ker-BOOM! Charred, but still livid, Daffy screams “Who are you?”, and demands that the artist show himself. The paintbrush enters the frame, draws a door in front of the screaming duck, then shuts it in his face, never letting the duck find out who has made him the fall guy. Only the audience is made privy to the secret, as the camera pulls back to reveal Bugs Bunny at an animator’s desk, turning to the audience to declare, “Ain’t I a stinker?”
• You can watch this cartoon if you CLICK HERE!
Forward March Hare (Warner, Bugs Bunny, 2/14.53 – Charles M. (Chuck) Jones dir.) – A letter intended for one “B. Bonny” (actually Bertram), residing in the rural farm district of El Slope-O, is blown out of its mailbox by a puff of exhaust from the postman’s tin lizzie, and floats on the breeze to the edge of and into Bugs Bunny’s hole. Bugs spots the letter on the floor while doing his morning calisthenics (including ear exercises). He reads the return address: “The President of the United States…hmm, that’s nice.” He continues to read the contents, including an instruction to “report local board…”, then shouts, “Holy cats! I’ve been drafted!”
At the induction center, he is viewed through a fluoroscope by a doctor who doesn’t see him step behind it among the passing line of inductees. Seeing a rabbit skeleton, the doctor puts a thermometer in his own mouth, checks his pulse, and remarks to himself “Overwork”. The eye test goes amazingly well, with Bugs not only reading correctly every intended line of type, but the nearly-invisible fine print at the bottom reading “ACME Eye Test Chart, printed by the United States Printing Office, Washington. D.C., Reg. U.S. Pat. Off.”. The physician administering the test has to find a magnifying glass to read it himself, and can only respond, “Uh, yeah.” Bugs is issued a uniform, in the Army’s smallest size, which still leaves him waddling in a draping overflow of fabric. On his first encounter with his sergeant on the drill field, an order to “About face” allows Bugs’ oversize shoes to knock over all the other recruits alongside him in Charlie Chaplin fashion, like two rows of bowling pins. The sergeant orders Bugs to step forward. “Private Bugs Bunny reporting, your majesty, sir”, salutes Bugs. The Sergeant (voiced by radio veteran John Brown (Digger O’ Dell)), with an obvious knowledge of Looney Tunes, responds in a sarcastic condescending tone, “Oh, Private Bugs Bunny, eh? Well I’m Sergeant Porky Pig.” “Sergeant!”, shouts a voice from behind him, continuing, “And I’m Colonel Putty Tat. General Tweetie Pie was asking about you, Sergeant.” The Colonel advances to see how the Sergeant’s training is progressing, and also orders Bugs to “About face”. “Oh, no”, mutters the Sergeant, as Bugs bowls over the Colonel. When next we see Bugs, the former sergeant is personally marching Bugs through a twenty-mile hike – but with one stripe removed from his arm insignia, demoted to Lieutenant.
Mishaps continue to ensue, as Bugs “murders” the bugler in the morning (by smashing a camp record player playing Reveille over a loudspeaker system), takes a morning bath in a tub made of the Colonel’s helmet, “dresses” chickens for an officer’s banquet in tuxedos and top hats, and hammers up signs with one end of a cannon shell (blasting a hole through the Colonel’s helmet). On each fowl-up, the former Sergeant loses another step in promotion, until his sleeve is empty of decorations. “Why don’t ya’ listen to orders?”. he asks Bugs. “You’ve got ears just like all the other guys…” The sergeant for the first time notices one of Bugs’s ears sticking out from under his helmet. “Well anyways, you’re furry all over and got a fuzzy tail just like all the other g – – -DYIIEEEEEE!!!” The former sarge turns to the camera. “Jumpin’ catfish! We’ve inducted a rabbit!” The revelation causes Bugs to be brought before the General, for orders of discharge, and an apology that Congress made no provision for inducting rabbits into the armed forces. “Isn’t there something a patriotic rabbit can do for his country?”, Bugs asks. The General suggests a service where he could be useful. We finally see Bugs in a factory, running a conveyor belt, upon which cannon shells roll before him. He hits each on the nose with a small hammer, and if they don’t explode, writes on the nose cone “DUD”. Bugs remarks to us, “And just think! In 30 years, I can retire.”
• You can watch this cartoon if you CLICK HERE!
Herman the Catoonist (Paramount/Famous, Herman and Katnip, 5/15/53 – I. Sparber. dir.) – Famous Studios remembers its Fleischer roots for this one, attempting a color return to the “Out of the Inkwell” format, of sorts. However, no real process shots are employed. Instead, everything is rendered in standard 2-D animation, with intermittent still photographic images of real-life objects mixed into backgrounds and sometimes in the hands of the characters. The scene opens, not in an animation studio, but at the artist’s desk of the creator of a Herman and Katnip comics page. The still image of an artist’s hand begins to ink in the contents of the various frames on the page – first, the lettering for a title frame, then a panel depicting four mice sneaking toward a refrigerator, with Katnip behind them, concealing his face behind a broom, Then, a third panel, in which the artist begins to draw Herman. While the backgrounds of these panels and props within them are not colored in, left in bare outline form, each amimal character miraculously appears in color when drawn out of the same ink pen, removing the need for paint or four-color process printing. But as the artist gets Herman’s head and one arm drawn in, he pauses and stops. The camera reveals a wide shot of the artist’s studio, where the human artist is shown only by way of shadow upon the wall. He tiredly yawns, and declares that’s enough work for one day, then departs the studio. As soon as he has gone, the four mice come to life, creeping to the refrigerator, and standing upon a soap carton and upon each other’s shoulders to reach the door handle. Katnip creeps up behind, and knocks the soap box out from under them, almost catching the group. They escape from his paws and out under his arm, retreating to a mousehole interior in a previous panel. Herman hears their cries and also comes to life, but can’t do much in his present half-drawn condition. Fortunately, the artist’s fountain pen is within reach of Herman’s one arm, so he grabs it, and proceeds to draw the rest of himself in. Then, positioning the pen vertically within his panel, he uses it to climb up to the mousehole panel. He assures the mice he will take care of Katnip as usual, when Katnip’s paw reaches into the mousehole. Herman grabs the pen again, and draws a baited mousetrap, placing it in the path of Katnip’s paw. “YEOOWW!” shouts the cat as the trap snaps, as he leaps in pain clear off the comics paper, landing atop the wooden frame upon which the paper rests. The mice cheer Herman, who still hilds the pen – until Herman and the pen begin to rise out of the panel. Katnip has grabbed the upper end of the pen, and hoists Herman up to the level of his own mouth. Before Katnip can bite, Herman grabs the end of Katnip’s tongue, extending it out to take the painful bite from Katnip’s teeth.
Herman hops off the drawing board and onto the artist’s desk, spotting a rubber eraser. He slips up behind Katnip with it, and erases one of his feet. Katnip spots him, and tries to give chase – but quickly learns of his walking impediment. He too escapes the drawing board, hopping over to a book on a shelf entitled “How to Draw Animals”. Flipping the pages, he discovers an illustrated guide to drawing cat’s feet. Katnip chooses one that looks the right size, then inserts his own ankle into the drawing. He pulls back, removing the outline foot from the book, and with a few stomps, drives his own color ink into the foot, restoring it to Katnip’s original coloration. For reasons unknown, a ball of twine rests upon a desk (perhaps for wrapping packages to mail off the completed drawings?) Katnip grabs a strand, and uses it as a lasso to snare Herman. But Herman grabs hold of a pair of scissors, and as Katnop yanks on the line to reel in, Herman aims the open scissor blades straight at Katnips neck. Snip. Katnip is temporarily decapitated, his head landing on his neck upside-down. A mere inversion of the cranium right-side up, and a clockwise screw, and the head is restored to functional use. Herman sticks Katnip’s tail in the pencil sharpener, sharpening its tip to a fine point. Tipping a bottle of ink eradicator erases Katnip’s middle, but a quick guzzle from a paint can by Katnip restores it again. Katnip grabs up the fountain pen, and sucks the ink-and-paint Herman inside. But Herman escapes through the handle of the ink reservoir, and sucks into the pen in his place a full helping of rubber cement. Katnip takes up the pen again, turning it around and reversing the reservoir handle to eject the tasty Herman ink into his throat. Instead, he is doused with rubber cement, and begins bouncing helplessly all over the desk. Herman positions in his path the traditional Fleischer open inkwell, and the film ends in exact fashion as a Fleischer of old, with Katnip landing in the inkwell, and Herman inserting the stopper, to the cheers of the other mice.
NEXT TIME: Onward for more ‘50‘s fun.
Another great themed group of cartoons! There’s so many details that I didn’t quite remember from long ago, so thanks for reacquainting me with them. I always like cartoons like “Duck Amuck“. The heck and Jekyll cartoons were fun as well.
I’m very familiar with all of these cartoons except for “The Turn-Tale Wolf”, which I don’t believe I’ve ever seen before. Why it was never broadcast on TV when I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s is positively mystifying. Certainly it’s a violent cartoon, but no more so than most cartoons of its time, and considerably less than “Herman the Catoonist”.
It’s funny that Porky encounters a beautiful Indian maiden hitchhiking in the desert in “Nothing But the Tooth”, because the same thing happens to Cool Cat in the last of the Warner Bros./Seven Arts cartoons, “Injun Trouble”.
The idea of picking up girls by showing them etchings, referred to in “What Makes Daffy Duck”, originated with Stanford White, the architect who designed Madison Square Garden, the Rhode Island State House, and numerous other landmarks. White used his large collection of etchings as a ruse to lure young women up to his apartment, where he would then drug and rape them. He was murdered in 1906 by the husband of one of his conquests; the subsequent court trial, covered with salacious gusto by the yellow press, was the first of many to be dubbed “the trial of the century.”
Certainly there’s a lot to like about “Duck Amuck”, but what has always fascinated me about it is Daffy’s incarnation as a flower-headed screwball monster. Even as a child I noticed that its hind legs take two paces to its forelegs’ one. Nothing in nature moves like that, yet it’s a mode of locomotion ideally, and logically, suited to the creature’s bizarre design. The cartoon is the ne plus ultra — perhaps I should say, the Acme — of animation as endless possibility; it is pure imagination run, well, amok.
Daffy’s line “Where’s the rest of me?” was originally uttered by Ronald Reagan in the 1942 Warner Bros. feature “Kings Row”, when his character wakes up and discovers that his legs have been amputated. Reagan later used the line as the title for his autobiography. I remember seeing a copy of it in a bookstore when he was running for president in 1980 and wondering why he borrowed the title of his book from a Daffy Duck cartoon.
Bugs Bunny’s drill sergeant in “Forward March Hare” doesn’t get demoted to lieutenant, because lieutenants outrank sergeants. He starts out with the five stripes of a Sergeant First Class, then is successively demoted to Sergeant, Corporal (not lieutenant), and finally buck private. Curiously, the sergeant’s superior officer introduces himself as “Colonel Puddy Tat”, yet later in the cartoon he’s wearing the star insignia of a Brigadier General.
Huh? Now I’ve heard it all.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/give_the_bird
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=give%20the%20bird
A similar ending to that of “Pill Peddlers”, though a less elaborate one, occurs at the end of “Off to the Opera” (22/2/52 — Connie Rasinski, dir.), in which Heckle and Jeckle sneak into a performance of “The Barber of Seville” and are continually hounded by the (opera) house detective. After they flood the opera house with a fire hose and have bricks hurled at them as they flee, the screen fades to black and a “THE END” card appears — and the magpies promptly burst through it to sing one last reiteration of “Fi-ga-ro!”
I wonder if gate crashers at the opera were ever a big problem. Opera houses have very tight security nowadays. Orchestra members even have to pass a criminal background check if the opera has a children’s chorus.
“Turn-Tale Wolf” plays a bit like “The Hams That Couldn’t Be Cured”, a 1942 Lantz cartune. There, a wolf on the gallows for trying to eat the pigs begs to present his side of the story, which casts him as an effete music teacher living a fastidiously perfect life until the pigs — now thuggish wise guys — arrive to wreck his home and person while playing swing music. In the end the persuaded mob go after the fleeing pigs. The wolf laughs and switches to an Edward G. Robinson voice, telling the movie audience he really put one over on the rubes — and accidentally hangs himself, the noose somehow moved to his tail for non-fatal results.
Always puzzled me that Sarge is aware of “Bugs Bunny” as a known entity, yet he (nor anyone else in camp) fails to recognize him. I guess all rabbits look alike to them.
The closing bit with the conveyor belt of warheads always reminds me of this classic SNL sketch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m77V03EQjz4
[“The Turn-Tale Wolf”] seems to have been withheld from TV airings until the NBC run of “The Daffy Duck Show” where it was seen once in heavily-edited form, running, to my recollection, only about four and a half minutes.
I saw it air repeatedly – and uncensored- as part of a syndicated package of post-’48 WB cartoons in the mid-late Seventies.
Not to be confused with the other cartoons of the same title starring Porky Pig and Cool Cat, “Injun Trouble” (Terrytoons, Mighty Mouse, 23/5/51 — Eddie Donnelly, dir.), like Tex Avery’s “Symphony in Slang”, derives its humour largely from literal visual representations of the figures of speech employed by its narrator. As it opens, Col. Pureheart, father of Pearl (who does not appear in this cartoon), is living in poverty in his decrepit Southern mansion. There is “a heavy mortgage on the house” literally weighing down the roof, and he is “down to his last [literal] bean.” “It wasn’t long,” intones the narrator, “before he saw the handwriting on the wall.” Then the pen-wielding hand of an unseen artist, identical to the one that brought Mighty Mouse into being in “The Wicked Wolf”, “Goons From the Moon”, and “The Cat’s Tale”, emerges from offscreen and writes on the wall of the house: “Go West young man and seek your fortune!” The colonel does so, to be later assailed by savage natives and rescued by Mighty Mouse in the end.
Does this count? I admit that neither Col. Pureheart nor the other characters seem conscious of their presence in a cartoon. However, the hand that writes on the wall, like the one that spooked King Belshazzar in the biblical Book of Daniel, seems to be a manifestation of a higher power that created the (cartoon) universe, or at least one that elsewhere could create Mighty Mouse out of ink and paper. On the strength of that alone, I think it’s worth at least a mention here.
I’d always construed Catstello’s line of giving Babbitt “the bird” as flashing the middle finger.