If you know me, you know that I love the Looney Tunes. And why not? The cartoons from the late 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s, as well as some early 60’s ones, were constantly hilarious and have a lot of replay value., which has helped them survive the test of time for generations. My grandparents liked them, my parents liked them, and while my sister wasn’t as big of a fan, I definitely grew to like them while watching these old cartoons on Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, Kids’s WB, and wherever else aired them(and back in the early-to-mid 90’s, finding a channel without Looney Tunes is like finding something other than SpongeBob or iCarly on Nick nowadays; not very likely).
Daffy Duck has got to be my favorite of the vast library of Looney Tunes characters. Hell, I would go as far to say that he is my favorite cartoon character, period. His cartoons seem a little more personal to me than Bugs Bunny’s and he is able to steal the show whenever he arrives. Possibly my favorite cartoon featuring Daffy is Friz Frleeng’s “Yankee Doodle Daffy”, where he plays an agent trying to sell his kid to talent scout Porky Pig as Porky tries to head off to his vacation. How easily Daffy changes emotions to get his way and to bother Porky I consider to be one great bit of acting, thanks in part by Freleng’s staff and equally to the talents of voice legend Mel Blanc, who played not just Daffy and Porky, but just about every major Looney Tunes character.
As much as I like Friz Freleng’s cartoons, though, not every he touches is gold, which is why I’m writing this up. The Warner Brothers cartoon studio closed down in 1963 as the studio couldn’t afford to keep making theatrical cartoons anymore- ever since the end of the 50’s-start of the 60’s, theaters stopped paying for cartoons to be made alongside movies as animation for television was becoming a more viable market, so Warner’s cartoons already were cutting back on talent and length. Freleng then formed DePatie-Freleng Enterprises with partner David DePatie, which made both theatrical and televised cartoons on a smaller budget, most notably the Pink Panther of all characters.
Warner saw the potential in making new Looney Tunes cartoons at this new studio, and got Freleng to agree to make new shorts for them with his studio. Consider the fact that Friz had been with their cartoon division since nearly the beginning and had won four Academy Awards for the studio, more than any of the other directors there, it would be safe to assume that Looney Tunes was embedded in Freleng‘s person. Even though the cartoons made from this era were not very good and DePatie-Freleng would end their partnership with Warner in 1966, this wouldn’t be the last time we would see Friz or the Looneys from Warner.
Again, in the mid 70’s, Warner brought Freleng and fellow fan-favorite director Chuck Jones back to make new Looney Tunes shorts, TV specials, and movies. Most of these weren’t too good- the shorts were mostly forgettable attempts to revive the creative fervor of the cartoonist’s golden ages, while the movies had shatter-shot narratives hastly combined with some of the classic cartoons they made. The TV specials were often either one or the other in that regard, and like the shorts and movies, often have weak animation, dull writing, and less inspired voice work from the usually more active Mel Blanc. While it is always good to see Bugs, Daffy, and the gang in action, it would be better to watch some of the original cartoons again than to look over these.
I recently took it upon myself to watch one of these specials, Daffy Duck’s Easter Egg-Citement, made in 1980 featuring 3 unrelated segments starring the titular poultry, made by who else, but good old Isadore “Friz” Freleng. You can find this on volume 6 of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection, which collects various cartoons made during the age of classic Looney Tunes cartoons, as well as various other bits made starring the characters for good measure. Frankly, this special should never be seen again.
What’s wrong with this special, you ask? Well, for one, Friz has no shame to take characters and situations previously used by other Warner directors without adding anything interesting or fun to the table.
The special opens with Daffy correcting an unseeable animator who loves to mess with the duck. This happens during each wraparound segment and grows increasingly tedious as the gags go along. The animator tends to color Daffy differently as well as paint a watery background for Daffy to fall into, and even redraws him as a flower!
Isn’t that hilarious? I liked it better when Chuck Jones used all of these gags in the 7 minute masterpiece “Duck Amuck” nearly 25 years earlier.
Yes, we start this special off by reusing a series of gags from one of the most popular cartoons ever made, which Freleng didn’t even make! Great start, am I right?
Part of what made “Duck Amuck” so funny was that you didn’t expect for a mad animator to mess around with Daffy the first time you saw it. From the opening credits and the first few seconds of footage of the cartoon, it looked like Daffy would be one of the Three Musketeers. It’s not until discovering that there wasn’t any scenery past the first bit that it would be easier to guess what would happen to the Duck, and things only got better from there. Here, we start off in a generic screen with Daffy already ordering out commands. You can easily guess what is going to happen to Daffy throughout right from the start.
On top of that, the gags used in these wraparound sequences just aren’t funny. Many of the gags come from “Duck Amuck” and it’s sister short, “Rabbit Rampage”, which puts Bugs in a similar predicament(it‘s also worth noting that this cartoon is available on the same disc as the special I‘m writing about). That cartoon may have had a similar premise, but the jokes are more original, Bugs gave a different albeit equally agitated performance, and the ending reveal felt more satisfactory9finally, Elmer beat that swewy wabbit!). These segments have no originality or redeeming factors to speak of.
After an average opening, we cut to more Daffy/random animator antics when Foghorn Leghorn walks in all of a sudden and gives Daffy a script and tells him to rehearse his line. As entertaining as Foghorn can be, this wasn’t a good bit. Daffy barely handles it when he is told to do something for Bugs or Jack Warner, so why should he take directions from a less popular character than Foghorn, and why even use the rooster, anyway? They could have added in Bugs, maybe Porky, maybe even Elmer or Yosemite Sam, but Friz adds in a character that he had personally not worked with(Foghorn was mostly a Robert McKimson character) to move the story along. Again, why?
It turns out the first of our three brand new cartoons, entitled “The Yolk’s on You”, starts off with Foghorn heading into his egg factory where he tells the chickens to laid a bunch of colorful eggs for Easter. The fan favorite Miss Prissy is told to laid turquoise eggs, but being the screw-up she is makes a golden one by mistake. She throws it outside where Daffy and Sylvester are seen together searching for food in trash cans. Daffy sees the gold egg and hides it for himself, while Sylvester gets wise and catches it behind Daffy’s back, leading the two to go on a wild goose egg(well, chicken egg) chase to obtain it, all done in not-so-glorious limited animation. Because this is a cartoon and neither character are seemingly favored here, neither one wins the egg at the end of the episode.
Instead, Daffy makes the “smart” decision to hide the egg back it where it came from, in Miss Prissy’s coop. As soon as they do though, all of the eggs popped out today are taken by an egg company, and it ends with Daffy and Sylvester searching through each of the eggs made today.
So Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, and Sylvester the cat all appear in this cartoon. What a mix! Having Daffy and Sylvester be together is a bit of a novelty, since Mel Blanc uses very similar voices for the two characters, but you can’t tell since Daffy’s is sped up before his cartoons reached the public(I don’t know if Warner still does this with Daffy’s current appearances today, but you can tell that they don’t do that with Tweety, who went through a similar process. Instead of sounding like a sweet little bird, most of Tweety’s modern voice actors sound like a grown man trying to sound like a sweet little bird, which I just find creepy). Funny thing is, this isn’t the first time the two appeared together in such large quantities. In Chuck Jones’ much sharper short “The Scarlet Pumpernickel”, Daffy plays the protagonist while Sylvester plays the antagonist.
Meanwhile, Sylvester and Foghorn have appeared together in the also better cartoon “Crowing Pains”, which is also available on the same disc in this particular Golden Collection. Although Foghorn doesn’t appear again in the cartoon after the opening, this is still worth noting because I gave you at least two other cartoons worth watching instead of this shit.
If there’s one positive I can say about the cartoon, is that it is nice to see Sylvester be a supporting character in a cartoon without having to chase a smaller animal again. After the studio closed, pretty much all endeavors starring the cat would have him chase an animal based on instinct or hunger, and that animal usually would be Tweety. True, most people might remember Sylvester best for chasing Tweety or Speedy Gonzales, but people often tend to forget that Sylvester has a fully alive personality outside of these cuddyl, clever creatures, and while Freleng found great success having Sylvester chase them(three of his four Oscar wins, “Tweetie Pie”, “Speedy Gonzales”, and “Birds Anonymous”, were Sylvester chase pictures), but Sylvester is one of the few characters who the three major directors from that time period(Freleng, Jones, and McKimson) all seemed to like using, for different results.
Freleng often had the cat be an obsessive chaser, but wouldn’t be afraid to use Sylvester’s obsessive side over his clumsy one for a change(“Birds Anonymous” is probably the defining example of this); Jones had Sylvester be a simple house cat, one who usually didn’t talk; McKimson developed Sylvester a bit by giving him a son to fight for, and made things a little interesting by having Sylvester Jr be ashamed of his father‘s misgivings. I’d recommend watching “Canned Feud” or any short with him alongside Elmer Fudd or Porky Pig to see what I mean.
Now the second short is one that instantly made me groan. “The Chocolate Chase” has Daffy keep an eye on a chocolate bunny making factory’s inventory in Mexico to make sure that the local mice don’t steal from it. Since the other mice aren’t fast enough to run past Daffy to get to the bunnies, they call upon who else but Speedy Gonzales, the fastest mouse in all of Mexico. Since Daffy is big and Speedy is little and fast, you can tell who wins for the remainder of the cartoon.
I was expecting something really horrible here because one of the series of Looney Tunes cartoons made while DePatie-Freleng handled the production of the cartoons were shorts with Daffy and Speedy. These are among the worst cartoons made in the Warner animation canon. Daffy was written as an asshole for no reason other to have some sort of conflict, while Speedy would provoke him with unfunny dialogue, and the chases would often be done very sloppily and with reused gags. Again, these were mostly McKimson projects, so it’s surprising to see Freleng take this idea straight from these cartoons.
For some reason though, this isn’t as bad as your average Daffy/Speedy cartoon. Granted, it is by no means good, either- it mostly reuses gags from “Speedy Gonzales” with Daffy in Sylvester’s shoes- but Daffy is a little more likable here than he usually is. In your average Daffy/Speedy cartoon, Daffy shows up in Mexico for no real reason and continually messes with Speedy again, for no real reason. Here, Daffy is just trying to do his job, when Speedy comes in to interfere with it. Since Daffy loses and becomes a chocolate duck at the end, I guess this makes Speedy the unlikable asshole at the end, if anyone. Well, for the most part, anyway. Daffy does except the mice’s offerings of a bag full of pesos as payment for some bunnies, but doesn’t hand them any back. It is a dick move but it’s not Daffy’s fault he can’t give them any of the inventory.
Daffy still doesn’t really act like Daffy, however. When Speedy speeds by, he tries to catch him but fails along the way, often without a clever remark. This is fine for Sylvester, who usually remains silent in Freleng’s chase cartoons, but Daffy has a tongue as silver as a shiny spoon, but he doesn’t really get to use it here. Daffy fights back, but his means(a giant net and a fast moped) are tired and uninventive. Usually Daffy is more clever than this, but I just don’t think Freleng cared enough to come up with better ways for him to try to get Speedy at this point.
The last short, “Daffy Flies North”, is somewhat reminiscent of some of Daffy’s earlier cartoons, where he was the pray and had to outsmart hunters such as Porky or Elmer. He flies north along with a pack of ducks who are drawn similar to him, but complains to the head of the pack because he doesn’t see the point of flying north for the spring and south for the winter. Why not try east and west instead? This is a stupid argument, but it is probably something Daffy would do. There’s only so much he can take in being an accessory; Daffy always has to be first!
So Daffy leaves the pack and checks out his new environment. He tries to find a way north by hitchhiking, but the only car that stops is one full of hunters and hunting dogs(Ha ha. Very funny.). After a minute of equally unfunny gags in which Daffy tries to find a way to get a ride, he finds a horse that I swear looks like a camel eating grass out in a field, and Daffy’s new goal is to tame it so he can ride it north. Can Friz spare us the agony of seeing Daffy attempt to tame a horse to reach is goal?
He can’t.
Now we get some very unfunny jokes where Daffy tries to get the horse to take him north. One bit actually has him fall in water and has Daffy emerge blue from it. Was the water supposed to be paint? Was there really not enough money in the budget to let Daffy look a little wet so they decided to let him come out in the same design but just painted blue to make him look wet? I don’t know, but this scene pisses me off more than any other. Especially because he falls in water in at least 3 other points in the cartoon.
This is the worst of the three shorts because even compared to other two, it’s the least inventive and least interesting. I can’t list any specific cartoons similar to it on the top of my head, but I also can’t name one bit that made me chuckle or even think that it was the least bit inspired.
Thankfully after this suck fest we only have one more wraparound short that caps off the show. After messing around with Daffy some more, the animator draws him into an Easter egg that has a note saying “Don’t open until next Easter”.
And I won’t. Won’t open it next Easter. Or the next after. Or the next after. Or ever, actually. How far south could Friz go in the span of nearly 2 decades? As much as I love the Looney Tunes, I think I would be better off without crap like this sullying the good name of Termite Terrace.
This isn’t Easter, but I felt like finally watching this special in it’s full after owning the set for a year or two. Now that we’re getting a new series dedicated to the Looney Tunes after years of dormancy, I just have to hope that this new series won’t be as creatively bankrupt as this shit. Now this came from one of the people behind the Warner classics, I can’t help but wonder how relative newcomers like those working on the show can compare.
Hopefully when Daffy falls in water, he won’t turn blue.
Originally posted on Saturday, July 31, 2010.
As expected, the series is done very much in the style of Robot Chicken, stringing together a series of animated sketches which are apparently part of some kind of paper world where MAD is law. That said, one would think that Robot Chicken more than fills in that particular spot for Cartoon Network, leading one to question just how necessary MAD is.
