Category Archives: classic animation

One deed that needs doing is the location of a complete print of The Daffy Duckaroo, a 1942 Daffy Duck cartoon by Norm McCabe.

Here’s the scoop:
There are two different versions of the opening song Daffy sings at the beginning of the cartoon. The more widely-seen version, Guild/Sunset B/W prints and the Korean redrawn, is actually in-sync with the animation, but there is a definite splice in the soundtrack. (Click here to see that copy.) The computer colorized version, as aired on Nickelodeon, featured a different half that obviously was incorrectly pasted over the wrong animation.

Put them together, as Larry Tremblay did in the embeded reconstruction (re: “fake”) below, and you get a complete song.

I have no idea as to why the soundtrack was split up like this. If had to guess (and I hate doing this, because it’ll end up on Wikipedia as a fact), there may have been censorship by Guild/Sunset to remove a legible reference to Warner Brothers on Daffy’s trailer (the company verifiably removed WB references in Porky in Wackyland and You Ought to Be in Pictures), which you can kind of make out at the end of the cartoon when it’s in view again. Again, this is only a guess. But then, if that was the case, why does the computer colorized version use the same footage, and the second half the song? The mind boggles.

If you have leads to an answer on this mystery, I and many others would appreciate them.

Now for the actual cartoon…

This is actually a very underrated cartoon for several reasons. It’s one of the earliest cartoons that uses “modern design” successfully, neck-and-neck almost with Chuck Jones’s usage of it. McCabe unfortunately had the handicap of being resigned to wartime propaganda as story material and having his films only available in shoddy condition, but some of his films are worth rediscovering. I wish I knew who McCabe’s layout artist was during this period.

The earliest Art Davis Warner animation is seen in this cartoon (mostly in the scenes with Daffy and Little Beefer in the teepee), marking the beginning of his 20 years of employment, and beginning his reign of terror as the studio’s funniest animator (a title only also held by Rod Scribner).

The classic sexually active Daffy takes center stage, a carryover from some of the last cartoons Bob Clampett did with his unit, but here it’s about as overt as it would get (Frank Tashlin excepted). Some of it borderlines uncomfortable when he seems to genuinely enjoy Beefer’s advances.

On a related note, Jerry Beck has the honor of being the only historian whose writing created an awkward moment between my parents and I. I asked them what the word “bisexual” meant, as Jerry used the word to refer to Daffy’s behavior in his book in the passage on this cartoon. (This had to be when I was seven, reading his Looney Tunes books for book reports. That created even more awkwardness.)

It always astounds me how much stuff was literally trashed at Disney’s throughout its history. Would you believe that they once scrapped a cartoon that was nearly completely animated, simply because of its length?

Plight of the Bumble Bee, a 1951 Jack Kinney directed Mickey Mouse cartoon, featuring the work of Fred Moore, Cliff Nordberg, and others, is the cartoon in question. Kinney offered the following explanation to why it was shelved:

“The best Mickey ever was never finished. It was called The Plight of the Bumble Bee, and it was all finished in animation. It had an awkward length, but Fred and Sib agreed that it could not be cut, so it was shelved.”

Calling this the best Mickey ever is overrating it at best, though I’m sure Kinney and the animators were sore over their hard work being thrown into the Morgue. It’s a standard Kinney cartoon, which means it’s a notch above the hackwork that the Shorts Department had been turning out on a regular basis for years. Certainly not a forerunner to One Froggy Evening in any way as I’ve read some people suggest.

Still, it’s neat to see something the studio never intended the public to see, and “new” work by one of the most highly recognizable animators. You can watch the rough cut below.

Hans Perk offers boards and some great original animation scans here.

This is one of the more famous Bugs Bunny cartoons by Bob Clampett for two reasons: 1) it’s on basically every public domain tape ever made (the source of my childhood love/hate for this one), and 2) almost all of the drawings and poses from it became the basis for all future modelsheets and licensing guides. This is not the greatest Bugs cartoon (it’s up there), but the animation is probably the best it ever would look.

The ‘loser’ Bugs is easier to take in Falling Hare than it is in others, because he’s not really the loser; at the start and finish, he’s in control of things, and all is well. This makes it actually unique among all the Bugs Bunny cartoons: he’s over-confident and keeps screwing up, but an unseen power rectifies all.

We get the standard near-minute of static footage (no new animation) typical of a Clampett cartoon at the beginning. Some speculate that he did this (and reused footage) so he could spend more time making the new animation better than anyone else’s (ass-kissing sycophants); others say it’s because he was too busy scoring with girls in the Termite Terrace crapper and playing ‘pwanks’ on the Jones unit to have time (too caustic, but more likely); it’s probably somewhere in the middle.

Bob McKimson tends to get all of the glory for this one for doing the mammoth amount of footage at the beginning, and he deserves all the praise he gets. There’s nothing more to say: the drawing, movement, action, lipsync, and acting is perfect. If you notice, Bugs has a [slight] potbelly in these scenes, so the look even predates McKimson’s own films.

Rod Scribner did very little on this cartoon, though he gets the sole animation credit, a typical tradition at Schlesinger’s. Being the most recognizable and funniest of all the Warner animators, his footage is distinct in its ability to capture Bugs’s horror and anger like no other Golden Age artist. [Before anyone comments, no, Bill Melendez did not animate the “these blockbusters…” scene as he says in his audio commentary with John K. While likely Scribner’s assistant at the time, he did not become a full-fledged animator until Wagon Heels.]

On the other end of the spectrum, we have Virgil Ross, who never really could draw Bugs with such ‘spirit’, only ‘wascally’, which is part of the reason he left the Clampett unit. There’s nothing wrong with his animation here though: the drawing and movement (lots of smears, a Virgil earmark) looks just as good as anyone else’s, and the scenes don’t call for a particularly nasty Bugs. It’s also actually very stylized in its approach, in an almost Tashlin-like fashion (there’s even the scene by Ross of Bugs deflating that would be reused by Art Davis in Tashlin’s Plane Daffy). Clampett was never one to follow the ‘less is more’ rule; occasionally an action in his cartoons could be too full, to the gag’s own detriment. So it’s surprising to see Bugs machine gun from one pose to another, when he attempts to dart off but only fall teeth-first into the ground.

I wish animators like Ross were still around. His work for all the directors is so human and sincere, unlike so much self-concious Disney animation. That’s a quality that he’d probably have lost if he was actually aware of how great he was and didn’t have Clampett and Freleng chastising him and lauding others (only Avery ever gave him compliments and even offered him a job at MGM).

Two other lesser known Warner stalwarts are thrown into the mix of Falling Hare. Phil Monroe flopped around the studio for years: from Freleng to Tashlin to Jones to Freleng to Tashlin to Clampett… before finally settling in with the Jones unit in 1946. I have no explanation for why. Some of Monroe’s drawing and posing looks a bit like Jones’s Bugs here, particularly the pursed lips. The excellent subtlety of Bugs looking under the bolt for the Gremlin is often lost because of crappy transfers, but thankfully those days are long over. There’s a bit of Goofy-influence in the way he tries to smash down the door, settling into a ridiculously cute/stupid pose after each hit.

Tom McKimson did character layout on most of the best Clampett films, but he animated beforehand. It was Larry Tremblay who originally pointed out some of his work in this film to me, and it’s completely identical to his drawing style in the Bugs Bunny stories of the Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies comic book. There’s more than a few poses in this cartoon that I’m certain showed up in one of the stories he drew. (Coincidentally, the Bugs in the comics matches Clampett’s interpretation of the character more than any other director’s.)

An interesting way to tell the difference between his and his brother Bob’s work is how they draw Bugs’s ears. Bob was always the perfectionist, and one ear almost always matches the other. Tom wasn’t as much of a stickler for that sort of thing and would often draw one ear bent or crooked.

We’ve all seen, read, and heard about this cartoon a hundred times, but I hope this animator breakdown sheds some light on more of its many fine aspects.