DAFFY DUCK’S QUACKBUSTERS
It seems more a matter of confusion at Warner Brothers than either poetic justice or business acumen that has denied this triumphant new cartoon feature a theatrical opening in Chicago, although it has recently become available here on video. After a limited if successful run in a New York theater last fall and several scattered theatrical play dates elsewhere in the U.S., Daffy Duck’s Quackbusters has entered the vast no-man’s-land of new features that are available for the most part only on tape, never having received the mainstream attention routinely accorded to other, mainly inferior, Hollywood releases.
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Recycled Hollywood classics are very much in evidence right now, in a variety of forms, but this postmodernist conflation–consisting of nuggets from nine earlier Warner Brothers cartoons, two more-recent ones, and a generous amount of new material–displays a critical intelligence and a creative energy that were not apparent in such previous compilations as The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie, The Looney, Looney, Looney Bugs Bunny Movie, Bugs Bunny’s 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales, and Daffy Duck’s Movie: Fantastic Island. The principle behind all these earlier efforts was basically cut-and-paste–i.e., string together a bunch of old cartoons with a few new linking segments designed to give them a crude continuity–which meant that the only real function of any new material was to provide setups for the old stuff. Quackbusters, which is much closer to intricate interweaving than cutting and pasting, is more a fresh effort that uses some old material as part of its design. A feature that involves some careful rethinking of the Warners cartoon tradition, it manages to create a new whole so seamlessly constructed that it is nearly impossible for any nonspecialist to tell where–apart from up-to-date topical references–the old animation leaves off and the new animation begins. (The blurb on the video box states that 60 percent of the animation is new.)
Loaded with intertextual high jinks, Night of the Living Duck begins with Daffy plowing through his collection of horror comics (an idea borrowed in part from Robert Clampett’s The Great Piggybank Robbery, which featured “Duck Twacy”), looking desperately for the comic that continues the story he happens to be engrossed in, when a grotesque alarm clock falls on his head. Then comes an extended dream sequence in which he finds himself in a nightclub as the featured performer, appearing before an exclusive clientele of famous monsters (including the Fly, the Mummy, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre zombie, Godzilla, the Creature From the Black Lagoon, a cyclops, Frankenstein and his bride, Dracula, the Blob, and–just to be perverse–Mad’s Alfred E. Neuman). Daffy prepares for his number by drinking a bottle of “Eau de Torme,” and then proceeds in Mel Torme’s actual voice to sing a likable ditty called “Monsters Lead Such Interesting Lives,” before chatting with the guests and finally incurring Godzilla’s wrath; he wakes up amid his comic books and finds the comic he’s been looking for. Here, too, we find a plot that can be read in allegorical and auteurist terms in relation to Ford and Lennon’s predicament: a preoccupation with continuity (Daffy’s search for the missing comic book, the continuation of the adventure he is engrossed in), which leads to a meditation on the past of characters who now appear to be detached from their original movie contexts (roughly comparable to the clientele at the Ink and Paint nightclub in Who Framed Roger Rabbit–although according to Ford, he and Lennon dreamed up this sequence well before Roger Rabbit’s release).
