Thursday 13 September 2012

Duck Soup to Nuts Exit

Porky Pig and Daffy Duck made a great combination in the 1940s. Daffy outsmarted Porky and, in the process, pulled off funny dialogue and tricks that came out of nowhere. He was both casual and vivacious (Bob Clampett stretched his emotions more than the other directors). Unfortunately, he became an egotistical patsy in the ‘50s but that’s another story.

Friz Freleng’s “Duck Soup to Nuts” (released in 1944) has a string of great routines that flow one into another. It also has an interesting animation effect. Porky rushes off camera to get a bucket to bail out the lake that Daffy’s in. Note the multiple pig eye.








Tedd Pierce wrote the story and the animation credit on the original prints of the cartoon went to Dick Bickenbach. Looks like Paul Julian painted the backgrounds.

1 comment:

  1. My favorite part here is the Fuller Brush man gag, followed by the hyper-determined Porky bucket-draining the lake to get at Daffy.

    This is kind of the middle cartoon of a non-trilogy trilogy featuring woodland Daffy hectoring Porky to no end and show how strong both the characters' pairing and the basic set-up were. Three cartoons, three different directors and writers -- Freleng/Pierce here, Jones/Maltese for 1942's "My Favorite Duck" and McKimson/Foster for 1950's "Boobs in the Woods".

    All are excellent cartoons, and all avoid turning Porky into Elmer (as some have suggested) by maintaining Porky as the more sympathetic figure and, in the end, by allowing him to finally get his revenge on the duck before the iris out.

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