Daffy reacts and does his best to save the act. An unseen audience member provides a capper for the scene.
Gerry Chiniquy, Art Davis and Virgil Ross are Freleng’s animators.
Tuesday 24 July 2018
A Few Bugs in the Act
Friz Freleng and writer Warren Foster beautifully put together a gag in Show Biz Bugs (1957), where Daffy Duck elaborately sets up a trained pigeon act on stage only to have the pigeons unexpectedly fly out of the theatre.
Daffy reacts and does his best to save the act. An unseen audience member provides a capper for the scene.
Gerry Chiniquy, Art Davis and Virgil Ross are Freleng’s animators.
Daffy reacts and does his best to save the act. An unseen audience member provides a capper for the scene.
Gerry Chiniquy, Art Davis and Virgil Ross are Freleng’s animators.
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A re-do of the gag which previously appeared in Freleng's "Curtain Razor" from 1949 and written by Tedd Pierce.
ReplyDeleteThe Warners' gag writers sure liked to borrow from one another!
Somehow, this works better in context of the plot involving Daffy. Same with the blow-up gag at the end.
ReplyDeleteI like the two-headed janitor in Curtain Razor.
So "Curtain Razor" was pretty much a testing ground for the gags that "Show Biz Bugs" would later have?
DeleteDaffy's stare out the window writes paragraphs-Ha!! Love the Bugs-Daffy competitions. Of course. What competition would there be in a " Looney Tune " without someone playing " Those Endearing Young Charms "? I don't have to explain the out come of that one. Bugs-Daffy, Bugs-Yosemite.
ReplyDeleteDaffy's by-now established 1950s personality, then angle of the birds as they fly away (not straight back from the camera, and with the two patrons in the box watching them go by), the use of both music and silence in the scene by Friz and Milt Franklyn and the tomato end gag (as opposed to the trap door) are what make the re-use of this gag superior to the original in "Curtain Razor" (and if you go through the years, there are a lot of Warners gags that were used even in the 1930s which were rehashed but improved -- nothing wrong with that. It's when the gags are reused but come out far flatter than the original that there's a problem).
ReplyDelete15 years ago, Jaime Weinman tried his hand at animation ID in this cartoon. He wasn't sure if the pigeon sequence was done by Chiniquy or Davis but guessed the former. My guess is that at least the post-flyaway was crafted by Davis. Of course, . . .
ReplyDeleteI thought the straight-ahead-looking Daffy was Davis.
DeleteIt is Davis. Much of the re-use is also from Pete Burness and Manny Perez, who animated the same gag almost a decade before in the original short.
DeleteI remember a DePatie-Freleng Sat.-morning cartoon from 1976, "The Oddball Couple," a rip-off of "The Odd Couple." They actually had the nerve to reuse this classic gag there.
ReplyDelete"The Oddball Couple" also had an episode that ripped off the "stork assigned to deliver the baby of the giant that lives on top of the beanstalk" gag from the Warner Bros. cartoon short "Goo-Goo Goliath".
ReplyDeleteIf you go look at the title sequence to 1978's "Revenge of the Pink Panther" -- the first one wholly animated by D-FE since the original Panther movie in 1964 -- it's glutted with gags from Friz's old Warner Brothers cartoons. They still work with the Panther and the Inspector, but they just don't work as well as the originals, if you know the source material with Bugs, Daffy, Sylvester and others....
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99eiwAGSYZo