Monday 3 September 2018

Stupor Duck

Stupor Duck may be the best of the Bob McKimson/Tedd Pierce TV parodies. There are some good gags, and Pierce seems to find a little capper for each of the sequences. And one of the animators gets in some multiples (with effective dry-brush work) that are fun to watch when you freeze the picture.



And later in the cartoon...



Keith Darling, Ted Bonnicksen, George Grandpré and Russ Dyson are the animators; not exactly A-listers. Bob Gribbroek is the layout artist. Daws Butler provides some uncredited voice work. The cartoon was released in 1956.

5 comments:

  1. McKimson's unit, post-shutdown, seemed to gain a little more life than the efforts they had immediately prior to the temporary closing (when the quality of Pierce's stories were such that Warners hired on Sid Marcus as a second story man for McKimson). Lots of good stuff, but it pretty much died out by the end of 1957.

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  2. What happened with the McKimson unit was that Russ Dyson passed away, and Keith Darling went over to the Jones unit. There were a number of cartoons that had only Grandpré and Bonnicksen as the animators. To round out the crew, two veteran assistants were promoted to full animators: Tom Ray and Warren Batchelder.

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  3. That was before Warner Bros. bought DC Comics.

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  4. "This is a job for... you know who!"

    Tedd gets name-dropped when Daffy reaches for a box of "Dr. Pierce's Mild Pills."

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  5. Both scenes in this post were possibly done by Keith (at least for the latter). Keith brought to the McKimson unit the smearing technique that you would find in numerous Jones cartoons. Darling would also happen to give characters Jone-esque faces.

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