Here’s an insane sequence where Daffy Duck is trying to run away from Porky Pig. Porky has ahold of Daffy’s leg. The leg keeps stretching. Daffy tries to pull it back to him.
Matched shots? Eh, that's for Disney, not for Bob Clampett. The camera cuts from a Daffy holding his leg to Daffy not holding his leg.
Porky’s coming for him. No stretched leg is going stop him. The two chase after each other on a conveyer belt. The expressions of panic are nuts.
Daffy pulls up a hair (Ducks have hair?). The leg is back to normal.
All this comes after the scene where Porky uses his tongue to bridge his body to stop him from sitting on an egg.
This isn’t even the insane part. The machine turns the two of them into a diapered pig-duck delivered to mother ape (with a huge, Manny Gould floppy tongue), who ends the cartoon with a radio reference (John J. Anthony. There are Bing and Cantor references earlier).
Rod Scribner, Bill Melendez and Bob McKimson also animate on this short (is that Melendez on the conveyer belt scene?), with layouts by Tom McKimson and backgrounds by Dorcy Howard. Warren Foster put together the story.
An all time favorite!
ReplyDeleteThe postwar Warner Bros. cartoons, revered as they are, would have been a lot more fun if Bob Clampett had hung around a bit longer.
ReplyDeleteFor a while. Everyone's cartoons became less energetic by 1950. Even the Tex Avery of 1942 isn't the same as the Tex Avery of 1952. Chuck Jones became enamoured with stop-and-pose. I suspect Clampett's work would have been much like his Beany and Cecil cartoons of the early '60s
DeleteFunny you mention Beany and Cecil. I've been working my way through those cartoons and have so far seen no trace of the wild, unhinged, unbridled energy associated with Clampett's Warner cartoons. Certainly not in the animation. (And if there had been even a single scene like that, it would have been reused six times.) There are plenty of early 1960s pop culture references. Oh, and puns. Lots of puns. It's not a bad series, by any means. Particularly by TV standards, it's pretty good. I just haven't found it as brilliant as I've always heard it played up to be. Oh, and they're Bob Clampett cartoons. You'll be reminded of that in the opening and closing of every single cartoon, as well as in the series opening and closing credits.It's onscreen as well as being sung.
DeleteThe hardest I ever laughed as a kid was watching that scene where Porky is ready to kill running toward the camera ( from Daffy’s perspective )and Daffy fleeing as fast as he could with that over stretched leg. That, and the music were the perfect track this crazy train was running on.
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