Daffy, the One Duck Band

Norm McCabe’s The Daffy Duckaroo has a lively start, with the newspapers revealing crooner Daffy Dackaroo has deserted films for the wild and wooly west.

Wearing a cowboy hat that covers his head, Daffy rides a burro into the cartoon, strumming a guitar and singing “My Little Buckaroo.” After removing the hat (and the hats underneath), Daffy gives a “Howdy, you all!” to those of us watching the cartoon and carries on with the song.



Things gallop along, with Daffy quickly pulling a honky-tonk piano from a trap door in his travel-trailer (complete with a stein of beer on top). After two bars, he reaches behind the piano, pulls out a trombone he plays for three-quarters of a bar, honks a horn twice for the rest of the bar, then gives another two bars on the piano.

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McCabe cuts to Daffy scatting the song from various positions, including extended bouncing legs that we saw when he shouted “woo-hoo” in those pre-greedy, pre-Speedy days.



There are several animated character twirls. Here’s a frame from one.



Tubby Millar’s story leaves a bit to be desired. Daffy’s motivation isn’t well thought out. I get using sex as a weapon against your opponent, but Daffy takes it a little far for no necessary reason. There’s no real ending; the cartoon stops when a character who had nothing to do with the plot shows up out of nowhere (I can’t help but wonder if McCabe was told his cartoons had to end with a war public service message). But it’s likeable enough, certainly in the first half.

I learned something today from a note from Matt Hunter:

There’s a brief bit of footage cut from most prints of this. The camera pans back to reveal Daffy’s trailer, which advertises him as a Warner Bros. Star.
This was likely done when the cartoons went to TV through the Guild/Sunset films deal…Jack Warner wanted all references to the studio removed from anything that went to television. He felt (at the time) that TV was inferior to theatrical films, and didn’t want his studio’s name associated with it.

You can see the murky, low-resolution frame grabs. I have two versions of this cartoon (three counting a Fred Ladd colourised re-trace). Both are fuzzy and the other is muddier than this one. You can’t appreciate the animators’ work (Cal Dalton gets the screen credit). McCabe deserves better than this.

The song over the opening titles is “I Can’t Get Along Little Dogie” by M.K. Jerome and Jack Scholl. I swear I’ve heard either Judy Canova or Jerry Colonna sing this on an old radio show. It sounds a lot like Jerome and Scholl’s “The Old Apple Tree,” sung by the McKimson crow in Corn Plastered.