November Flies By

What’s the best turkey dinner cartoon without the word “yams” in it?

This is all very subjective, but my answer is Holiday For Drumsticks from the Art Davis unit.

Daffy Duck craves all the food for a turkey that hillbillies want to fatten up for Thanskgiving, so he eats while forcing Tom to do athletic stuff to sweat off the weight. There’s an imaginative scene where the passage of time is shown by Daffy and the turkey irising in and irising out while letters and numbers form in the distance (a solid blue background is originally a star of pain when Tom hits a cross-bar) and swoosh forward out of camera range.



Davis pulls off a great bit of timing in one scene. He has the hillbilly slowly reaching for his rifle (animated on twos), then grabbing it and shooting it, which takes up five frames. The barely moving arm emphasizes the quick movement that follows.

Milt Franklyn comes up with a clever arrangement of Sunny Skylar’s “All the Time” over the opening titles. Since the cartoon is called Holiday For Drumsticks, it opens with a drumstick against a cymbal (score by Carl Stalling).

Lloyd Turner is credited with the story. Emery Hawkins and Don Williams animate along with Bill Melendez and Basil Davidovich.

We Canadians have already celebrated Thanksgiving so we send best wishes to our friends and readers in the U.S.A. today. We’ll have posts to mid-December.