Painted Pun

Daffy Duck's being chased by Little Beaver in The Daffy Duckaroo. The pun in this scene is a groaner, the kind that might have been thought up by Bugs Hardaway, or Tex Avery's unit.



Pan to the right. Daffy and the Beav run through the scene to the sound of J.S. Zamecnik's "In the Stirrups" (aka "Western Scene"). The initial sign proved to be correct.



Mind you, if Avery and Rich Hogan or Heck Allen pulled this one, there would be a sign or someone putting down the gag.

The ending to this one is so bizarre, it's in Screen Gems territory. A tribe of American Indians rides on horseback toward Daffy and his burro, who hid under their travel trailer. Out of nowhere, an Indian who had never been part of the cartoon walks carrying a stack of tires that had been taken off the trailer (unseen because of dust clouds that obscure the scene). "No fit-um putt-putt," says the native (with the voice of Chuck Jones' Martian), who rides off on motor scooter with no wheels and into the distance. McCabe seems to have been stuck inserting wartime propaganda or messages into his cartoons, incongruous to the plot or not. That's how this one ends. Rubber shortage gag.



It may have been patriotic, but it had absolutely nothing to do with the cartoon.

Cal Dalton is the credited animator, but Izzy Ellis, Vive Risto and Jack Carey handled scenes as well.

The official release date of the cartoon was Oct. 24, 1942. Daily Variety reported on Nov. 12 McCabe had been inducted into the First Motion Picture Unit at "Fort Roach."

You know how Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising had different characters emerge from behind the drum to say "So long, folks!" I wish the studio had carried on doing that on the Looney Tunes. I would have liked to have seen Daffy (or maybe Little Beaver) burst out. Instead...

Cartoon Video News

It’s always a good day to read about restored cartoons that can find their way to your home.

Once again, the Warner Archive Collection is coming through with what you see on the right as of March 24th. You can see the list of shorts HERE.

There’s a lot of Chuck Jones in this two-volume set, but there are some cartoons by Art Davis, one by Tex Avery (The Heckling Hare) and even two of Norm McCabe’s efforts (the less than exciting Hop and Go and the in-need-of-restoration The Daffy Duckaroo). And there’ll be a clean, clear version of Jim Backus as the Hubert Updyke III genie in Bob McKimson’s A Lad in His Lamp that was last seen on laser disc.

Don’t expect Bosko or Buddy to show up here.

If you’re a fan of Famous Studios, you’ll be happy to hear word from Cartoon Logic that a 1940s collection will be distributed soon by ClassicFlix. There will be more about this in the new year.

These shorts really needed loving care; it seems the versions I’ve seen are either faded or turning a shade of pink. In fact, the TV prints I watched in the ‘60s don’t strike me as being all that great.

You can watch a clip below. The restoration is exemplary.

Nutsy Blur

Confusions of a Nutsy Spy (released in December 1942) is full of angled shots and varying perspectives in a war-time tale of a really stupid Porky Pig trying to capture a bomb-carrying Nazi spy.

There’s also a pan shot reminiscent of the Fleischers in the late 1930s. To simulate speed, the pan is blurred. Not by the camera pan itself but by brush work over the background painting. I can’t snip this together to give you the full background, but here are some frames that may give you an idea.



The backgrounds are likely by Dick Thomas.

Norm McCabe directed this war short, which has some of the most tedious and obvious puns you can find in a Warners cartoon, supplied by Don Christensen.

The cartoon opens with a rather low-key violin and clarinet version of “Hey Doc!” by Edgar Sampson and Kim Gannon. You can hear a different version below.

And the Champeen Is...

In 1943, there was a war on, so you'd expect a certain amount of sabotage to be going on around the world. Unfortunately, one place where it shouldn’t have been happening was in the Warner Bros. cartoon studio, where Norm McCabe’s directorial efforts were continually sabotaged by weak stories.

One of them is the one-shot Looney Tune Hop and Go, released February 6, 1943. There are some pretty good visual touches in it, but the story (credited to Tubby Millar) stars three weak characters. There’s a dopey kangaroo (who doesn’t have an Australian accent), a rabbit (who has a Scottish accent for some reason) and another rabbit with no personality who barely speaks.

Somehow, Millar wants us to connect with these characters and to a plot about who is really the “champeen” hopper. But does anyone really care? Maybe he thought the early ‘40s love of heckling cartoon characters could somehow carry the film.

On top of that, McCabe seems to have been stuck shoehorning patriotic war stuff into his shorts. In McCabe’s The Ductators, it works well because the characters are clear-cut Axis bad guys. In this one, the ending just seems obligatory. And the best Millar could come up with a name for the kangaroo was "Claude Hopper"?

McCabe has future UPAer Dave Hilberman as his uncredited layout man, and the two try to be creative. The opening is shot at the kangaroo’s visual perspective with the scene hopping up and down. There are attempts at perspective animation. And there’s great use of light and shadow after the kangaroo is catapulted into the night atmosphere by the rabbits.



Claude lights a match to see where he is.



Suddenly, the sound of anti-aircraft fire. Claude twirls around, with his body alternating in shadow, or partly lit.



Now we see the anti-aircraft fire.



Cut to a long shot of Claude flying through the search lights.



There’s an explosion and a crate put in the kangaroo’s pouch by the rabbits jostles out.



As Claude falls, he realises what the crate contains and tosses it away. Claude hit the earth and hops away. The crate hits the earth. Nothing hops away.



Dissolve to Claude, telling us that we now know who the “champeen” is. Cut to a longer shot. Claude has destroyed Tokyo. Cue Porky bursting out of the drum.



Interestingly, the background artist (Dick Thomas?) spells it “Tokyo.” McCabe’s next cartoon spelled it “Tokio.” But the less said about that one, the better.

Cal Dalton is handed the rotating animation credit on this one. Izzy Ellis and John Carey are likely artists on this as well.

Pinto Colvig appropriates his Goofy voice for the kangaroo. Mel Blanc plays both rabbits, with one having his standard Scottish accent he gave to Botsworth Twink on the Abbott and Costello radio show.

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. Cal Dalton animates.



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. Izzy Ellis animates.



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. Ellis again.



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



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. (AUG. 2026 NOTE: the people at the Warner Archive have restored this cartoon and the muddy frame grabs have been replaced. Thanks, Warner).

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.

Gophers, McCabe-Style

The elements were there, but Norm McCabe and his writing staff just couldn’t pull it off.

Art Davis (and, I guess, writer George Hill) invented some heckling gophers in The Goofy Gophers (1947).

Tedd Pierce and Chuck Jones came out with a couple of mice, one a Brooklyn sharpie, the other a dullard, who terrorised a cat in The Aristo Cat (1943).

McCabe tried both concepts a few years earlier in Gopher Goofy (1942).

It has familiar elements from Warner Bros. cartoons—a character happily copying Jerry Colonna saying “Something new has been added!”, a human character with a red nose (a la Elmer Fudd in A Wild Hare and other cartoons), characters talking to the camera (“Keep your shirts on, folks. Us gophers go through this all the time), and Carl Stalling loading up the soundtrack with “42nd Street.”

McCabe and writer Don Christensen also pull a variation on a Maltese gag from The Heckling Hare (1941) where a dog crushes a tomato but thinks he’s killed Bugs Bunny. Here, the farmer thinks he’s crushed one of the gophers.



Here’s the punch line.



I really want to like Norm McCabe’s cartoons. Really I do. But most of them are full of blah characters and weak jokes. None of the characters in this short do anything for me. The farmer is a zero and the gophers don’t have the wit of Hubie. The dummy says, out of nowhere, “I miss Central Park.” What? Why? Lame characters equal lame cartoons.

This was a Looney Tunes cartoon. The series still featured Porky Pig in the opening and closing titles, but Leon Schlesinger had given up any pretense that the LTs were a showcase for the pig. Porky d-dee-uh-doesn’t appear anywhere in this short. It might have been stronger if he had been the farmer and got some decent dialogue.

Izzy Ellis is the credited animator and Dick Thomas remains uncredited as the background artist.