Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies has gone through a variety of mascots throughout the 1930s before finally settling on Bugs Bunny. First there was Bosko (his creators, Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, took the copyright to the character with them when they left Warner Bros. for MGM), then Foxy (so much of a blatant copy of Mickey Mouse that Walt Disney himself threatened to sue), then Buddy (just plain bland), then Beans (meant as part of a pair with Porky Pig - the latter proved to be more popular), then Porky (worked better as a sidekick/straight man to characters more outrageous than himself). Yet while the rest were gracious enough to back out of the limelight when their time was up, one in particular was stubborn enough to keep trying to take back the mascot position - perhaps in part because Bugs seized his spotlight before he had a proper chance to bask in it.
That character, of course, was
Daffy Duck.
Introduced in the 1937 short
Porky's Duck Hunt (directed by Tex Avery), Daffy in his introduction was exactly as his name suggested - a screwball trickster of a duck who tormented his adversaries at every turn. However, his greedy, spotlight-hungry side would come to the forefront in the 1940 live-action/animation hybrid short
You Ought to Be in Pictures (directed by Friz Freleng, and somewhat based on a real-life experience where he briefly left Warner Bros. to work for MGM), where Daffy manipulates then-mascot Porky Pig into quitting Warner Bros. so that he can take his place as the head honcho of the Looney Tunes. Of course, the short ends with Porky realizing he's been had, returning to reclaim his position, and giving Daffy his comeuppance in the form of a beatdown, but even if Daffy
had succeeded, it would've been for naught - later that year,
A Wild Hare would premiere, and not long afterward Bugs would displace both Porky
and Daffy as the face of the Looney Tunes brand.
Needless to say, it didn't take long for Daffy to switch his sights from Porky to Bugs... except that isn't
quite the case. In fact, for the entirety of the 1940s, Bugs and Daffy appeared in the same cartoon a grand total of two times, both in 1943:
Porky Pig's Feat (in which Porky and Daffy are prevented from leaving a hotel after the latter gambles away the money meant for their hotel bill; they try calling Bugs for assistance as a last-ditch effort, only to find that he's trapped there with them) and
A Corny Concerto (a Fantasia parody with two segments, the first featuring Bugs and the second featuring Daffy; neither of them interact with each other or are even on screen at the same time). Of course, Daffy would have plenty of appearances opposite Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd during this time; his more established maliciousness in comparison to Bugs made it easier for him to serve as an antagonist to either of them while Bugs was edged closer to the heroic side throughout the 1940s. Not to mention he had a good deal of solo appearances without any previously established Looney Tunes characters.
Then, in the 1951 short
Rabbit Fire (directed by Chuck Jones), Daffy would finally make his move to directly upstage Bugs, in a scenario very familiar to both characters: getting hunted by (and subsequently outwitting) Elmer Fudd. But while outwitting the likes of Porky and Elmer (more so the latter - Porky tended to have the last laugh in cartoons where he's the victim of Daffy's antics) is easy enough for Daffy, Bugs is a whole other beast entirely - any attempt Daffy makes to get Bugs shot by Elmer, Bugs is able to turn right around so that Daffy is the one blasted instead. This would end up coloring both of the characters' personalities and the interactions between the two of them in Jones' later work - Bugs as the suave, carefree one who always gets the better of his foes (after they sufficiently provoke him into actually getting involved, of course), and Daffy as the selfish, egotistical one who can't seem to have anything go his way no matter how hard he tries (as Jones himself would later summarize, "Bugs Bunny is who we
want to be, Daffy Duck is who we
are.").
Unsurprisingly, Daffy's luck wasn't much (if any) better in the shorts directed by Jones that
didn't have him paired with Bugs, even the ones that had him in a "protagonist" role. Often, these would have Daffy in some sort of "heroic" role only for him to be hilariously incompetent at it - sometimes, Porky Pig would also appear in these as his more competent sidekick. A perfect example of this is the 1953 short
Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century, (a spoof of the
Buck Rogers comic strip and similar sci-fi stories) which featured Daffy as the titular space hero (and Porky as his "eager, young space cadet") battling it out with a diminutive Martian commander (who'd previously appeared as one of Bugs Bunny's antagonists - later works featuring the character would give him the name
Marvin the Martian) over the right to claim Planet X - home of "Illudium Phosdex", the shaving cream atom. Their conflict escalates (with Daffy almost always on the losing end) until Planet X itself is destroyed in the crossfire - after which Daffy claims what's left of it "in the name of the Earth!" (Porky: "Eh, bi-bi-bi-bi-big deal."). Another 1953 short starring Daffy,
Duck Amuck, took a more experimental approach - in it, Daffy is toyed with by an unseen (until the end) animator, who messes with the backgrounds, the sound effects, Daffy's appearance, Daffy's voice... basically any and every aspect of the cartoon itself (according to Jones, it was an experiment to see if Daffy would
remain Daffy if every single aspect of him was changed beyond recognition). Both of these cartoons received much critical acclaim and are generally regarded as among the absolute
best of the hundreds of Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies produced in the heyday of Termite Terrace, with the latter even managing to claim the 26th Academy Award for Best Animated Short Subject, ending
another winning streak by MGM's Tom and Jerry (who'd won the 24th and 25th awards for the cartoons
The Two Mouseketeers and
Johann Mouse, respectively).
Emboldened by the win, it was decided that Daffy would be the star of Warner Bros. first ever animated feature film - an adaptation of
Don Quixote, with Daffy in the role of the Don himself and Porky in the role of Sancho Panza (and unsurprisingly, with Chuck Jones in the director position). The resulting movie,
Daffy Quixote, would release on New Year's Eve in 1955 to much commercial success - Jones would later remark how ironic it was that, despite having written Daffy as the loser to Bugs' winner,
Daffy would be the first of the two to receive both an Academy Award
and a feature film (Bugs would finally get
his Academy Award winning short in 1958, the short being Friz Freleng's
Knighty Knight Bugs - and by that point, Termite Terrace had
far more to worry about than Academy Award wins). That said, even Daffy's feature film debut would be upstaged to a degree, as the short that preceded it (also directed by Jones) would end up beating it in both popularity and critical reception - a tale about a singing frog and a man's fruitless efforts to profit off of him, titled
One Froggy Evening.
Not everyone was fond of Chuck Jones' re-interpretation of Daffy Duck, however. Among those was fellow Warner Bros. animation director
Robert "Bob" McKimson, best known for his creation of Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies series regular
Foghorn Leghorn, a loudmouthed prankster of a rooster with a Southern accent (first introduced in the Academy Award-nominated short
Walky Talky Hawky in 1946). By his own admission, McKimson preferred the earlier screwball trickster interpretations of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, and thus he did his best to maintain elements of those earlier personalities in the shorts he directed featuring those characters.
Incidentally, another Looney Tunes character that McKimson himself had then recently created was also going through some modifications around this time -
Speedy Gonzales (introduced in the 1953 short
Cat-tails for Two), a Mexican mouse with speed rivalling that of the Roadrunner, was being reworked by Friz Freleng to serve as another opponent for Sylvester (likely because Tweety had fallen a bit
too far into passiveness regarding their rivalry by this point, relying more on outside forces to thwart Sylvester) - while Speedy's personality didn't change all that much, his
design was given a complete overhaul to remove the more overtly stereotypical elements. The 1955 cartoon that debuted the new version of
Speedy Gonzales (named after the title character) would go on to win the 28th Academy Award for Best Animated Short Subject, ensuring the "fastest mouse in all of Mexico" a spot among the Looney Tunes' cast of recurring stars. Another Freleng-directed cartoon featuring Sylvester, the 1957 short
Birds Anonymous, would claim the 30th Academy Award - in it, Sylvester tries to give up chasing Tweety, and as one would expect the prospect is easier said than done. While it's still regarded as a good short in its own right, many animation fans and critics would consider Chuck Jones' 1957 cartoon
What's Opera, Doc? (a Wagnerian opera take on the classic "Elmer Fudd hunting Bugs Bunny" formula) to be the more deserving recipient of that award.
Despite all the acclaim that Warner Bros.' cartoons were getting, there was an omnipresent threat to their continued existence (as well as the existence of other theatrical short films in America) ever since the postwar era - the increasing presence of television in American homes. After all, why go all the way to a movie theater and purchase a movie ticket just to watch a Bugs Bunny cartoon when you could watch that same cartoon on TV for free? Warner Bros. studio chief executive Jack Warner (who'd recently tricked his brothers into leaving him in full control of the film studio) must've certainly thought so... which probably explains why he thought it'd be a good idea to sell off
all of Warner Bros.' cartoons made prior to 1948 (along with their pre-1950s feature films not long afterward) in 1956 to Associated Artists Productions for broadcast on television, getting $3000 per cartoon sold (plus $21 million for the pre-1950s film bundle) but inadvertently cheating himself and the studio out of the millions those films would make in broadcast revenue on television - by the time he'd realized this, it was too late, as a smaller film studio by the name of United Artists merged with AAP and claimed the rights to the films he'd sold off. The chain of events resulting from this short-sighted decision (and it was far from the only one Jack made - he was just
barely talked out of going all-in on the short-lived 3D movie craze, which would've resulted in Warner Bros.' animation studio temporarily shutting down) would eventually lead into the most tumultuous conflict in the rivalry between Warner Bros. and MGM...
Speaking of MGM, they were also well aware of the threat that television posed to the continued production of theatrical animation, and the film studio's executives were considering closing down their animation division in order to save money. But Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, who'd recently been promoted to heads of the animation division while all of this was happening, had a plan to save the studio. After all, if people are watching theatrical cartoons on TV... why not make cartoons
for TV?
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I'm trying something a bit different with the 1950s entries. Rather than covering them in chunks of 3-4 years, I'm going to dedicate each entry to all of the notable events related to a specific studio/company/medium that happened within that decade.
I wasn't quite sure about the release date of Warner Bros.' animated feature film debut at first, but then I figured that, since the film stars Daffy Duck (and more specifically, the Chuck Jones interpretation of Daffy Duck), it'd be kind of fitting if it released on the same day as (and subsequently got overshadowed by) one of the most well-regarded short films in Looney Tunes history. Credit to
@TheFaultsofAlts for coming up with the idea of Warner Bros. doing an animated feature adaptation of Don Quixote with Daffy Duck as the lead and to
@TheBeanieBaron for coming up with the movie's name!
And yes, I
am aware that Bugs
did technically appear in Daffy's Oscar-winning short ITTL (IOTL, Duck Amuck didn't even make it past the nomination phase, and the Oscar went to Disney's
Toot, Whistle, Plunk, and Boom) - but he wasn't the
starring role in that short, Daffy was.
Speaking of Oscars, if I had a nickel for every time Friz Freleng paired Sylvester up with a retooled version of a Looney Tunes character that another director created, and the debut short for that pairing ended up winning an Oscar, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice, right?
And yes, the temporary closure of Termite Terrace in 1953 has been butterflied!
Up next, we get to see if Hanna and Barbera's gamble pays off. However, they're not the
only animation studio with their eyes on the small screen...