Funny Little Things

Daffy-blogging, essay 9 of 15 blog entries on

Duck Dodgers in the 24 ½th Century

Part One, Funny Little Things

Blink and you miss it:  Daffy gets so angry at Porky that he sticks
his hand straight through his head.

Daffy takes the evaporator on the right that goes to the airport
and not the evaporator on the left that would presumably take
him to the Warner Bros. studio.

I love the flying taxi modeled on a submarine.

How did they miss the misspelling on "stratosphere"?

Marvin's Matomic Masher is built on the model of a cash register,
complete with "SALE" tab.

Part Two, The Star of Our Show

Daffy as Duck Dodgers.

Psst…  I’m going to let you in on a secret.

Daffy is not really Duck Dodgers.  It’s all just an act.

Daffy’s enablers at Warner Bros. didn’t understand him at first.  It took years for them to get a full grasp of his character.

In his first movie appearance in Tex Avery’s Porky’s Duck Hunt (1937), Daffy stole the movie from everyone around him simply by being a

Daffy in Porky's Duck Hunt (1937).

manic nutcase.  “I’m just a crazy darn-fool duck!” he babbles to Porky and, truthfully, that just about covers it.  You can sense the charisma though.  In retrospect, you can see the star power.

Nearly all the Warner Bros. directors worked to get a handle on Daffy’s personality in the early 1940s.  Tex Avery, Frank Tashlin, Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones, and Robert Clampett all struggled to find the key to the duck’s undeniable charm.  (In a way, watching Daffy in shorts from this period is like watching Humphrey Bogart movies prior to High Sierra (1939)—there’s a strong character there but it isn’t channeled properly yet.)

Daffy as Duck Twacy in The Great Piggy Bank
Robbery (1946).

Robert Clampett probably realized the truth first.  In The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (1946), Daffy hallucinates that he’s a police detective.  “Nothing’s impossible to Duck Twacy!” he slobbers.  But, of course, he’s not a real Dick Tracy but just a dream of himself as Dick Tracy.  And even that doesn’t quite capture the real Daffy…  There was one further realization that had to be made.

Daffy isn’t a barnyard dreamer like in The Great Piggy Bank Robbery.  He’s an actor, a born performer.  That’s why he’s not really Duck Dodgers but something much more entertaining than a genuine space hero—he’s Daffy Duck pretending he’s Duck Dodgers.  Just as in other great Daffy shorts, he’s Daffy pretending to be Robin Hood or the Scarlet Pimpernel or a western sheriff or Sherlock Holmes.

In all these cases, the hero exterior is only a feather or two deep.  Clever disguises like his Dodgers’ red cape and head antenna can’t conceal the truth.  Daffy’s a star because he’s Daffy, the world’s greatest show-biz duck.

Daffy on the set, his cigar smoke plugging his bosses, in
Daffy Duck in Hollywood (1938).

Reference Sources

Chuck Amuck by Chuck Jones

Chuck Reducks by Chuck Jones

Hollywood Cartoons by Michael Barrier

Looney Tunes: The Ultimate Visual Guide by Jerry Beck

Warner Bros. Animation Art by Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald

7 Minutes by Norman M. Klein

That's All Folks by Steve Schneider

Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume One DVD set, Duck Dodgers commentary by Michael Barrier

Friends at the IMDb Classic Film message board including Rollo Treadway, Chloe Joe Fassbender, Illtdesq, and Fish Beauty

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

Watch Duck Dodgers...

Purchase Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume One DVD set at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Rent Disc Two of Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume One DVD set at Netflix or other rental service.

© 2011 Lee Price

Orchestrating the Apocalypse

Daffy-blogging, essay 8 of 15 blog entries on

Duck Dodgers in the 24 ½th Century

Part One, Earlier Apocalypses

In Max Fleischer's Koko's Earth Control (1928), Koko the Clown's dog
Fritz presses the "Destroy the Earth" lever.  At the top of the earth,
Koko and Fritz are panicking but it's too late to reverse things now.

Animals can be seen in the foreground surveying post-apocalyptic
desolation in Hugh Harman's Peace on Earth (1939).

Two fighting superpowers (a super-cat and a super-mouse)
endanger the entire planet in Tex Avery's King-Size Canary (1947).

Bugs Bunny tricks Marvin the Martian into blowing up the moon
in Haredevil Hare (1948).  Left hanging on the remaining crescent,
Bugs screams, "Get me out of here!"

Planet X obliterated in Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2the Century (1953).

Part Two, Orchestrating the Apocalypse

How do you orchestrate the end of the world?

In the closing scene of Duck Dodgers in the 24 ½th Century, Duck Dodgers and Marvin the Martian blow up Planet X.  Michael Maltese and Chuck Jones dreamed the scene up, Mel Blanc supplied the character voices, the animators painted the images on hundreds of cels, and then the sounds of apocalypse were added.

Treg Brown, Warner Bros. resident sound effects genius, orchestrated the noise.  A 20-year veteran at the studio, Brown had assembled a vast collection of thousands of sound effects, preserved on small reels of tape, over the years.  His task was to find or create the appropriate sound effects and synchronize them into the film using the animator’s exposure sheets, which precisely timed image, dialogue, and sound effects.  This particular scene—the blowing up of a planet—would have required a super-sized explosion noise.  Brown had plenty of explosions on file to choose from.

Planet X, pre-explosion...

Carl Stalling wrote and conducted the music.  At the age of 62, Stalling was the oldest of the core team of artists who worked on Duck Dodgers.  He was a pivotal figure in the history of animation having wedded music to animation for the first time with his legendary work on Disney’s Steamboat Willie in 1928.  Like so many others who worked on Duck Dodgers, he was a wizard at his work but also
a consummate team player.

Kaboom!!!

The roots of Stalling’s genius extend back to his improvisational work as a silent movie organist in Kansas City.  Matching music to a wide variety of silent films, Stalling became a master at borrowing snippets of melodies from classical and popular sources, incorporating them into broader themes, and building emotional or comic impact.  Performing for live audiences, he learned when it was most effective to play loud and when it was best to be silent.  He learned the art of timing.

So this is how you orchestrate the end of the world:  Stalling’s fifty-piece orchestra is fully employed, building up to a mighty horn section crescendo that reaches its peak a second before the explosion.  Then there’s a split second of silence followed by Treg Brown’s enormous “kaboom” effect.  As the sound effect trails off, an eerie subdued flute melody emerges in the background.  On the screen, we have deep space, with Daffy and Marvin standing on what’s left of Planet X, just a floating clump of dirt now.  The characters exchange their final dialogue as the flute melody temporarily drops out, replaced by the mock-heroic Dodgers theme.  But then, as the camera tilts down to show the predicament of Porky and Marvin, the minor key of the flute melody returns, momentarily suggesting their insignificance against a backdrop of infinite space.

Iris in on Porky for the closing line and the orchestra roars back for the traditional Merrie Melodies’ closing theme.  That’s all, folks!

It’s perfect music for Duck Dodgers.  And it would probably work just as brilliantly with an arthouse piece like Samuel Becket's Waiting for Godot.  The essential existential themes are all there—the anarchic comedy and underlying despair—but perhaps a bit more accessible for the general public when performed by Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Marvin the Martian, and Carl Stalling.

The explosion fades, revealing a clump of dirt with our three leads
clinging to it.

Reference Sources

Chuck Amuck by Chuck Jones

Chuck Reducks by Chuck Jones

Hollywood Cartoons by Michael Barrier

Looney Tunes: The Ultimate Visual Guide by Jerry Beck

Warner Bros. Animation Art by Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald

7 Minutes by Norman M. Klein

That's All Folks by Steve Schneider

Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume One DVD set, Duck Dodgers commentary by Michael Barrier

Friends at the IMDb Classic Film message board including Rollo Treadway, Chloe Joe Fassbender, Illtdesq, and Fish Beauty

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

Watch Duck Dodgers...

Purchase Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume One DVD set at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Rent Disc Two of Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume One DVD set at Netflix or other rental service.

© 2011 Lee Price

Talks Like a Duck

Daffy-blogging, essay 7 of 15 blog entries on

Duck Dodgers in the 24 ½th Century

Part One, The Acme Arsenal

Sometimes Acme products do what they promise.  Here,
Duck Dodger's Acme Disintegrating Pistol very effectively
disintegrates.

The effectiveness of an Acme product often depends upon the
character of the user.  When reliable Space Cadet Porky uses an Acme
Integrating Pistol, it works just fine.

The first appearance of an Acme product in a Warner Bros. cartoon:
An Acme Super Outfit for Wile E. Coyote in the first of the Coyote/
Road Runner series, Fast and Fury-ous (1949).

Another Acme product that delivers what it promises.  Wile E. Coyote
neglects to read the fine print (and holds the pebble over his head
while adding water) in Scrambled Aches (1957).

Acme Aspirin may be effective for curing some pain but not for relief
from crashing into the ground after falling off a mountain.  A hard lesson
learned by Wile E. Coyote in Beep, Beep (1952).

"Mr. Coyote believed that this product would enable him to pounce
upon his prey in the initial moments of his chase, when swift reflexes
are at a premium."  From "Coyote V. Acme" by Ian Frazier, published
in The New Yorker, February 1990.  The still is from Beep, Beep (1952).
Note that Acme Rocket-Powered Products, Inc. is located in Fairfield, NJ!

Part Two, Talks Like a Duck

There were great voice artists in animation before Mel Blanc.  Two of my favorites are:

Jack Mercer

Jack Mercer who did the ever-mumbling, ad-lib spouting Popeye for most of the great Fleischer cartoons of the 1930s.

Pinto Colvig who was the lovable, folksy voice of Goofy in the Disney cartoons.

Both were great.  They mastered their Popeye and their Goofy and kept discovering new shades and depths to their characters.

Perhaps more importantly, there was Mae

Pinto Colvig

Questel, who could be considered an authentic precursor of the Mel Blanc phenomenon.  Her Betty Boop and her Olive Oyl have fully developed vocal personalities, expressed through dead-on mimicry and solid acting chops. 

But Mel Blanc redefined the field, creating a whole new set of expectations regarding what voice artists can accomplish in animation.  Through force of personality and natural acting talent, he developed the distinctive speaking characters of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Sylvester, Pepe le Pew, Yosemite Sam,

Mae Questel

Speedy Gonzalez, and a host of others.  His vocal talent was actually not as broad as many others who have done well in the field—but his vocal acting ability was boundless.

Duck Dodgers in the 24 ½th Century is a one-man voice extravaganza, with Blanc effortlessly differentiating Daffy, Porky, Dr. I.Q. High, and Marvin the Martian.  There’s never a slip.  Each is always perfectly in character.

Mel Blanc

In reality, these performances required a bit more work than it sounds.  Blanc would do all the Daffy lines in one session, the Porky lines in another, and then the Marvin lines.  He wasn’t performing in a vacuum either.  Jones was right there with him, feeding the cues (doing his own versions of Daffy, Porky, and Marvin in turn), and setting the tempo.  Every aspect of these cartoons required teamwork—even Blanc’s high-flying solo contribution.

Reference Sources

Chuck Amuck by Chuck Jones

Chuck Reducks by Chuck Jones

Hollywood Cartoons by Michael Barrier

Looney Tunes: The Ultimate Visual Guide by Jerry Beck

Warner Bros. Animation Art by Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald

7 Minutes by Norman M. Klein

That's All Folks by Steve Schneider

Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume One DVD set, Duck Dodgers commentary by Michael Barrier

Friends at the IMDb Classic Film message board including Rollo Treadway, Chloe Joe Fassbender, Illtdesq, and Fish Beauty

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

Watch Duck Dodgers...

Purchase Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume One DVD set at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Rent Disc Two of Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume One DVD set at Netflix or other rental service.

© 2011 Lee Price

Masters of Comedy

Daffy-blogging, essay 6 of 15 blog entries on

Duck Dodgers in the 24 ½th Century

Part One, A Very Expressive Duck

Preparing to launch the rocket, Dodgers winds up for his heroic
"Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century" pose.  Note comic
cross-eyes as he prepares to attempt a serious heroic pose.

Character movement is always very expressive in a Chuck Jones'
cartoon.  Dodgers must drop into a crouch before the force of his
"Duck Dodgers" pronouncement will propel him upward.

The big moment:  "Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century."
Jaw fully dropped, mouth wide open, it's a big thing to say.

Holding the heroic pose.

A brief moment of faux humility as Dodgers basks in the adoration
of the audience.

More faux humility.  Hold the applause, folks...

The gag:  Dodgers has put the rocket into reverse, jamming
it into the ground instead of launching it.

Sheepish Dodgers:  "Oops!  Had the silly thing in reverse."

Maybe nobody will notice the mistake if he closes his eyes and
looks vaguely penitent.

Part Two, Masters of Comedy

Marvin the Martian has just claimed Planet X in the name of Mars.

Daffy responds:  “Look, bud…  I’ve got news for you…  I have already claimed this bit of dirt for the Earth and there just ain’t room enough on this planet for the two of us.”

Daffy plants the earth flag first...

Is it even possible to read these lines without falling into Daffy Duck speech?  It’s so wonderfully smug, so condescending, so entirely lacking in any self-knowledge.  The “bit of dirt” flourish is especially funny.  Daffy’s perfectly ready to escalate the situation even though he concedes the planet itself has little value.  In Daffy’s mind, the real subject is always Daffy.  And I love how the threat at the end smartly foreshadows the memorable conclusion.

... then Marvin claims Planet X
in the name of Mars....

This is brilliantly written comedy, instinctively built on character.  After refining the insane 1930s Daffy into tamer Daffy over a couple of dozen shorts, writers Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese intimately knew (and loved) their self-confident, eternally deluded character.

Jones was the sophisticated Abbott to Maltese’s Costello;  the Dean Martin to Maltese’s Jerry Lewis.  Jones brought book-smarts to the table and Maltese brought life-smarts.  After working with several other writers, Jones latched onto Maltese because he sensed that Maltese added a hard-edged imaginative freedom to his work that was needed.  Without Maltese, Jones could easily slip towards a more Disney-esque realism and sentimentality.  Maltese dared him to be a little crazier.

"Look, bud... I've got news for you...  I have already
claimed this bit of dirt for the Earth and there just ain't
room enough on this planet for the two of us."

If this had been a normal Hollywood screenwriting situation, Maltese might never have made the cut.  Eventually, most writers have to face the typewriter and bang out some material.  But that’s not the way Warner Bros. animation worked.

With support from Jones, Maltese threw together a fast comic-book version of the proposed story, with the scenes presented in a few dozen little rectangles.  These sketches were mounted on the wall and a “jam session” was called.  Maltese excelled at these “jam sessions” (sometimes called “yes sessions” because criticism of ideas wasn’t allowed) where writers and directors gathered together to brainstorm gags.  To be noticed, you had to be fast, loud, and prepared to prove your gag was funny by acting it out.  Maltese loved this.  He could express crazy slapstick ideas with enthusiasm.

Afterwards the plot would continue to gel through the recording sessions and Jones’ endless drawings of character sketches, matching the sketches to dialogue exposure sheets that would guide the animators.  Jones’ spirit infused the work but he was supported every step of the way by extraordinary artists in their own right.

When writing his memoir Chuck Amuck in the late 1980s, Jones remembered the golden days of the Jones-Maltese writing partnership with great affection:  “...(as) the squirrel cannot explain or even be aware of his symbiotic relationship with the redwood, Mike and I never knew which of us was the squirrel and which the redwood.”

Reference Sources

Chuck Amuck by Chuck Jones

Chuck Reducks by Chuck Jones

Hollywood Cartoons by Michael Barrier

Looney Tunes: The Ultimate Visual Guide by Jerry Beck

Warner Bros. Animation Art by Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald

7 Minutes by Norman M. Klein

That's All Folks by Steve Schneider

Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume One DVD set, Duck Dodgers commentary by Michael Barrier

Friends at the IMDb Classic Film message board including Rollo Treadway, Chloe Joe Fassbender, Illtdesq, and Fish Beauty

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

Watch Duck Dodgers...

Purchase Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume One DVD set at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Rent Disc Two of Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume One DVD set at Netflix or other rental service.

© 2011 Lee Price

Future/Past

Daffy-blogging, essay 5 of 15 blog entries on

Duck Dodgers in the 24 ½th Century

Part One, The World of the Future

Electric arcs will be common in the future.  No worries though.
You can walk right through them.

Much future technology will be
based on the filament light bulb model.

While the term "Evaporator" may sound ominous, these inverted glass
bulbs are actually an early version of Star Trek's transporter chambers.

A view of the rocket cockpit of the future:  Note the keyboard and
the hanging ribbon microphone, ideal for radio use or for recording
voices for cartoons.

The TV of the future.  Outer space transmission apparently causes
static patterns characteristic of TV in the 50s and 60s.

Part Two, The World of the Past

July 25, 1953:  There’s rarely anything momentous about the release of a cartoon.  When Duck Dodgers in the 24 ½th Century hit the screens on the last Saturday in July 1953, people came to the theater to watch the feature film or, in some cases, the double feature.  The cartoon was just a minor accessory in the 1950s movie-going experience, along with the newsreel, the coming attractions, and the popcorn.

Denise Darcel, "the
French Marilyn Monroe."

The Hollywood movies released that month were standard fare.  The last half of July saw Richard Todd in the swashbuckler The Sword and the Rose, George Montgomery and Tab Hunter in Gun Belt, Denise Darcell (touted by Columbia as “the French Marilyn Monroe”) in Flame of Calcutta, Robert Mitchum and Linda Darnell in Second Chance, Willard Parker as Jesse James in The Great Jesse James Raid, Robert Taylor and Ava Gardner in Ride, Vaquero, and Kathryn Grayson as opera star Grace Moore in So This Is Love.

It’s a fairly good bet that Duck Dodgers outclassed them all.

Meanwhile, outside the theater…

Elizabeth II at her
coronation.

Dwight D. Eisenhower was President in the United States, the Soviet Union was in a period of transition following the death of Josef Stalin in March, and Chairman Mao was firmly in charge in China.  Elizabeth II had been crowned Queen of England the previous month (June 2, 1953). 

In world news, the Korean War was stuttering to an indecisive close.  The day after Duck Dodgers opened, Fidel Castro launched the opening salvo in the Cuban Revolution.  In March 1953, James D. Watson and Francis Crick (with a major uncredited assist from Rosalind Franklin) had published their discovery of the double helix 

Mickey Mantle on the
cover of Time, June 1953.

structure of DNA.  Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay made headlines by successfully ascending Mount Everest, reaching the top of the world on May 29.  On July 25, 1953, the #1 song on the hit parade was “I’m Walking Behind You” as performed by Eddie Fisher.

My parents were a few months away from their second wedding anniversary.  I was still seven years off and my first viewing of Duck Dodgers would have been…

I like to think that my first viewing of Duck Dodgers was on the TV at my grandparents’ house in Riverhead, NY sometime in the mid- to late 1960s.  When my cousins and I visited the house on summer weekends, Warner Bros. cartoons often seemed to be on the TV.  We all liked them but the biggest fan of all was my Uncle Ted.  He had a house-shaking laugh that was a perfect accompaniment to Bugs, Daffy, and Wile E. Coyote.  I’d like to think that was where I first saw Duck Dodgers—surrounded by family with Uncle Ted laughing loudest of all.  Those were good times.

A TV test pattern, often seen very early on Saturday mornings
before the cartoons came on.

Reference Sources

Chuck Amuck by Chuck Jones

Chuck Reducks by Chuck Jones

Hollywood Cartoons by Michael Barrier

Looney Tunes: The Ultimate Visual Guide by Jerry Beck

Warner Bros. Animation Art by Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald

7 Minutes by Norman M. Klein

That's All Folks by Steve Schneider

Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume One DVD set, Duck Dodgers commentary by Michael Barrier

Friends at the IMDb Classic Film message board including Rollo Treadway, Chloe Joe Fassbender, Illtdesq, and Fish Beauty

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

Watch Duck Dodgers...

Purchase Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume One DVD set at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Rent Disc Two of Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume One DVD set at Netflix or other rental service.

© 2011 Lee Price

Science Fiction Inspirations

Daffy-blogging, essay 4 of 15 blog entries on

Duck Dodgers in the 24 ½th Century

Part One, Space Cadets Through Time

Displaying the enthusiasm you want to see in a space cadet, Porky Pig
salutes his hero in Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century.

From 1951 to 1955, Tom Corbett was the TV face of space cadets as
he attended Space Academy in the 24th century.

TV always seemed to be a friendlier environment for space cadets
than feature films.  Will Robinson (Bill Mumy) learned the basics
of interstellar survival while Lost in Space from 1965 to 1968.

The first edition of Star Trek lacked a space cadet but not the second.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), the great ambition of
Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton) was to attend Starfleet Academy but
everyone knew he was a real space cadet from the start.

The most famous of all space cadets:  Luke Skywalker in
Star Wars (1977).

Part Two, Science Fiction Inspirations

Newspaper headlines open Warner Bros. first science
fiction cartoon, Hardevil Hare.

Before Duck Dodgers in the 241/2th Century (1953), the Chuck Jones unit at Warner Bros. produced two other forays into science fiction territory.  In 1948, they made Haredevil Hare where Bugs is launched on a rocket to the moon and, several years later, The Hasty Hare (1952) where Marvin the Martian visits earth on assignment to bring back an earthling (Bugs Bunny is his choice).

Director Chuck Jones and writer Michael Maltese rarely passed on an opportunity to parody a subject, but their Haredevil Hare (1948) isn’t the parody of science fiction movies that it initially appears to be.  It can’t be because there were no science fiction movies to parody in 1948.  During the 1930s, there were several popular space opera serials but that period was followed by a parched drought of filmed science fiction during World War II and the immediate post-war years.  Writers continued to produce science fiction but the mood was changing there, too.  The new authors—Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke—experimented with a new “hard” science fiction approach that had little in common with the escapist adventures of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.

So where did Haredevil Hare come from?  Here’s a possibility…  On the Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD commentary, film historian Michael Barrier mentions that Robert Gibbroek, Jones’ layout artist in the late 1940s, brought a love for his adopted home in White Sands, New Mexico to his work.  Gibbroek employed White Sands-type backgrounds in the Road Runner cartoons and in the opening to Haredevil Hare.  Well, White Sands wasn’t only home for desert critters like coyotes and roadrunners.  The U.S. Army Air Forces operated the country’s primary missile range at White Sands—developing the latest high-tech rocketry there prior to the move to Cape Canaveral in 1949.  As a resident of White Sands, Gibbroek would have been well aware of the local rocket experiments.  Perhaps he even contributed the idea…

Behind Bugs, the desert background in the opening of Hardevil Hare.

Despite coming first by two years, Haredevil Hare now looks like a parody of Destination Moon (1950).  Co-written by hard science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, Destination Moon opened Hollywood’s floodgates, releasing a decade-long torrent of filmed science fiction.

The Hasty Hare parodied one of the best of the new movies.  Bringing back Marvin the Martian and his bounding alien pet K-9 from Haredevil Hare, the two aliens arrive on earth in a flying saucer, setting the stage for a round of jokes aimed at The Day the Earth Stood Still, Twentieth Century Fox’s big hit from fall 1951.

With its good-natured parodies of Buck Rogers, Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century primarily reflected the old-fashioned space opera tradition but it also contained at least two references to contemporary science fiction films.  First, the idea of Planet X may well have been inspired by Edgar G. Ulmer’s low-budget quickie The Man From Planet X (1951).  Second, Porky directly mentions another contemporary science fiction film hit when he hands Marvin some dynamite and calls him, “You thing from another world, you.”  The Thing (from Another World) was a 1951 hit from acclaimed mainstream director Howard Hawks.

Villains of the future from the popular 1950s TV series
Captain Video and His Video Rangers.

But the most significant influence of all came from television.  This is the influence that Jones himself acknowledged in his letter to his daughter Linda in October 1952:  “It’s a parody on the ‘Space Cadet,’ ‘Captain Video,’ type television show…”  Considering how few channels there were, the amount of science fiction on the air in those years was astonishing.  Space Cadet and Captain Video are just the tip of the iceberg.  From 1950 to 1953, there was also Buck Rogers, Commander Cody, Space Patrol, Tales of Tomorrow, Stranger From Space, Out There, Johnny Jupiter, Space Command, Atom Squad, and Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers.  Chuck Jones and crew had plenty of material ripe for parody when they promoted Daffy to space hero status.

Reference Sources

Chuck Amuck by Chuck Jones

Chuck Reducks by Chuck Jones

Hollywood Cartoons by Michael Barrier

Looney Tunes: The Ultimate Visual Guide by Jerry Beck

Warner Bros. Animation Art by Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald

7 Minutes by Norman M. Klein

That's All Folks by Steve Schneider

Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume One DVD set, Duck Dodgers commentary by Michael Barrier

Friends at the IMDb Classic Film message board including Rollo Treadway, Chloe Joe Fassbender, Illtdesq, and Fish Beauty

... and an occasional sneak glance at Wikipedia entries (but always double-checking everything!)

Watch Duck Dodgers...

Purchase Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume One DVD set at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Rent Disc Two of Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume One DVD set at Netflix or other rental service.

© 2011 Lee Price