Duck This

Whenever Daffy Duck hit the screen during 20 Cartoons, the audience went wild. Recently, the Caroon Channel identified its ranking of the top 100 cartoons of all time. Rated as number one is the dark and despairing masterpiece of Charlie Jones entitled Duck Amuck.

Amuck begins innocently enough when Daffy Duck appears in a Scarlet Pimpernell/Three Musketeers costume but before any sword play, the background vista shifts to a mid_American rural scene. Daffy's musketeer outfit is clearly inappropriate in "Iowa" so he rushes out of frame and emerges dressed as a farmer at which point the vista immediately changes to Antarctica. Once again, Daffy rushes out of frame to emerge on skis which become immediately inappropriate as the Arctic scenery transmogrifies into a jungle paradise. Trying in vain to cope with the insanely evolving landscape, Daffy rushes out of frame again only to emerge in an Hawaiian grass skirt plucking on a ukelele at which point the environment disappears again.

Suddenly a terrifying eraser appears and removes Daffy completely from the scene until he emerges on a blank background as a singing cowboy only this time without sound. When the sound effects return, they are inappropriate (e.g. machine gun fire bursts from the guitar) until Daffy's voice returns along with a stick figure flat background without depth or color. Daffy complains and demands that color be added.

Color is added not only to the background but to the flummoxed fowl himself. Daffy is transformed into a grotesquerie recognizable only by his facial features. Daffy is unaware of his horrifying transfiguration until a mirror suddenly descends before him and the Duck is forced to confront his own mutilated, freakish image ala Winston Smith in 1984.

The horror, the horror is too much for the canard who immediately transforms into his former self only now dressed in a sailor's outfit. Confessing a life long desire to appear in a seafaring epic, Daffy seems satisfied until the background appears and Daffy finds himself standing ON the water. Daffy uable to walk on water descends into the deep until he miraculously emerges on an island in the distance, much like Turley Lura, from whence he calls for a closeup which reveals angry, bloodshot, frantic, disbelieving eyes.

Apparently as we are looking into Mr. Duck's pupils, a huge obsidian mass has fallen upon his head. Daffy struggles to recover some space and during this suffocating conflagration, the Warner Brothers Ending logo appears prematurely. Daffy pushes the logo away and begins dancing against a suddenly white background. Apparently, the sprockets of an imaginary projector running this very film fall out of synch resulting in a split of Daffy's personality between two frames neither one of which is in full focus on the screen. 

As Daffy's personality unifies he becomes a fighter pilot flying through blue skies until a mountain is drawn on the immediate horizon into which Daffy and his plane immediately crash. Fortunately Daffy hits the silk in the nick of time but unfortunately, the parachute turns into an anvil and strikes Daffy in the head when he lands on the ground. After crushing Daffy's head, the anvil explodes like dynamite.

 The camera pulls back from the perplexed, anvil crushed Duck to reveal a drawing board upon which all of the preceding chaos and catastrophe has been created. The artist is Bugs Bunny who turns to the camera and asks "Ain't I a Stinker?"

Whoa

Absurdity is despair refusing to recognize the validity of anything including itself. Duck Amuck is a study in despair. A merciless universe is at the mercy of a non-sensical deity intent only upon obstacle creating and paradox, a big footed long eared deity who fully realizes his own malevolence and is amused by it.

On another level, Duck Amuck, offers caustic commentary on the relationship between artist and art, statue and sculptor, singer and song.

Finally Duck Amuck is reminiscent of Vonnegutt at the zenith/nadir of his alienated idealist stage when in creation of Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegutt creates a rupture between fiction and faction when he chooses to interrupt the suicide of erstwhile car salesman Duane Hoover by bringing his omnipotent author self into the scene not as a participant but as an observer. Of course, no one recognizes the presence of the creator except for Kilgore Trout who comes to the sudden suspicion that his own life may be nothing but another person's imagination much like Ovid and Julia as they sat one Covid afternoon in Birkdale in front of Big Daddy's.

Fortunately for Trout for Ovid for Julia or Paladin or Thornton Krell or Ice Rivers and many others, the person imagining them wasn't Bugs Bunny. That particular conundrum is saved for Daffy Duck.

Thus, Duck Amuck surpasses even Vonnegutt in its visonary, surreal, chaotic desperarte vision...a vision crystal clear to children everywhere.