Looney Tunes Wiki
Looney Tunes Wiki
Looney Tunes Wiki
5,888
pages
in: Shorts, 1944, Looney Tunes Shorts,
and 15 more

Booby Hatched

Sign in to edit

Booby Hatched is a 1944 Looney Tunes short directed by Frank Tashlin.

Title[]

The title is a play on the phrases "booby hatch" and "booby trapped".

Plot[]

During a snowstorm, a mother duck struggles mightily in a barn house and finally hatches her eggs in the bitter cold after candling them and seeing the chicks sneezing, skiing, skating, and otherwise enjoying winter inside the shells. All but one, that is, poor little Robespierre, who hatched prematurely. She doesn't notice until after the rest of the brood has gone ice-swimming and Robespierre has sprouted legs and run off in desperate search of warmth. He finds it under a hibernating bear, but a wolf, who has followed him in, snatches the egg for his dinner, with some help from a stick of TNT. What the wolf hasn't counted on is mama, who's right behind him, with a couple of eye-poking fingers at the ready. The wolf swaps a doorknob for the egg and starts boiling it, but Mama arrives in the nick of time to save him from the wolf's hungry jaws, only to be ungratefully rejected by the baby duckling, who was just getting warm.

Availability[]

Streaming[]

Notes[]

  • The wolf from "I Got Plenty of Mutton" is referred to B.B.Wolf on his house mailbox. B.B. Wolf is likely short for Big Bad Wolf.
  • The names of the baby ducklings in order of appearance and birth order are the following: George, Randall, Radcliffe, Elinor, Windsor, Leah and Robespierre.
  • At one scene, the thermometer reads, "cold as a brass monkey." This refers to the expression, "cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey." A brass monkey was a brass tray, called a "monkey," used to hold cannonballs on warships in the 16th to 18th centuries. Supposedly, in very cold temperatures the "monkey" would contract, causing the balls to fall off. However, nearly all historians and etymologists now consider this story to be a myth.
  • According to Cartoon Research, the original titles had the song "She Broke My Heart in Three Places" playing over them.[4]
  • According to a calendar in the barn house, this cartoon is set on December 31, 1943.
  • The unhatched egg is named after Maximilien Francois Robespierre, an influential figure of the French Revolution, who originated the expression "Omelettes are not made without breaking a few eggs."
  • This was the first cartoon produced by Eddie Selzer to be reissued.
  • When the oil lamp quickly goes out when the prematurely-hatched Robespierre warms himself around it, the duckling blames the fuel oil shortage for it, which is a reference to gas rationing during World War II. At the time of the cartoon's release, gasoline, fuel oil, rubber tires, and many more everyday items were rationed for the ongoing war effort.

Goofs[]

Animation Goofs[]

  • After Robespierre remarks to the audience "The is the saddest part of the picture, folks", as he continues walking through the snowstorm, there is a split second where he goes backwards by a step before going forward again in a few quick blink-and-miss frames, due to his production cel not being positioned properly.

Audio Goofs[]

  • The restored version on Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 4 had an error with the Blue Ribbon opening: it had a cut-short 1941–45 Merrie Melodies opening music instead of the correct 1945–55 Merrie Melodies opening music over the Blue Ribbon opening titles. It also has the generic 1941–55 Merrie Melodies ending music replacing the original ending music cue.
  • Old a.a.p. prints of this cartoon with old Brazilian Portuguese dubs that air on Cartoon Network, Boomerang, and Tooncast in Latin America alter the opening music in the Blue Ribbon opening; the 1945-1955 Merrie Melodies music is replaced by the cut-short version of the 1941-1945 Looney Tunes opening music in the old Brazilian Portuguese dub.[5] Note that the altered opening track could only be heard on the Brazilian Portuguese audiotrack, not on the English audiotrack of the cartoon airing on these three channels.
  • Unlike the USA Turner dubbed 1995 version which kept the original 1941–55 Merrie Melodies ending music (the slightly distorted variant in the ending of "The Wacky Wabbit"), the European Turner dubbed 1995 version has the generic 1941–55 Merrie Melodies ending music replacing the original ending music cue.

Gallery[]

References[]

  1. ↑ https://archive.org/details/catalogofc19723261213libr/page/142/mode/1up?view=theater
  2. ↑ https://archive.org/details/animationbreakdowns35
  3. ↑ https://tralfaz.blogspot.com/2023/04/bear-and-robespierre.html
  4. ↑ https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/more-lost-looney-tunes-title-cues/
  5. ↑ https://youtu.be/0l-Xm58BS3k



Community content is available under CC-BY-SA unless otherwise noted.