Meatless Flyday

← Previous	Next →
What's Cookin' Doc?	Tom Turk and Daffy

Airdate:
29 January 1944

Series:

Merrie Melodies

MPAA Number:	Production Number:
9104	MM-1-13

Copyright Renewed:

24 May 1971^[1]

Crew

Voice Characterizations:

Mel Blanc (uncredited)
Cy Kendall as the Spider (uncredited)

Film Editor:

Treg Brown (uncredited)

Musician:

Carl W. Stalling

Video A
B

Meatless Flyday is a 1944 Merrie Melodies short directed by I. Freleng.

Title[]

The title is a pun on Meatless Friday, a reference to the traditional Roman Catholic practice of abstinence from meat on Fridays.

Plot[]

A guffawing spider spots his intended prey, a mute fly, on the ceiling, and indulges in various cat-and-mouse schemes to try to catch him for food, including painting a load of buckshot with "Kandy Kolor" and luring the fly to eat it and drawing him closer with a magnet, which only succeeds in attracting a set of metal cutlery which the spider has to dodge to save himself. Eventually, the spider catches his prey, and, when he is about to carve him up while singing the song "Would You Like to Take a Walk?", the fly points to a wall calendar giving the day as "Meatless Tuesday", a reference to food rationing during World War II. The frustrated spider runs to the United States Capitol and screams, "You can't do this to me! You just can't! You can't, you can't, you can't, you can't!"

Caricatures[]

Jerry Colonna - "Something new has been added!"
Adolf Hitler

Availability[]

Streaming[]

Notes[]

Cy Kendall, who voices the spider, based his performance on Tex Avery's voice. In later years, Avery became convinced that he had done the voiceover.^[2]
This is the first cartoon to use the finalized Merrie Melodies logo on the closing Color Rings, which would be used until the end of 1955. This is also the first cartoon to use the 1944–45 rings evident in the blue rings and red background.
The buckshot is dipped into "Sugar Coated Kandy Kolor, I.G. Farben Co. Minneapolis". I. G. Farben was the fourth largest company in the world, based in Germany, not the U.S. It started as a manufacturer of synthetic dyes, thus its use here. Unknown to the production team at the time, it was also supplying poison gas to Nazi concentration camps.
When the fly does air acrobatics, the spider heckles him as "a poor man's Bugs Bunny".
Some prints of the USA dubbed version have a subtle edit to remove a black screen set in-between the part where the Spider laughs as he says, "Well, that's one on me. Caught me off my guard," after the fly releases the spider from the sugar cube trap and the part where the fly does acrobatics in the air to heckle the spider.^[3]^{[dead link]} The EU 1995 Turner dubbed version prints, however, do not have this edit. However, some USA dubbed version prints of this cartoon also exist without the edit.
Both US and EU Turner "dubbed" versions kept the original ending theme on their altered cards.
Vitaphone release number: 1203^[4]