Nasty Quacks is a 1945 Merrie Melodies short directed by Frank Tashlin.
Title[]
The title is a play on "nasty cracks."
Plot[]
A suburban father buys a black duckling for his daughter Agnes, who dotes on the duck. The duck quickly grows up to become Daffy Duck, whose loud and obnoxious behavior is driving the man to distraction, but Agnes defends her pet at every turn.
The father buys a white duckling for Agnes, who changes her focus totally to the new duckling. The father comes at Daffy with murder in his eyes and chases him around the house. Daffy hides in the room where the duckling is being kept. He wants to kill the duckling, but has a pang of conscience and decides to make the duckling grow to adult size and then kill him. Daffy pours vitamins down the duckling's throat. With a "bay-woop", the duckling instantly grows into adulthood and turns out to be a shapely female duck. Daffy shrugs his shoulders.
The father walks down the stairs, laughing to himself, thinking he has chased Daffy out of the house. He is stunned to see Daffy, the female, and several newly born ducklings bouncing around the dinner table as Daffy launches into one of his raucous stories.
Caricatures[]
- Joe Besser
- Wally Maher's character Wilbur - "I like him, he's silly!"
Availability[]
Notes[]
- This was the final Daffy Duck cartoon directed by Frank Tashlin, who is not credited as he had already left the studio for the third time.
- Daffy packs up his things and announces that he is leaving, then comes back and tells his master that "...the government doesn't want us to do any non-essential traveling," a reference to how travel had to be reserved for WWII soldiers fighting overseas, but by the time the cartoon was released in theaters, World War II had ended.
- This was one of two cartoons shown on Cartoon Network's Looney Tunes marathon on New Year's Day 2009 to carry the a.a.p. logo, the other was another Daffy Duck outing, Daffy Duck in Hollywood. Most other a.a.p.-owned cartoons on the marathon were shown as "dubbed versions", and the rest did not bear the a.a.p. logo. Even into the 2000s, some cartoons were shown as an a.a.p. version, a "dubbed version", or sometimes, as a DVD/restored print.
- The cartoon's "dubbed version" aired on the 15 November 2009 Looney Tunes marathon. However, it uses an unreleased stereo mix of the soundtrack with another audio track playing simultaneously with the cartoon (1995 Dubbed version audiotrack and the recreated 1995 m/e soundtrack mixed together). Additionally, some of the characters' dialogue volume decreased, making it hard for viewers to understand the dialog and making the soundtrack sound canned, notably in both the opening and altered ending music cues, as well as the unaltered parts of the background music.[3]
- This cartoon was shown in theaters with Too Young to Know during its original release alongside the live action Joe McDoakes short So You Think You're Allergic.
- The female duck at the end has been cited as a prototype of Melissa Duck, a female duck who appears in several other Daffy-related shorts, most notably "The Scarlet Pumpernickel".
- According to the production number, this cartoon was produced in the Looney Tunes series but released in the Merrie Melodies series.
- Agnes resembles a human version of Petunia Pig, another character created by Frank Tashlin.
Gallery[]
References[]