Quackodile Tears is a 1962 Merrie Melodies short directed by Arthur Davis.
Title[]
The title is a play on the phrase "crocodile tears."
Plot[]
Honeybunch is sitting on an egg in her nest and knitting. She tells Daffy that it's his turn to sit, but he refuses until she kicks his butt. He moves the egg for a moment to fluff up the nest, but the egg rolls away down the hill and into another nest full of eggs. Unbeknownst to him, these are alligator eggs. Unable to tell the difference, Daffy picks an egg at random and brings it back to his nest. The mother alligator sees him take an egg and cries out, and the father alligator chases Daffy. They squabble about the egg back and forth for a while until Honeybunch returns.
Daffy uses a grenade painted white as a trap for the crocodile. Honeybunch mistakes it as Daffy throwing away their egg, so she strangles Daffy and forces him to sit on that "egg", ignoring Daffy's explanation that it is a grenade, not the real egg. It explodes, setting his tail on fire.
She makes him sit on the real egg until it hatches into a baby alligator. And when Daffy starts clobbering the alligator with a bat, she tells her husband it's just an ugly duckling which will grow into a beautiful swan. Meanwhile, Mrs. Alligator tells her husband something similar, since both families had swapped eggs.
Availability[]
The Looney Tunes Video Show, Volume 2
_(UK_VHS).jpeg "Daffy Duck (1990) (UK VHS).jpeg (44 KB)")
Daffy Duck (1990)
Special Bumper Collection (Vol. 2)
Daffy Duck
Daffy Duck (2003)
Looney Tunes Collector's Vault: Volume 1, Disc 1 (restored)
Streaming[]
Censorship[]
- The version of this short shown on CBS's The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show was cut to remove Daffy substituting his egg for a firecracker so the alligator can get it, only for the alligator to catch wise and force Daffy to sit on the firecracker.[1]
Goofs[]
- After Daffy puts the dynamite stick through the female alligator's eggs and then her husband puts it into the nest, you can see a stick already being there, which is replaced by the one the gator places in.
- The 2020 restoration has a fake cutaway from the opening sequence to the title card, as with the other handful of 1960s cartoons that got a restoration in 2020. It was not fixed in Looney Tunes Collector's Vault: Volume 1, and is also present on MeTV airings and streaming on Tubi.
Notes[]
- Arthur Davis assumed supervision for this short, as Friz Freleng was working on interstitial segments for The Bugs Bunny Show, making it the first short directed by him since 1949.[2] Davis directed this cartoon using Freleng's unit, as his own got dissolved around in 1947 due to budget problems. This would also be the final golden age Warner Bros. short he directed, as he would later leave for Walter Lantz Productions.
- This short was included in The Bugs Bunny Mother's Day Special.
- Unlike other cartoons featuring Daffy, he is not drawn with his white collar around his neck. However, the lobby card for the cartoon portrays him with his collar.
- This cartoon was originally slated to be included on the Looney Tunes Super Stars' Daffy Duck: Frustrated Fowl DVD, but was replaced early in development due to restoration issues.[3]
