See Ya Later Gladiator

See Ya Later Gladiator
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Airdate:	29 June 1968
Series:	Looney Tunes
MPAA Number:	21822
Production Number:	21774
Vitaphone Number:	3382
Copyright Renewed:	14 May 1996
Starring:	Daffy Duck Speedy Gonzales
Crew
Voice Characterizations:	Mel Blanc
Director:	Alex Lovy
Written By:	Cal Howard
Producer:	Bill L. Hendricks
Animated By:	Ted Bonnicksen Laverne Harding Volus Jones Ed Solomon
Layout Artist:	Bob Givens
Background Artist:	Bob Abrams
Film Editor:	Hal Geer
Musician:	William Lava

1/10

See Ya Later Gladiator is a 1968 Looney Tunes short directed by Alex Lovy.

Title

The title is a play on the 1955 song "See You Later, Alligator".

Plot

Janitor Daffy Duck is an assistant to a Mexican scientist who has just built a time machine and gone to take a siesta. The scientist warns that Daffy shouldn't pull the chain when Daffy is curious to play with the machine. However, Daffy hears Speedy Gonzales and his band playing music right outside the laboratory window, which annoys Daffy. Daffy attempts to tell Speedy to scram by throwing a broom at the band and telling them to get lost and not come back, but Speedy blows the broom back in Daffy's face using his trumpet. As Daffy tries to pursue Speedy in retaliation for that, he hatches a plan to send him back in time to be rid of him permanently upon remembering that the scientist had left the time machine set for Rome in 65 A.D..

Daffy goes outside towards Speedy and lies that he likes his music and that he has a recording booth available for him. He lures the mouse into the machine and tells him to pull the chain. However, when Speedy tries to pull the chain, it breaks. As Daffy fixes the chain, Speedy blows his trumpet on Daffy, scaring him into accidentally pulling the chain, thus activating the time machine, and sending the two into Ancient Rome. A dazed Daffy yells at a passing centurion by calling him "fathead". However, the centurion doesn't take kindly to it, and after confronting Daffy and Speedy, where Daffy tries to lie and say he was calling Speedy "fathead", only for Speedy to seal their fates and tell the truth, the centurion promptly throws both of them into the Colosseum. Emperor Nero and the rest of the audience laugh as a lion enters the arena. Daffy and Speedy fight back and forth with the lion using wooden swords and chili peppers until the lion flings them into Nero when Daffy bites the lion's tail, forcing it to let them go as it shouts in pain. Unfortunately, when they land on the Roman Emperor, they break his fiddle. "You broke my fiddle; now I'm going to break your neck!" Nero chases the duck and mouse through the streets of Rome to get revenge for his fiddle. Meanwhile, the scientist wakes up to realize the catastrophe when he hears the alarm on the time machine and witnesses Daffy and Speedy fleeing from the furious Nero on the time machine's monitor. "Caramba! I must bring them back!" He reverses it to bring Daffy and Speedy back to the present in the 20th Century. However, he accidentally brings Nero to the present as well as Nero was too close to Daffy and Speedy during his pursuit of them when the scientist triggered the retrieval. Nero doesn't know what he's going to do in the present time until they can return him home to his own time period, so Speedy lets him play fiddle in his band. Daffy is glad that he doesn't have to go through time travel again, but his appeasement is short-lived, as Speedy, Nero, and his band continues to annoy Daffy outside of his room.

Availability

Streaming

Tubi (2025 -)

Caricatures

• Emperor Nero

Goofs

• When Daffy looks out a window, the same background is used twice even though the second time that background is used, Daffy is at his own house when looking out the lab window.

Notes

• A slightly different arrangement of "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" by Bill Lava appears in this cartoon and in "3 Ring Wing-Ding".
• This was the last cartoon to feature Daffy and Speedy in the Golden Age of Animation. Furthermore, it was the last such cartoon to feature any classic Looney Tunes character in the Golden Age of Animation.
• MeTV aired a previously unreleased restored print of this short on Toon In With Me.
• This cartoon is based on a pitch from Alex Lovy for a series of cartoons called "Time Flies". The aforementioned series would have featured two Colonel Rimfire-esque explorers named Hap and Stance that would use a time traveling machine and travel to the past or future. As one of the first time periods mentioned in the pitch is Ancient Rome, it is assumed that the series was scrapped early in development and was reworked into this cartoon.

Gallery

A pitch for "Time Flies" that this cartoon is based on.