The Bashful Buzzard

An Italian buzzard sends her four boys out to bring home the bacon (or rather, lamb). While her first three boys are tough as nails, her youngest is painfully shy and fairly inept when it comes to catching food. However, this might be the time that he manages to turn it around (with a little help).

The films starts with a seemingly pointless mother buzzard with a thick mama-mia style accent for no real reason and continues through the film with the same lack of cohesion but still a certain amount of humour to it. The film centres on a slightly dopey, bashful little eagle that is trying to match his brothers for hunting ability. The film creates several imaginative moments but really doesn't make much sense. It is quite funny but never hilariously so.

The mama-mia mother is the height of characterisation; both her and the bashful buzzard of the title are based on gimmicks rather than real personalities or characters, but that isn't really the point here.

The film gets sillier as it goes without really getting much funnier. It is amusing and has some imagination but some of the gimmicks are a little daffy and are perhaps a little too goofy to be hilarious.

Comparisons to 'Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid' will be inevitable, with Beaky and his mother also in that cartoon and the story being similar here even if the material is different.

This said, 'Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid' is the vastly superior cartoon to me, while it is still funny enough, if rather silly to begin with, the best of the writing in 'The Bashful Buzzard' doesn't come close to the animal bone, "take a shower" and big band dance sequence gags in 'Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid' and the absence of a much stronger character to Beaky and his mother like Bugs is noticeable.

Beaky is still a cute and amusing character, while never being too cloying, overly-dumb or annoying. Making less of an impact is his mother, humour-wise she's bland, she's a bit shrill and also somewhat stereotypical without being particularly funny, endearing or interesting. The story is not quite as engaging this time around, and a stronger character to work against would likely have livened things up.

However the animation is bright in colour, fluid and rich in detail and smooth in movement and design, with some clever and wonderfully wacky visuals still as was characteristic of Bob Clampett. Ever demonstrating why he has always been my personal favourite of the Looney Tunes composers, Carl Stalling provides yet another energetically characterful, beautifully orchestrated and cleverly action-enhancing music score.

'The Bashful Buzzard' does boast some very amusing, without ever being hilarious, dialogue especially "you little shriveled-up, infinitecimal piece of sh... shoe leather". Same with the gags, fun and well animated but there are more hilarious and more inventive around. Mel Blanc's voice work is terrific as always.

Overall, quite good but not great like Clampett often was. 7/10 Bethany Cox

"Beaky Buzzard" was another Looney Tunes effort that never made it past a couple of efforts. This cartoon did offer some laughs, though.

Mama buzzard, complete with a strong, stereotypical Italian accent, sends her four boys out on a mission - get food! Three of them head out in formation and start dive bombing immediately. The fourth is a shy little guy who sounds exactly like Edgar Bergen's ventriloquist character "Mortimer Snurd." He isn't just shy; he's just plain stupid. He's sarcastically called "killer."

The cartoon started stupidly but did get funny when the buzzards started bringing back food to the nest high up in the mountains.What they brought back was astounding - and funny! Unfortunately, the 'toon reverts back to stupid near the end with the little guy inadvertently bringing back a surprise, but it's not really humorous.

I can see why this idea didn't work.

Beaky Buzzard returns in this enjoyable short from Bob Clampett. Beaky had previously appeared in Clampett's classic Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid. Here, as in that short, Beaky and his brothers are sent out by their mother to capture food. The brothers do so easily but Beaky runs into some trouble. Fun stuff from Clampett but missing the something extra Bugs brought to the table in the previous short. Still there are funny gags and lines throughout, as well as references to Dumbo and The Great Gildersleeve. Beaky may be a minor character in the grand scheme of things but he's impossible to dislike. Good animation, music, and voice work. The last cartoon Kent Rogers did before his untimely death.

As "The Bashful Buzzard" started, I thought that it was going to be a shot-for-shot remake of "Bugs Bunny Gets the Boid" for about the first minute. But when it started doing its own thing, I found it an OK cartoon, not great. Why is Beaky Buzzard - or Killer, if you want to call him that - such a lazy ignoramus? Who knows? They have to entertain us somehow.

I certainly liked the sight of Beaky bringing some of those things home. If I'd been that Italian mother of his, I'd have told the father (who probably would have been a godfather) that the son isn't fit for missions.

All in all, worth seeing. Available on YouTube.