Daffy Duck's Quackbusters

This is one of several Looney Tunes compilations made by Warner brothers in the 80s, and it was the one I watched the most- and still do when it's on TV- as a youth. It's another example from the others of old 50s cartoons put together into a plot that is meant just to string one short to the next, with Mel Blanc's obviously inconsistent voice filling in. Not that his voice at 80 is hard to take at all, but it does become jarring on repeat viewings to suddenly get that age gap just in-between lines of dialog, as if we as the audience didn't notice. The story for the film springs off from a short where Daffy- selling goofy objects on the cheap- tries to sucker JP Cubish for all of his loot by getting him to laugh (which he does finally, hilariously, by getting hit with pies). He leaves his fortune to Daffy with the provision that he use it in a 'service' kind of fashion. So, he opens up shop as a Ghostbuster racket, hiring out Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig for odd jobs out in Transylvania and haunted houses. It all leads up, in the end, to a humiliation due to a tiny elephant.

Like with the less successful string-together flicks of the early 80's, the storyline that is put together for Quackbusters is less than great, even a little too clunky. As a kid I didn't really put much bother to it, but again on repeat viewings it becomes about as obvious as Sylvester's jitters get. One such example is the very flat and ill-conceived bit where Daffy goes to the possessed woman's place. On the other hand, out of the all of the other animated films put together with the shorts- save for the Bugs Bunny and Road Runner Movie- this has the best shorts. My favorites include when Tweety gets the Heckle & Hyde treatment (very, very funny), or when Sylvester gets terrified by mice under a sheet. But the most indelible lines, in just sheer ludicrous and hysterical, fall-on-the-floor funny parts, are when Bugs tricks around the Blood Count ("Walla-walla-Washington", still gets me every time), and when Bugs and Daffy visit the Imbominable snowman. The film is also topped with a pre-short by a fairly humorous song sung by Mel Torme.

So, if you're one of those fans of Looney Tunes that hasn't seen the compilation films before, this is probably the best place to start, as the sum of the shorts are far greater and worth your time than what might be found in the other string-together films. That it still remains memorable more for the older shorts than the newer material is a credit of the late, great Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, and Robert McKimson (the three ORIGINAL directors of the films, not of the in-between segments).

Daffy Duck's Quackbusters is a hysterical and hilarious movie featuring the classic Warner Bros. characters: Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Sylvester, Tweety and of course Daffy Duck. Much of the movie includes clips from the old shorts to create a story about Daffy Duck against super natural forces. The new animated parts for this show are not as funny as the old clips however. All an all, I'd call this movie a classic.

As you are fully aware, I am a huge Looney Tunes fan. I can't help it, when I was little, it was an all-time favourite in the household, and at 18 I still love to watch these cartoons. Some are better than others, that I agree with, it's the same with Tom and Jerry pretty much too, but when you watch Looney Tunes you are guaranteed to have great animation, energetic music, wicked humour and amazing vocal characterisations from the one and only Mel Blanc.

As for Daffy Duck's Quackbusters it is a real treat. True, it has one or two slow moments and one or two weak links, particularly the link before the Duxorcist(one of about two cartoons I knew nothing about before I watched this compilation film), where I wasn't completely sure whether the cartoon had started already or not. That said, out of all the compilation films this one has the best premise and I think overall storyline. Plus it is the overall best paced, as it does move swiftly in general.

The animation is in general very nice, more in the cartoons than in the edited bits, but the film does have some nice colourful backgrounds and also some atmospheric and spooky ones. The music is playful and energetic as well, though the song Monsters Lead Such Interesting Lives from the beginning short Night of the Living Duck was very interesting and beautifully sung by Mel Torme. The cartoon itself was an interesting start to the film.

I loved the humour too. All the Looney Tunes films have good to great humour, that sticks relatively close to the cartoons, and this is no exception. I loved the material in 1001 Rabbit Tales, I liked it even more here, in both the dialogue and sight gags it was fresh and witty like Looney Tunes humour should be. This is evident in the cartoons especially, Transylvania 6-5000 has really great dark, subtle humour particularly from the Count, and in The Abominable Snow Rabbit with the Abominable Snowman when he mistakes Daffy for a rabbit and starts naming him George. The Duxorcist was also interesting, and it was nice to see Water Water Every Hare and Hyde and Go Tweet(although that had a concept that had been done to death I was impressed how fresh and clever it was), while Claws for Alarm was very creepy and atmospheric almost as creepy as Scaredy Cat, which creeped me out big time. Daffy Dilly is a lot of fun, and is very relevant to the story, I especially loved it for the ending, while Prize Pest was also very well done. In fact, the weakest one was Punch Trunk, I still liked it don't get me wrong it was very sweet with an adorable tiny elephant but it was on the undemanding side and not as memorable as the others.

The characters are wonderful. Daffy of course is the star, like Bugs was in 1001 Rabbit Tales, while Bugs is impressive too. It was also nice to see Porky, Sylvester and Tweety, while the Count in Transylvania 6-5000 is also very memorable. The voice work is spot on, particularly with Mel Blanc who is superb in his final set of vocal performances. I can't help mention Mel Blanc constantly when praising these cartoons, it's just that his voices are a big part of their success and I think it is right to think he is one of the greatest voice actors who ever lived, he was that amazing and very rarely disappointed. Yes even with lacklustre material(like it was in some of the Speedy Gonzales cartoons) he put 100% into everything he did.

Overall, a slightly uneven but on the whole delightful compilation film. 8/10 Bethany Cox

Another quick cut-and-paste job by Warner Bros. to generate some quick bucks, "Daffy Duck's Quackbusters" is just a wide selection of cartoon shorts starring Bugs Bunny, Tweety, Porky Pig and others. The whole thing is glued together by new animation that features Daffy in some odd situations as he tries to fight paranormal entities that are terrorizing others in the real world. The old cartoons can be caught at most anytime on the Cartoon Network or just about any place else now. Watching the productions as shorts are much better than watching a series in a 90-minute string. 2.5 out of 5 stars.

Occasionally, you'll dig up a movie that exists in your life without anyone else to whom you've talked about it, and without ever having read a word about it from a critic. I was a child when I would watch this silly little cartoon patchwork in my basement full of VHS's, before there was an IMDb for me to go to surfing around for trivia. Now, it is a rare avenue of escape for me. Every other movie I can recall watching in my adult life, despite whatever genre, cast, production history or director, has some sort of cultural connection to the outside world. Except for this.

Daffy Duck's Quackbusters is not a great movie, nor is it much of a good one, but that doesn't matter to me. In some indescribable way, it has a placebo effect because all I've ever known of it has been as a videotape in a yellow-sleeve with Warner Bros. heading that my parents must've grabbed for me at Half-Price Books a lifetime ago. I would watch it repeatedly as a young kid with no developed need for coherent plot progression, beginnings, middles, ends, any capacity to judge performances, frame compositions, narrative consistency or whether a comedy sketch could hold up as a concept at all were it not comprised of anthropomorphic animals with goofy stereotypical voices.

What are we laughing at when Daffy arrives at the manse of J.P. Cubish only to have every endeavor to enter thwarted by Cubish's jowly British bloodhound butler? The fact that the butler inexplicably uses whatever means necessary to ban Daffy from the premises? That is after all the core of the matter. Is it just the incidental slapstick schemes Daffy impetuously uses to outwit the butler? Well, not exactly. It's not so much what is happening as that it is happening at all. In the world of Looney Tunes, character motives don't exist. Neither does an actual story, despite the fact they are probably he most accessible and popular short films in movie history. It is simply that these are outlandish drawings, portraying wildly embellished actions endowed with the arbitrary freedom not to have consequences, disdaining any and all laws of physics, until the characters realize their dilemmas.

This is why Daffy Duck's Quackbusters can work. It is no more than a compilation of classic Looney Tunes shorts bridged by original sequences which clearly look and sound different than the found cartoons, which don't even always look and sound like each other. However, as well as the original opening credits sequence, the original storyline is very funny. After a completely unrelated musical dream sequence starring the eponymous duck and various likenesses of horror film icons, a desperately entrepreneurial Daffy makes an ailing millionaire die laughing, inadvertently after all his conscious attempts to make him laugh have failed, and inherits a fortune. But the millionaire Cubish's spirit scrutinizes all of Daffy's cavalier decisions now that he's rich, and as punishment each time makes some of the money disappear. So Daffy decides to placate Cubish's ghost so that he can keep the money long enough to start a business not unlike the Ghostbusters, ostensibly so that he can eventually eliminate Cubish and not have to worry about any more evaporating money.

So here we have a clear case of character motivation making a story hilarious. And yet, these very minimally constructed scenes are meant mainly to trigger the already done segments of stand-alone classic Bugs, Porky, Sylvester and Tweety, etc., most of which are funny, though the misnomers are still watchable for those nostalgic, atmospheric reasons, and yet they aren't at all funny because they complement Daffy's premise. They simply have some correlation with paranormal activity. Whatever happens in those segments happens and then back to the bridging sequences we go and around again. This is all to say, Quackbusters, as a story like that which movies tend to fundamentally aim to be, is catastrophically uneven and incoherent, but as a dated, tangible artifact, it is wondrously entertaining.