The Daffy Duckaroo

Daffy Duck is one of Looney Tunes' best, most interesting in personality and most iconic characters and one of my favourites in animation. His best cartoons are cartoon masterpieces and there is good reason as to why Daffy is used frequently.

'The Daffy Duckaroo' is not one of his best cartoons by any stretch of the imagination and is an uneven cartoon, but there are a lot of good elements and when it's good it's very enjoyable. Considering that Daffy is such a great character it was a little frustrating that 'The Daffy Duckaroo' wasn't better. The plot is thin and rather familiar and some of the cartoon may not bode well with the easily offended.

It is also let down by its tacked on, misplaced and heavy-handed ending, that is just an attempt to address a topical gag that doesn't gel with the rest of the cartoon and reminds us at how it was made in WWII. It also brings one of the best scenes to an abrupt stop which is a shame. A lot of cartoons were made in this period, not all of them did this.

However, the animation is very good. The black and white is crisp and there is meticulous background detail and smooth character drawing.

Carl Stalling to me was always the best Warner Brothers/Looney Tunes composer as well as the most consistent. 'The Daffy Duckaroo' is another example of consistent greatness, his music is lushly orchestration, cleverly synchronised, vibrant, characterful and not only fits and adds to the action but actually enhances it.

Regarding the gags, while there could have been more and could have been more witty, they are still clever and funny, the highlights being Daffy in drag, the chase sequence and the Charles Boyer impersonations. Daffy, even in reasonably early development, has his manic, energetic and witty persona and carries the cartoon with aplomb.

Mel "The Man with 1000 Voices" Blanc is characteristically brilliant.

Overall, decent but uneven. 7/10 Bethany Cox

Just watched this Warner Bros. cartoon on YouTube as linked from the What About Thad? site. It seems Daffy Duck is a movie cowboy crooner who decides to retire to live in the real west desert. He encounters an American Indian girl duck he immediately falls for. Unfortunately, she has a relationship with a big human Indian named Little Beaver. When he returns, Daffy disguises himself as another female Indian who Little Beaver now falls for due to Daffy's way of dress and his moves...There's some funny scenes of both Daffy with the female duck and Little Beaver with Daffy of them both impersonating Charles Boyer and a few more visual and verbal gags I liked but by the end when a topical gag related to the situation of World War II comes on, it just confused me. So despite some nice visual touches by director Norman McCabe, The Daffy Duckaroo was quite an uneven effort to me.