The Henpecked Duck

Lee Eisenberg on this website points out that Daffy is rather an ignoramus. I however do not see it that way. I am sure he did not mean deliberately to do what he did, because he was so upset about it in court.

I like this older Daffy Duck short a great deal. I personally found it very emotional - if I was younger I may have cried! The idea of the short is a very inventive one, one that personally I think is very good. I also "admire" the "brutality" of this episode. It is not really "brutal", just it is not as comical as many of Daffy's other appearances.

In this Daffy is in court for letting his wife's egg disappear. Poor Daffy is very upset and seems to be guilty. In a flashback, we see how his wife, with her short temper, was very hard on him and he merely lost the egg while performing a rather sweet, entertaining and clever magic trick. The tension builds on...

Good for people who like the intelligent, thoughtful Daffy Duck in his old stage, enjoy "The Henpecked Duck"! :-)

I know that Daffy Duck is an out-of-control wacko, but what led him to pull a trick that might lose his wife's egg?! Even he should be smart enough not to endanger his own marriage. Truth be told, I gotta wonder why any woman would want to marry him. Yes, he's one of the funniest cartoon characters in history, but wouldn't that make him a little hard to be around? Oh right, I forgot that cartoons don't have to make sense.

So, "The Henpecked Duck" is a fair cartoon. I would usually expect a Bob Clampett cartoon to be a little more bizarre. I guess that it's OK seeing once. Available on YouTube.

When I was a child, I quite frequently watched a tape containing four Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies cartoons. All were good except for one that I had to get my mother to turn off before the end because of my sensitive hearing. 'The Henpecked Duck,' however, which I believe was probably the first on the tape, was my favourite by far, and it was the one that I often wanted rewound to the beginning over and over again. In the present day, as soon as I finally found this video somewhere and watched it again (without sound, so I missed any dialogue), I remembered almost the entire Looney Tune perfectly just with the visual presentation of the animation. This is the cartoon that drove my sister, my father and my brother absolutely crazy, and this is the cartoon that I would have given an 11 out of 10 several years ago if I could have, and that here today I give a 10 out of 10 because it is still hysterically funny, even without sound.

Looney Tunes were part of my childhood and I still love a vast majority of them to this day. The Henpecked Duck I liked as a child and just love now. The animation may be dated for some, but I for one very much love it, the colours are sumptuous and shadowy and Daffy is very well animated, right from his desperation to his sadness at the start. The music is energetic and beautifully orchestrated, with some old favourites like Home Sweet Home and the Midsummer Nights Dream Wedding March being fun to spot. The story is well-paced and always engaging, while the writing is subtly funny(like the joke with the chicken) and the more emotional moments like at the start and when Daffy is pleading with Porky(in the role of the judge) are done with real pathos. Daffy I really felt sorry for in The Henpecked Duck, this is different from the manic or greedy personas he's known for, this is a more poignant approach which I think would have worked better than the other two, and you do identify with him as a result. Especially when, while not as bad as the wife figures in Quackodile Tears and His Bitter Half, he has such a bitch of a wife. Porky doesn't have as much to do, but he is also good. Mel Blanc is even better in cartoons later on, but still voices his characters superbly. All in all, a great cartoon. 10/10 Bethany Cox

Sometimes in your brain you have images or moments from your childhood that you simply never forget, decades later when you've forgotten almost everything you learned in high school math or certain parts of history or even in science, and yet what was shown on a television to a child in a cartoon from the 40's is everlasting. I had forgotten the title of this short but knew that it involved a courtroom drama involving Daffy Duck and a chicken, with Porky Pig as the judge (because why the hell not?) presiding over a lost egg over a magic trick, and specifically the hen wanting a divorce.

And how do I know this? Because a repeated retort, in full close-up from the hen, is her yelling "I want a divorce! I WANT A DIVORCE!" Maybe I remember it because it was the first time I could register the word 'divorce' and it meaning the end of a marriage, or simply because of the ferocity with how she said it. The rest of the cartoon was entertaining I'm sure, and it involves the usual creative madness that Bob Clampett has in his compositions and animation, which is among the finest in the 1940's. But the point of it all is that sometimes something very personal, like hearing a term described to you in a cartoon, sticks out and has power.