Duck Dodgers and the Return of the 24½th Century

Chuck Jones' mediocre follow-up to his classic Duck Dodgers short from the '50s. This was originally part of the made-for-TV special Daffy Duck's Thanks-For-Giving . Given that it was made for television and that it was made decades after the classic Looney Tunes shorts, you can imagine that this is inferior stuff. Surprisingly, the animation is not terrible. Compared to a lot of other stuff from the same era, it's quite good. However, it's not the least bit funny. It's dialogue-heavy with no good gags. Mel Blanc does provide the voicework and that automatically makes this better than any of the Looney Tunes stuff that came out after he died. So, it's not as good as the original short it follows up on, but it is watchable. More forgiving fans will likely rate it higher. After all, it's still Chuck Jones, Michael Maltese, and Mel Blanc. That's nothing to sneeze at.

This was a follow up to the classic short starring Daffy Duck. However, it really doesn't live up to it. The voices are fine, but many of the jokes are pretty weak. The animation is also poor and badly done. The story as a whole also seemed pretty weak. Trust me, it's really not worth seeing.

Love animation, it was a big part of my life as a child, particularly Disney, Looney Tunes, Hanna and Barbera and Tom and Jerry, and still love it whether it's film, television or cartoons. Actually appreciate it even more now through young adult eyes, thanks to broader knowledge and taste and more interest in animation styles and various studios and directors.

Chuck Jones deserved, and still deserves, to be considered one of the best, most legendary and most influential animation directors/animators. While not quite as distinctive in directing style as other directors from the same era, in his prime era he was responsible for some of the best cartoons ever made. Michael Maltese was a fine writer with lots of razor sharp wit, Daffy Duck is one of my favourite characters in animation and ever and Mel Blanc was one of the greatest voice actors ever.

On top of being somewhat of a follow up to the masterpiece 'Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century', all of those ingredients made the potential of 'Duck Dodgers and the Return of the 24 1/2th Century' despite the 80s Looney Tunes specials/cartoons not being exactly amazing.

Potential that was nowhere near lived up to. Not terrible, not close to being great either. There is none of the imagination, fun or wit of 'Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century' and it all feels tired and uninspired.

Certainly there are good things. The animation has brightness and colour with some inventive moments, if not always refinement with some of the drawing scrappy. The music is lively enough and doesn't sound too cheap.

Daffy is always worth watching, and that's an understatement, and he is still interesting and not out of character. A few amusing lines of dialogue and Mel Blanc shows that he has definitely not lost it.

However, there is nothing new here and not much is amusing let alone funny, nothing is imaginative either. The gags feel stale and the timing has very little energy, fatigue is all over here.

Marvin is bland, his personality being lost behind less than great material (weak actually) for him and so is the conflict and Porky is pretty useless. He is great usually playing it straight against the more interesting character of Daffy but he has nothing to do here. Some drawing is scrappy and the whole cartoon is far too talky with nowhere near enough gags, with too much of the dialogue being nothing to write home enough this is a big problem.

Overall, not terrible but not much great here, Blanc's voice work and Daffy are the best assets. 5/10 Bethany Cox

Chuck Jones made his mark on the world of animation by ignoring current conventions and writing his own rule book. In his later work, however, perhaps in response to an audience that could no longer appreciate subtlety, he ignores the principles that made him the innovator he was. 'Return of the 24½th Century' featured a clumsy plot driven by stilted dialog. Dialog-driven cartoons figured high on his list of gripes about latter-day cartoons. He maintained that if you couldn't follow the action with the sound turned off, it wasn't a real cartoon. By that standard, this isn't.

"Duck Dodgers and the Return of the 24 1/2 Century" isn't really terrible, but I don't understand why they thought that the original needed a sequel. Whereas the original was clever every step of the way - namely the conveniently alphabetical planets - there's just too much dialog here, something that director Chuck Jones didn't like. The main salvation is that Mel Blanc is still providing the voices (without him, the current stuff is basically worth nothing).

But overall, this cartoon doesn't add anything new. The near consensus that sequels suck should also apply to cartoons. Daffy, Porky and Marvin didn't deserve to get used like this.