Quasi at the Quackadero

Wonderful, psychedelic short film about a lazy duck (Quasi) whose frenemy Anita lures him to the Quackadero, a kind of crazy carnival with all sorts of weird carnies and barkers. I first saw it in Cambridge at a wonderful little place called Off the Wall that showed obscure short films.

This beautifully-crafted film was evocative and atmospheric, with a strong late 60s/early 70s vibe. And the music by Robert Armstrong and Allan Dodge adds a sometimes nostalgic, sometimes dreamy quality. One of the funnier "exhibits" was the Past Lives Pavilion, where people could go to relive things that supposedly happened to them in earlier lives. I remember one poor guy with his wife watching himself in some kinky hotel room or something and saying at the end, "That never happened to me!" And yes, youll recognize Cruikshank's style in some of the early Sesame Street cel animated shorts. Fantastic.

This must be what tripping balls feels like.

"Quasi at the Quackadero" paints a world of . . . well, it's like "Yellow Submarine" on acid. The colors are vibrant, the character designs are macabre, and it starts to sear into your brain after a while. I'd seen this before (middle of the night, in a theater setting) and I don't think my assessment has improved with being fully alert. And it just seems to go on and on. I'm not really sure it it's arty or some deranged '70s children's show, but I'm not getting the joke.

5/10

I saw this once a long, long time ago, and, as I recall, the soundtrack was by The Mystic Knights, and sounded an awful lot like Danny Elfman's Band Oingo Boingo. I subsequently learned that Oingo Boingo once called themselves The Mystic Knights Of Oingo Boingo...

Sally Cruikshank has always been a huge influence on me ever since I was really little watching her work on Sesame Street. This is one of the most unique art pieces I've ever seen, I truly mean that! The fact that this took 2 years to animate and like 4 months to edit is astonishing! Sally animated it all with other people helping with inking it and voicing it. I love everything about this, except for the fact that it's to short. I want more of this world and it's characters and it breaks my heart to know that nobody in the 70s and 80 wanted to pick up "Quasi's cabaret" for a full movie. I would have jumped at the opportunity to produce that. (I'll one day try my best to get that to be).

Two duck-like entities (Quasi and Anita) and their robot (?) colleague visit the Quackadero, a side-show carnival where attractions include memory projection, mind reading, prognostic mirrors, and one-way windows into the past and future (the latter Anita takes advantage of to deal with the obnoxious Quasi). The imagery and the erratic, surreal, pulsating animation have the look of the era's 'underground comic' movement. The weirdly creepy futuristic Quackadero psycho-temporal amusement-park resembles somewhere that, in another generation of cult cartoons, Rick and Morty would visit. Bizarre but entertaining. One of the few 'post-golden age' (and post Timothy Leary) cartoons represented in the '50 Greatest Cartoons' (at #46).