1

Warner Brothers Stars:

Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Daffy Duck

William L. Benzon • Summer 2015

2

Warner Brothers Stars: Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Daffy Duck

William L. Benzon Abstract: Chuck Jones believed in the “disciplines” one had to maintain for a cartoon, the constraints within which one acted. In the Road Runner cartoons, no one talked, though there could be signage, the action always centered on two, and only two, characters, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, and it always takes place in the outdoors in the American Southwest. These cartoons play with reality and engage in a guessing game with the audience in doing so. What’s Opera, Doc? goes beyond a string of gags end engages in a story about the relationship between Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny. Finally Daffy Duck and Porky Pig venture into space in Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, which satirizes incompetence and self-generating conflict. Introduction: Cartoons are for kids, NOT! ................................................................................................. 3  Road Runner ........................................................................................................................................................ 5  

Uh Oh! Hosni Mubarak and Wile E. Coyote ........................................................................................... 5  Desire and Causality in Road Runner Cartoons .................................................................................... 7  Reason in the Social Mind: Road Runner II .......................................................................................... 16  

Bugs in Drag ..................................................................................................................................................... 22  Method in Cartoonology .......................................................................................................................... 22  Intimate Enemies: What’s Opera, Doc? ................................................................................................... 23  Elmer Loves Bugs Redux .......................................................................................................................... 33  What’s Up between Cartoonist and Audience? .................................................................................. 42  

Duck Dodgers and Some Gags into the Unknown ................................................................................. 44  Duck Dodgers Instructs His Pupil .......................................................................................................... 44  Life Lessons .................................................................................................................................................. 48  Words and Things ...................................................................................................................................... 49  And the Larger Issues? .............................................................................................................................. 52  

1301 Washington St. No. 311 Hoboken, NJ 07030

bbenzon@mindspring.com

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

3

Introduction: Cartoons are for kids, NOT! I’ve been trying to think of something engaging and insightful to say about the cartoons I’m covering in this post – three Road Runners, a Bugs and Elmer, and a Daffy and Porky – and am drawing a blank. The little gray cells are protesting that they’ve been working too hard. So I’m thrown back on the obvious.

Cartoons are for kids1 NOT! Not when these cartoons were made. They were made for the general movie-going

audience. They were made to be shown before a feature film, also made for the general audience.

I suppose that I could then pose the question: What makes these cartoons worthy of adult attention? Wrong question.

We might be better off asking what makes an adult worthy of these cartoons? The answer to that seems obvious: That the adult be alive, awake, and curious about the world. What these cartoons do is play with reality and in so doing reveal our assumptions about it.

I was drawn to the Road Runner cartoons because of what their director, Chuck Jones, calls their “disciplines”, the rules that each cartoon must follow. The Road Runners are among the most disciplined cartoons ever made. Or, perhaps more accurately, their disciplines are among the most austere.

They involve only two characters, the Road Runner and his nemesis, Wile Coyote. There is only one plot, if it is even that: the coyote chases the road runner and fails to catch him. The setting is always the same: the desert of the American Southwest. And there is no dialogue, though there may be writing in signs and such. That’s it.

And from those simple constraints Chuck Jones spun cartoon after cartoon. What makes them work is the gags. And the gags work on two levels. Within the cartoon Wile Coyote is always being outfoxed even as he attempts to trap Road Runner. Sometimes he’s outfoxed by Road Runner and sometime it’s just the nature of things that outfoxes him. But the nature of things in Cartoonland isn’t quite so regular is in the real world.

And that brings in the second level of operation, where the cartoons play with us. Coyote rarely suspects that he’s about to be fooled. We always suspect it, but never know just how. The gag’s always on us.

Of course, all these cartoons work the same way. But the others under examination here also allow dialog. And yet they are still austere. Compare any of these to an episode of The Simpson’s. To be sure, those episodes run 22 minutes or so rather than six or seven, but that alone doesn’t account for the proliferation of characters and dialog. It’s a different regime at work.

The Bugs and Elmer cartoon has only those two characters, unless you count the rotund horse that bugs rides for a bit. What’s Opera, Doc? is perhaps the most lavish cartoon Chuck Jones ever produced. It’s a satire of classical music, Wagner in particular, but also of Disney’s Fantasia. For example, there are shots reminiscent of Chernobog from Night on Bald Mountain. But whereas the large looming figure in the Disney was a devil, albeit a tragic one, the large looming figure in What’s Opera, Doc? is Elmer Fudd’s shadow.

Elmer’s after Bugs, as he always is. But this time he gets him, or at least Bugs allows him to think he’s gotten him. What’s more Bugs plays in this cartoon in two ways. Elmer is in Nordic warrior drag from beginning to end. But when Bugs first appears he’s simply Bugs Bunny and, as such, is not a player in the music drama that has captured Elmer. Then Bugs puts on a costume and inserts himself into the drama where Elmer serenades him in that role. Is Elmer revealing a

4

hidden bond with Bugs? If not, then why is he distraught when he believes that he has finally killed Bugs? Why isn’t he happy in his triumph?

There is there more to this cartoon that meets the eye. It’s an odd tale of unrequited love, Elmer for Bugs. Or, rather, it’s a distortion of such a tale.

Finally, we have Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, starring Daffy Duck and Porky Pig, with Marvin the Martian as the villain. Is suppose I was drawn to this cartoon because of the science fiction premise – it has Daffy was using a transporter a decade and a half before Kirk and Spock. And it plays on an important motif in popular culture: the incompetence of those in power. Daffy is captain of a spaceship while Porky is his cadet crewman. Daffy is utterly incompetent while Porky is not. Porky gets Daffy out of a jam, twice, but is unable to save him from utterly destroying the planet they set out to find.

It is tempting to see this cartoon as a foretelling of the space race and missile race that would characterize relations between the United States and the Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s, but it has the themes nailed cold: the pursuit of a distant and largely pointless objective (a planet rich in an ingredient for shaving cream), the incompetence of the high and mighty, and the dangers of pointless technical mumbo-jumbo. Did Chuck Jones and his team foresee all that in 1952 when they made this cartoon?

But then, did they have to foresee it at all? Isn’t all that intrinsic to life in the modern world? They simply looked and reported what’s already there. It’s reality that took things out of control.

5

Road Runner Chuck Jones believed in the “disciplines” one had to maintain for a cartoon, the constraints within which one acted. In the Road Runner cartoons, no one talked, though there could be signage, the action always centered on two, and only two, characters, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, and it always takes place in the outdoors in the American Southwest.

Uh Oh! Hosni Mubarak and Wile E. Coyote I’ve been so busy doing one thing and another that I haven’t had time to make any substantial posts, not one doing a wrap-up on Porky in Wackyland, nor one on anything else.

And that includes the situation in Egypt. But I saw an Al-Jeezera clip that suggested a way to combine cartoons with the Egyptian revolution. The clip involves a discussion between Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim scholar, and Slavoj Žižek, philosophical provocateur. Žižek suggested that Mubarak is facing a situation covered by one of the best-known laws of cartoon physics: A character who is suspended in space will remain in suspension only until he realizes that fact.1 Once he realizes that he’s standing on nothing, gravity kicks in. Žižek’s comment starts a bit after 20:30 in this clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29NffzEh2b0

Here’s an elaborated example from a Warner Brothers Road Runner cartoon, Zoom and

Bored. In this shot Wile Coyote’s situation is obscured by a dust cloud:

1 URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartoon_physics

6

Of course, we don’t know what’s going on any more than Wile and Road Runner do. For all we know, both are standing on solid ground – the default assumption. Now Wile senses something’s wrong:

And so he explores the situation:

At this point we too know what’s wrong and know more or less what to expect, but not exactly when to suspect it.

Finally, the dust cloud begins to dissipate and Wile takes yet another fall:

7

As the dust completely disappears we’ll see that Road Runner’s standing on a jutting promontory.

My sense is that the Egyptian situation is currently somewhere between the second and the third frame grab. Mubarak & Co. know that something’s wrong, but they don’t quite know what. Nor is it at all obvious that the protesters are on firm ground. Even if Mubarak goes, which does seem likely, his cronies might remain in power.

Desire and Causality in Road Runner Cartoons What’s the Road Runner series about?

The cartoons adhere to a formula: They’re set in a desert landscape in the southwestern US and have just two characters, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. Coyote is hungry; Road Runner is a (potential) meal. Coyote concocts schemes to catch Road Runner; some of these are elaborate; and some use equipment supplied by the Acme Corp. All the schemes fail. Coyote has no particular animosity toward the Road Runner; nor Road Runner toward Coyote, though he does taunt him. The end.

Simple. But what’s it about? Take Coyote as a figure for human desire and Road Runner as a figure for the world at large. Desire wishes to bend the world toward its ends. All those elaborate, but failed, schemes are a figure for causality. Conclusion: causality operates according to laws that are independent of human desire. Ergo, there is a world out there, and it is independent of us.

Let’s consider an early example in the series, Beep, Beep (1951). Chuck Jones, the director, invokes a scientific frame of mind at the very beginning by giving us the scientific designations of the protagonists:

8

Jones enforces the sense of “science” by first presenting us with a blueprint for one of Coyote’s schemes:

9

We, of course, occupy the Coyote’s point of view; he’s a stand-in for us, and our desires. Notice the three-part explication of the plan. There’s a bit of a gap between steps two and three as a number of unnamed things must happen to transform a (presumably) squashed Road Runner into a burger. We might think of that gap as a figure for the gap between desire and reality.

Of course, the plan doesn’t work. When Coyote steps out onto the wire with the anvil in hand, then wire simply sags:

Road Runner then taunts Coyote – “beep, beep” – and rushes off:

Coyote drops the anvil to give chase and is promptly catapulted into the air:

10

At every point Coyote is foiled by the devices he enlists in his scheme. The world simply doesn’t do what he wants it to do. It’s continually asserting its independence.

And it’s asserting its independence of us as well. Coyote’s scheme, after all, appears logical enough. We may wonder about his ability carry a heavy anvil out onto the wire – how’s his sense of balance? – and about his ability to time the drop so it hits Road Runner. But surely, if it hits, Road Runner will be smashed. Our expectations are foiled as soon as Coyote steps onto the wire, and they’re foiled at every point.

We, of course, know that this will happen. That’s the game of this cartoon: can we guess just how the world will foil Coyote’s plan? We cannot, and thus the cartoon asserts its independence of us.

A bit later we see another blueprint. This one is more elaborate, and we’re given more time to study it:

No sooner do we finish studying the blueprint than we see Coyote rushing to hide (blueprint in hand) while Road Runner approaches the stand:

11

Road Runner stops at the stand, whizzes by and returns with a sign:

Well, I suppose that explains why Road Runner didn’t fall into the trap, but if he can’t read, then just how is it that he got that sign and is showing it to Coyote? If he can’t read then he doesn’t know that the sign said anything about water. If he can’t read then surely he can’t write. And so on. There’s a lot of explaining to be done, and no time to think it through, as we’re off to the next series of gags.

Which take place in the cactus mine:

12

Just what IS a cactus mine? A place where they mine cactuses? Or is that just the name of the mine? No matter. What matters is the chase, which we see largely in elevation view:

Both Coyote and Road Runner are wearing miner’s helmets. Road Runner is the green light; Coyote is the red. So we follow the two lights ‘round and ‘round through the mine tunnels and corridors. This is a very abstracted view of the chase. And that’s what science does, abstracts.

The chase, predictably, does not end well. The exact details of that failure are irrelevant here, though they are very relevant to the viewer who’s trying to figure out what comes next.

And after that we have more gags, gags built on various kinds of rockets. I don’t know how rockets would have appeared to viewers in 1951, which is before the Missile Race and the Moon Race paced the Cold War through the 1950s and into the 1960s. I suspect they appeared to be pretty high-tech stuff, especially the rockets mounted on skates.

And, after a series of gags, those rocket skates leave Coyote exhausted and thirsty. And, wouldn’t you know it, he’s in front of a stand offering a free glass of water.

13

No sooner does Coyote drink the water than he realizes the implications of lifting the glass from the table:

Notice the puff of smoke just above the box, either from the match, the fuse, or both. A moment later:

14

Success! This contraption worked like a champ. It did just what the blueprint implied it would do. But it did it to Coyote, not Road Runner. Where the anvil plan failed for physical reasons – the wire was more elastic than Coyote anticipated – the water contraption failed for semiotic reasons, Road Runner couldn’t read. The contraption got Coyote himself because he was too exhausted to remember the apparatus he’d built.

Thus Jones has clearly established two different realms of causal relations: 1) the physical world, and 2) the mental and social world of signs. Not bad for a cartoon.

We have time for one final gag. Coyote builds a fake railroad crossing and poses as a guard, presumably to stop Road Runner:

Road Runner roars on by, flattening Coyote in the process, who is then struck by an on-rushing train:

15

Just how’d that very real train get onto what had been a faked-up piece of railroad track?

As the train goes by, we see Road Runner lounging in a porch at the rear of the final car:

Desire is once again foiled. Reality gets the last word.

And a good thing it does, otherwise we’d be imprisoned in a world where we can’t distinguish between what we desire of the world and what the world offers to us. Causality is not, in fact, easy to determine; and we are often, in fact, fooled by events. This is never more so than in relations with others, where cause and desire chase one another in endless cycles.

In the Road Runner cartoons Chuck Jones has distilled interaction confusion to the simplest situation: one hungry creature wants to use some other creature as food. In order to achieve that end, to accomplish his desire, that first creature enters into a complex mesh of physical and semiotic causality that is the world. And the world asserts its independence of creaturely desire. In this figure interaction with the world-at-large and interaction with an Other are fused into a single activity:

Wile E. Coyote pursues Road Runner.

THE END

16

Reason in the Social Mind: Road Runner II Let’s return to Beep, Beep, the Road Runner cartoon we’ve been looking at. I want to take up a motif I’d noticed, but passed over.

As I indicated, one series of gags takes Coyote and Road Runner into an old cactus mine, where both wear lamped miner’s helmets. As the chase comes to a close, they enter a zigzagging passage which eventually splits, with Road Runner taking the upper passage:

Coyote takes the lower passage, but continues his zigzag course, bouncing off the ceiling:

He comes to rest in a dark passage:

17

And lights a match, revealing that he’s surrounded by TNT:

Of course, the TNT explodes. But we don’t see the explosion underground. We see it aboveground, where cactuses go flying:

18

Here’s the motif that interests me:

When the cactuses reseat themselves on the ground, they spell out “Yipe!” – as though they’re yelling on behalf of Coyote. It’s a good gag. But, I believe that it’s more than that.

Jones repeats it, albeit in a different form. Coyote ties himself to a rocket, presumably so that he can catch up to Road Runner:

19

When the rocket takes off, however, it doesn’t go horizontal, it goes vertical . . .

explodes in a shower of fireworks . . .

20

and they form themselves into an advertisement:

Again, an explosion leads to writing, first by cactuses, now by burning particles.

Why the writing? Yes, it makes a good gag, but why? Let me speculate. As I argued Saturday, the Road Runner cartoons are about the distinction between human

desire toward the world and the causal mechanisms operating in the world. One might even say they’re about objectivity, reason, science. Hence every cartoon in the series opens with pseudo Latin names for Road Runner cartoons and every cartoon emphasizes Coyote’s ingenuity in constructing contraptions to catch Road Runner. He reasons things out, and tests his devices before using them. And yet they fail.

Two thoughts: one old, one a bit newer. The old thought is that abstract reason starts in anthropomorphism and then, at least sometimes, proceeds to carve away the human elements until nothing is left but impersonal causal forces operating between impersonal objects. The newer thought is from evolutionary psychology, that the human brain is, above all, a social brain. The massive size increase, relative to the brains of other primates, is to accommodate the needs of a richer and more complex social life.

As a corollary to the second thought, the newer one, let us posit that the neural machinery for dealing with social life is the richest and most versatile neural machinery we’ve got. Thus, we’re going to use it to think about our most difficult problems, even when they are not problems of social life. That leads us to the first thought, the older one. Abstract reason begins in anthropomorphism because that’s how it gains access to our most sophisticated computational machinery. To use Mark Changizi’s term,2 the social brain has been harnessed by reason and, in particular, by scientific and technical reason.

And that’s what’s going on when the cactuses come down spelling “Yikes!” and the fireworks enjoin us to “Eat at Joe’s”. The social brain is peeking through, using a medium natural to it, language.

There is in fact almost no social interaction in Road Runner cartoons. We have only two characters and their only face-to-face interaction comes when Road Runner taunts Coyote. Thus the social brains of the audience can be given almost entirely to the parody of scientific reasoning that is the substance of these cartoons. That parody, however, DOES make and preserve a crucial distinction, as I argued in Desire and Causality in Road Runner Cartoons. Wile E. Coyote’s desire to

2 URL: http://changizi.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/how-to-put-art-and-brain-together/

21

convert Road Runner into food has no effect on the causal interactions exhibited by his devices, schemes, and contraptions. Instead of regulating the interaction between two or more actors, ego (that is, itself) and one or more alters, the social brain is regulating the interaction between desire and causality. Yet it’s still a conversation, and, as such, requires a conversational space.

As Mike Barrier points out in his commentary (in Vol. 2 of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection), we, the audience, enter the cartoon looking over Wile E. Coyote’s shoulder; he plays to us and thus draws us in, on his side. At the same time we’re aware of things Wile is not. We’re the ones who see “Yikes!” and “Eat at Joe’s”. We’re the ones who exercise the distinction between desire and causality. We’re the ones who learn that, no matter how ingenious it is, no matter how fast it can move, desire can never overtake causality. It’s a bitter lesson, but one essential to the conduct of reason.

22

Bugs in Drag I start my examination of What’s Opera, Doc? after the fact, with a statement of methodology prompted by Mike Barrier, then I get down to actual analysis.

Method in Cartoonology In the process of posting a link to some of my cartoon commentary [Thanks! Mike] Michael Barrier made some qualifying remarks:

I sometimes feel when I read Bill's pieces that he is taking a long way around when a more direct route is available, but what the hey, he's doing intellectual work that almost no one else writing about animation is doing. I've just read through his What's Opera, Doc? postings, and my reaction could be summed up as impatience, followed by second thoughts along the lines of, wait a minute, there are some ideas here that really deserve a careful look.

I don’t know quite what he has in mind when he refers to “taking the long way around”, but I do know what impatience is and I can certainly see why Mike, or anyone else, would react to my work in that way. For better or worse, “a more direct route” is unavailable to me.

So let me say a thing or two about what I’m up to. Anyone who reads my stuff sees that I spend a lot of time simply describing what happens. If

you know the cartoon I'm working on—and Mike certainly knows these cartoons, very well—that descriptive work is going to seem obvious and so may be a bit irritating—I know, I know, I've watched the cartoon! I’m looking for a pattern, or a detail or two, and these things may not spring into relief until the cartoon has been described in some detail (think, for example, of my discussions of ring form in Fantasia and Heart of Darkness). And, often enough, I don’t even spot the pattern or detail until I’ve sunk knee-deep in description. I start with some vague idea that something’s there, but it takes a bit of work actually to see it.

Consider What’s Opera, Doc? It wasn’t until I was deep into the analysis and description that I noticed that Elmer’s anger at Bugs could, and should, be attributed to Bugs deceiving him by dressing in drag and responding to his courtship apparently in kind. I then asserted that this is different from what happens in the other (some, most, all?) Elmer and Bugs cartoons where Elmer’s animosity, if you can call it that, is given in the basic framework of the cartoon. Elmer comes out hunting rabbits and Bugs is his target. Conflict is inherent in the situation and one expects it to intensify as the cartoon moves forward.

My assertion, then, was and is that Elmer’s anger in the last third of What’s Opera, Doc? is something other than this normal intensification. This anger arose from romantic disappointment generated within the cartoon itself, rather than being part of the cartoon’s basic framework. For what it’s worth, I doubt that I would have noticed that if I hadn’t been going through the cartoon slowly and carefully, taking screen shots, then describing them, and, in the process, paying attention to how much screen time was allotted to this that and the other. This was no ordinary gag, taking 10, 20, 30 so seconds of running time. It ran well over two minutes (from 2:58 when Elmer first sees Bugs atop the horse to 5:18 when Bugs’ helmet falls off); that’s a third of the running time for the cartoon (not counting the credit sequences). That’s a long time.

23

And, though I didn’t mention that duration in my original posts, that was certainly on my mind when I made my assertion that this cartoon is different from the others. And that’s all I did, ASSERT the difference. To actually ARGUE the point I’d have to discuss other Bugs and Elmer cartoons and show that, in them, Elmer’s late-cartoon anger is simply part of the natural escalation of the basic conflict and not something arising from a change in his relationship to Bugs that takes place within cartoon itself.

How do you make such an argument? Obviously you need to discuss other cartoons. How many: two, three, 10, all the Bugs and Elmer’s? And just how would you go about it? The answer to that, obviously enough, depends on the cartoons themselves.

But, you might start with those where Bugs puts on drag, for this is not the only such cartoon—think, for example, of Bugs in Rabbit Seasoning. In these cases one would have to distinguish these cases from what happens in Opera. How? And why confine ourselves to Bugs and Elmers? Bugs dresses as a bobby-soxer in Long-Haired Hare for example. Once we’ve made that argument . . .

And then there’s my argument about breaking the fourth wall, that not only is it frequent in gag-based cartoons, but it seems natural in then. It’s one thing to make the suggestion, which I’ve done in a post, but an actual argument will take many cases. And they’re going to have to be examined in some detail.

It just goes on and on. The fact is, all I hope to accomplish in these posts, all I CAN hope to accomplish, is to come

up with “some ideas here that really deserve a careful look.” To actually establish any of these ideas in a strong way, that will take a lot of work, not only by me, but by others interested in cartoons. That’s a job for a village, a community, of scholars.

Intimate Enemies: What’s Opera, Doc? It is a truth universally acknowledged that What’s Opera, Doc? is one of the finest cartoons ever made.3 It satirizes opera, Wagner in particular; it parodies Disney’s Fantasia, and, for that matter, it parodies the routines of its stars, Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. The production was, by Warner Brother’s standards, lavish, and the layouts, by Maurice Noble, are inspired.

All of that’s obvious. What’s not so obvious is that the film plays on the nature of reality in a way that’s reminiscent of Dance of the Hours from Disney’s Fantasia. As I’ve argued in Animal Passion? Hyacinth Hippo and Ben Ali Gator,4 that episode depicts the inability of animal dancers to stay in role with the result that, when Ben Ali Gator courts Hyacinth Hippo we don’t know whether they’re acting roles or whether their passion is, well, real. Something like that is going on in What’s Opera, Doc? Elmer Fudd is in role as, well, Siegfried I guess, from beginning to end, but Bugs is not.

Note: I’m not going to comment on the design. But you should pay attention to it. Note the colors, the camera angles, and the use of lines. It’s really exquisite.

Kill the Wabbit Let’s start at the beginning. As the title card and credits roll we hear an orchestra warming up. We thus know that, yep, as the title says, this is going to be opera. The opening music is wild and stormy and we see a stormy sky, and then a large hulking shadow appears projected against a cliff. More sky and lightening, and then we see that the large shadow is projected by a rather small fellow:

3 URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_Opera,_Doc 4 URL: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2010/11/animal-passion-hyacinth-hippo-and-ben.html

24

It this point a simple, and rather old, point has been made: things aren’t always what they seem to be. The camera zooms in and it’s Elmer Fudd, in heroic costume as a Nordic warrior, informing us that he’s “hunting wabbits.”

25

As Elmer sings “Kill the wabbit” while poking his spear into a rabbit hole, Bugs hears him and is rather distressed. Bugs approaches and delivers his classic line, “What’s up, Doc?” Bugs, however, is not in costume and so not, presumably, in role. He’s just Bugs.

26

For whatever reason, Elmer is completely oblivious to the identity of this character, which has us, the audience, wondering what indeed is up? When Bugs asks the mighty Nordic warrior just how he expects to kill the rabbit, Elmer replies that he’ll use his spear and magic helmet. The spear, of course, is just a standard weapon, the Nordic warrior equivalent of Elmer’s more usual shotgun. But a magic helmet, that’s something else entirely and gives the Nordic warrior powers that Elmer never had. Note how the helmet glows when Elmer mentions it:

Perhaps sensing a challenge, Elmer offers to demonstrate the helmet’s powers and climbs to the top of a tall promontory and summons up foul weather in a scene reminiscent of the dream sequence from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Lightening strikes a tree next to Bugs, who’s OK. But he starts running.

27

It’s then, when they’re far apart, then Elmer realizes that that creature, that’s the wabbit!

28

True Love Elmer sets out in hot pursuit until he comes to a halt at the foot of another promontory, atop of which he spies, and is smitten by, Brünnhilde. Brünnhilde, we see instantly, is Bugs in drag, and she’s plunked atop an enormously overweight horse, as though the horse had to make up for the lack of fat on the proverbial operatic Fat Lady as played by Bugs. We assume, of course, that Bugs knows full well he’s in costume, playing a role.

They dance a pas de deux, Elmer looking rather boyish, at the end of which Bugs retreats atop another tower, this one with steps up the side and a gazebo at the top. They sing a passionate duet as Elmer climbs the steps. He reaches her, she falls into his arms, and her helmet falls away, revealing rabbit’s ears. The jig is up!

29

Elmer is enraged. As Bugs flees, the Nordic warrior invokes his powers again and conjures up a powerful storm, leaving Bugs apparently dead from a lightening strike.

30

Upon spotting Bugs’ body, Elmer is suddenly filled with remorse. He rushes to the body, picks it up, and carries it off to, well, it’s not clear exactly where, Valhalla one presumes. As he does so the camera zooms in on Bugs, who reveals that he’s alive, asking: What did ya’ expect in an opera, a happy ending?

31

Comparative Wabbitology According to the Wikipedia article on What’s Opera, Doc? this is one of only three cartoons in which Elmer gets the “upper hand” on Bugs.5 The others are Rabbit Rampage6 and Hare Brush.7 Neither of them is, shall we say, a “standard” Bugs and Elmer cartoon. And in neither of them does Elmer think that he’s killed Bugs.

Rabbit Rampage is an exercise in meta-level surrealism comparable to Duck Amuck. Bugs is the lone on-screen character addressing himself to an unseen artist who keeps redrawing both the setting and Bugs himself. The camera pulls back at the very end to reveal that Elmer’s the animator. Far from being Bugs’ killer, Elmer is, in a sense, the one who creates bugs, who gives him, if not life, at least visible substance.

In Hare Brush, Bugs and Elmer switch roles. As the cartoon opens Elmer is a wealthy industrialist who thinks he’s a rabbit; he hops on all fours and munches a carrot. His board commits him to an asylum, where we see him in his room in a rabbit suit. This that and the other happens; Bugs takes a mind-altering pill; and voilà! bunny-suit Elmer gets chased around the countryside by Bugs-as-Elmer with a shotgun and wearing hunting clothes. A tax agent nabs

5 URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What's_Opera,_Doc 6 URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_Rampage 7 URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare_Brush

32

Bugs-as-Elmer and hauls him off to prison, with bunny-suit Elmer basking in his triumph. But: he doesn’t think Bugs is dead and there’s no mourning.

So, in one case, Rabbit Rampage, Elmer has had the upper hand from the beginning, but we don’t know that because we aren’t aware of his role until the end. In the other case we have, if not quite role reversal from the beginning, certainly role confusion; Elmer thinks he’s a rabbit and Bugs hunts him. The point is that Elmer having the upper hand at the END isn’t just a matter of the final moves in the plot. Rather, it seems to entail a reconfiguration of the whole cartoon from beginning to end. We’re in the intellectual territory Lévi-Strauss entered in his studies of myth, where he showed how a large body of South American myths was based on the strategic rearrangement and transformation of a relatively few underlying elements (see my working paper, Beyond Lévi-Strauss on Myth: Objectification, Computation, and Cognition8).

And that reconfiguration certainly includes playing with the conventions of reality. In Rabbit Rampage the so-called fourth wall is destroyed from the very beginning. At every step of the way we are told, in one way or another, that this is a cartoon. In Hare Brush Elmer is crazy and Bugs is drugged.

Things aren’t what they seem.

What’s Up, Really? That’s certainly the case with What’s Opera, Doc? From the beginning to the end, Elmer is caught up in a role in an opera; he never appears as ordinary Elmer. When he enters, Bugs does not appear to be playing a role. But he’s worried about this Nordic warrior who’s after him. At first he’s just Bugs. But, when Nordic warrior sees him as “the wabbit” he dons a costume and takes a role in the opera. He becomes Nordic warrior’s beloved Brünnhilde.

The two then dance together and serenade one another. That is quite unlike anything that happened in either Hare Brush or Rabbit Rampage. And this, I suggest, is why, at the end, Elmer mourns the dead Bugs—who isn’t really dead. Yes, when he realizes the deception he goes into a rage and, in that rage, conjures up a storm that lays Bugs/Brünnhilde out for dead. When the storm dissipates and he sees Bugs/Brünhilde there, well his rage is gone too and so he mourns the wabbit, the wabbit with whom he’d danced a dance of love and sang a song of love.

What else could he do? We’re in the land of myth logic and the rules are different from those in the real world. In

myth logic mourning is the necessary answer to passionate love, as destructive rage is the necessary answer to deception. And perhaps that’s it, it was the deception that angered Elmer/Nordic warrior and it was the deception for which he sought revenge. That is, he wasn’t merely hunting a wabbit, as he was at the beginning, he was exacting revenge.

And that’s different from simply hunting rabbits. At this point I see a pile of questions which I’m not prepared to address. For one thing,

Elmer vs. Bugs had been a staple of Warner Brothers cartoons for years. Most people in the audience would know this. But how would What’s Opera, Doc? play for those who didn’t know that? And what about relatively young children who had not yet absorbed the conventions of cartoons, such as the fact that, no matter how much violence we see, no one is injured?

Not only is the Bugs/Elmer conflict a known item, but it’s almost always presented as an on-going conflict. Elmer and Bugs have a long-standing relationship. Elmer’s not hunting any arbitrary rabbit, he’s hunting this particular wabbit. It’s personal, and has been for some time.

Family Matters What does it mean to be locked into THAT kind of conflict? It’s as though a significant component of Elmer’s identity is invested in his conflict with Bugs. That kind of conflict is

8 URL: https://www.academia.edu/10541585/Beyond_L%C3%A9vi-Strauss_on_Myth_Objectification_Computation_and_Cognition

33

steeped in ambivalence. The love duet in this cartoon was no mere act; it revealed an aspect of the relationship between Bugs and Elmer that’s otherwise been completely masked in standard-issue cartoon violence and conflict.

While Bugs and Elmer aren’t even the same species, much less the same family, that is only appearance. Or, if you will, that’s art. The response these cartoons evoke in us, the audience, that response speaks to close personal relationships. It’s about family. Wife and husband, parent and child, sibling and sibling, that’s what we’re dealing with. Those relationships are fraught with ambivalence, ambivalence that’s on full display in What’s Opera, Doc?

Now all I need’s a good explicit argument to that effect, rather than a few paragraphs of tap dancing and hand waving. That argument, that’s going to take more than a blog post, much more.

BTW, did you look closely at those screen shots, the color and layout?

* * * * *

Bonus points: As you know, Michael Barrier insists on the importance of animate acting. That is extraordinarily important in this cartoon. Pick one scene an explicate the acting subtleties it displays.

Elmer Loves Bugs Redux

In my previous post on What’s Opera, Doc? (Intimate Enemies above) I’d hit upon the idea that when, nearing the end, Elmer called upon all the forces at his command to destroy Bugs he was motivated by Bugs’ deception.* He’d sung and danced his love to and with Brünnhilde and she turned out to be Bugs in drag. It’s that disappointment, that frustrated love, that drove him into a rage. And that’s different from, in addition to, the almost pro forma antagonism that drove him at the beginning of this cartoon and that drives him at the beginning of all his encounters with Bugs.

I’d liked that idea when I had it, which was in the process of writing that post, but afterward I had some misgivings. For I’d long felt that one good answer—perhaps the best answer—to the question “Why’d he do it?” is: Because the author made him do it. The author wanted to achieve a certain effect, and having the character do whatever, that’s the way to achieve that effect.

34

So, what’s the immediate effect of Elmer’s remorse? Surprise! That’s not what we were expecting.

And that, of course, is what goes on in the typical Bugs and Elmer cartoon. It’s a game in which the cartoonist keeps us guessing about how Bugs which trick Elmer and keeps surprising us with new gags. Just as Bugs’ (apparent) death was a new move, so is Elmer/Nordic warror’s (real) remorse.

With that in mind, let’s reconsider What’s Opera, Doc?

Pacing The Bugs and Elmer cartoon revolves around pairs of moves: Elmer threatens Bugs, Bugs evades the threat. Consider a not-so-standard example from 1951, Rabbit Seasoning. In this case Daffy Duck is trying to get Elmer to shoot Bugs. So the threat comes from Daffy, and the deflection takes the form of Bugs getting Elmer to shoot Daffy. By my count this happens six times. (One of those times Bugs dresses in drag, and Elmer falls for it. So Bugs-as-Brünnhilde is not a new kind of move for Bugs.)

In What’s Opera, Doc? we have only two threat-evade pairs. The first happens when, after demonstrating the powers of his helmet, Elmer notices that Bugs is indeed the wabbit. He gives chase and, in relatively short order, Bugs dons drag and we have a relatively long courtship sequence which ends when Bugs’ helmet falls off while he’s in Elmer’s fond embrace. And that leads to the second threat-evade pair. Elmer goes into a rage and, once again, calls on his helmet powers, this time to kill Bugs. Bugs evades this threat by playing dead. He reveals that only to us, the audience, and then only at the very end of the cartoon.

So, the pace of this cartoon, when measured in threat-evade moves, is very different from the other Bugs and Elmers. It’s much slower. And that slower pace changes the scope and valence of Bugs’s and Elmer’s actions. It changes the nature of Bugs’s first evasion and of Elmer’s reaction against it.

It’s not simply that Elmer buys-in to Bugs-in-drag. He’s done that before. It’s that we have two sung duets and a pas de deux lasting a bit over two minutes before Bugs’s cover is blown. Yes, we can see that Bugs simpers and fidgets even if Elmer can’t, but that second duet, “Return My Love,” is so good, even if the voices are cartoon voices. The singing is on pitch and expressive. It’s sincere. Forget the effect it works on Elmer, what effect does it work on us, the audience?

What can possibly come of this? We know, of course, that it’s just got to fall through somehow, but just how—we can’t wait to find out.

With all this in mind, let’s go back to the beginning and take another trip through the cartoon, this time picking up some things we passed over on the first trip.

The Turn to Love Once the title credits and music are over, we see a lightening-struck sky and hear violent storming music. These sky shots are intermingled with the huge shadow of a helmeted and thickly muscled figure apparently directing the music and, thought that, the stormy sky. This goes on long enough that we just have time to ask ourselves, who or what is this creature?

35

No sooner do we formulate that question than the camera zooms down, and in, to reveal the answer: It’s Elmer Fudd in costume as a mighty Nordic warrior. At this point Elmer becomes separated from the hulking shadow, the music quiets, and he’s now chasing wabbits.

36

That opening is important, however, because it establishes the connection between Elmer and storming even before we know it’s Elmer and it also establishes Elmer almost outside the film itself. An Elmer who commands the very weather is more than a mere Nordic warrior. He’s close to the Elmer of Rabbit Rampage, who played the off-screen animator of Bugs.

Once Elmer’s hunting the wabbit, he sees the rabbit tracks and, shortly thereafter, Bugs himself, though he doesn’t seem to recognize Bugs as a rabbit. When Bugs wonders about his magic helmet, Elmer offers a demonstration. He climbs to the top of a pinnacle (podium?) and, in effect, evokes the opening sequence by, once again, bringing on violent music and violent weather. Lightening strikes a tree next to Bugs, who then scampers away.

Why invest Elmer with this kind of power? That’s the question: Why this kind of power? What effect is Jones trying to achieve that requires this? As an ordinary Wagnerian Nordic warrior Elmer’s pretty much what he is in a standard cartoon, a peevish little man out to get a wabbit. When he invokes that helmet power, well, we’re in the land of myth logic. Elmer has become a wizard, a mage.

Bugs is always aware of himself as Bugs. When he dons his Brünnhilde drag he’s aware that he’s playing a role. Elmer never gives any indication that he’s playing a role, but though his helmet powers he inflates himself to achieve a power over this Wagnerian world and so, even over Bugs-as-Brünnhilde. But not over Bugs as, well, Bugs Bunny. That Bugs is safe.

There’s two versions of Elmer: Elmer as Nordic warrior, Elmer as mage weather master. And there’s two versions of Bugs: Bugs as Bugs Bunny, and Bugs as Brünhilde. If you will, Bugs as Bunny escapes the Wagnerian world by retreating into mere mundane reality. Elmer animates the Wagnerian world by inflating into primordial pagan magic. There’s a peculiar symmetry about this arrangement that I’m at a loss to formulate in a coherent way.

In any event, once Elmer’s invoke his helmet powers and Bugs scampers away, Elmer is able to recognize him as the wabbit and he gives chase. It’s at that point that Bugs enters the Wagnerian world by donning his Brünnhilde drag. That leads to over two minutes of passionate courtship that ends when Bugs’s helmet falls off—notice that, it’s the helmet that gives him away. Accident or not?

Now we’ve got to pay close attention. Bugs immediately scampers away. We’ve got the same white-black-grey-pink color scheme we had during “Return My Love.” Notice that little Bugs casts a big shadow on the wall, as though echoing Elmer’s shadow at the opening:

As soon as Elmer goes into a rage the color changes dramatically, into deep blues, reds, and magentas. Once again he’s become a mage, and the world has changed.

37

Notice Bugs way down there running off toward the mountains:

38

Elmer invokes the North winds, the South winds, typhoone, hurricanes, earthquakes, and, of course, smog. Bugs continues running.

Now Magic Elmer orders the lightening to “stwike the wabbit.” It is one thing to kill a rabbit with a shotgun, or a spear. But to do so by invoking the weather, that’s action of a whole different order.

Elmer runs to see the fruits of his magic-enhanced rage. Notice the anger on his face as he looks down:

39

This is what he sees, presumably:

40

Bugs appears to be dead. The storming ceases and the music becomes calmer. We see Bugs, recumbent on a rock as a flower sheds tears on his dead body, as though the natural world itself mourned his death.

41

It is only now, after we’ve seen that flower weeping, after we’ve been able to register Bugs’s death, that Elmer, once again merely a Nordic warrior, feels remorse: “What have I done?” This is important. It’s as though Elmer’s remorse serves as a vehicle for our own sadness over Bugs’s death.

Notice that the lurid color scheme has disappeared; it disappeared as soon as the camera turned toward the dead Bugs.

Elmer rushes to Bugs, picks up the corpse, and carries it off to glory. Bugs, of course, escapes from the Wagnerian scenario by simply informing us, but not Elmer, that he’s alive. And this, in the logic of myth, seems parallel to opening where Elmer first appears through his shadow as conductor of the orchestra and master of the weather.

Redux There you have it, a second run through What’s Opera, Doc? The observations I made in my first post still stand, I believe, including the assertion that Elmer’s rage is to be seen as being occasioned, not by the cartoon situation itself, but by a specific set of actions within the cartoon, the courtship sequence and its collapse. But that observation has been refined by a sense of how the relatively relaxed pacing of this cartoon facilitated a change in the valence both of Bugs’s donning drag and of the exposure of his deception.

I also want to emphasize the importance of Elmer’s duality as both Nordic warrior and helmet-powered wizard. Such a duality doesn’t exist in other Bugs Bunny cartoons, but it’s central to this one. This is more than an extraordinary device for pursuing Bugs. It’s doing work that I’m not sure how to characterize.

Yeah, myth logic, that’s what it is. It’s as though when Elmer invokes storms and lightening, he changes the world from one

state to another. The first change made Bugs’s identity as a rabbit visible, and thereby necessitated the Brünnhilde guise and the attendant courtship. The second change reversed the first but at the cost of eliminating Bugs from action.

When Chuck Jones decided to take on Wagner he did more than simply cut way back on the gags. He moved into a different kind of psychological and narrative territory. The fact is that our sense of this as being performed on a stage is weaker, weaker than in the case of Disney’s Dance of the Hours. Once we get past the opening credits with the warm-up music and the opening shadow play there’s very little sense that this is taking place on a stage. The physical structure of the world is larger and more complex than sets on any stage. No, this story is

42

taking place in a Nordic world and Bugs is more like an interloper from an alternative universe than a wise-guy who’s wandered into an opera.

What was hatched as something of an uber-gag, Bugs and Elmer do Wagner, became almost a new kind of cartoon. While Bugs never becomes completely absorbed into the high Wagnerian seriousness that has captured Elmer, that seriousness has managed to move What’s Opera, Doc? into new narrative, emotional, and expressive territory. While the film doesn’t quite distil 14 hours of Wagner into six minutes, as Chuck Jones used to say, it does expand what a cartoon can accomplish in six minutes. That’s a lot.

* * * * * *I note that Daniel Goldmark makes this point in his excellent discussion of What’s Opera, Doc? in his Tunes for ‘Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon (2005. p. 155). Since I’d read this book a couple of years ago it’s possible that I got the idea from Goldmark and simply forgot the source.

What’s Up between Cartoonist and Audience?

Preliminary thoughts, very sketchy. Comments and questions, please! This post is about two things: the frame, and various details. By frame I mean the overall ‘governing aegis’ of the cartoon, the compact, if you will, between cartoonist and audience. As for details, there’s lots of them.

The details that sent me down this particular conceptual path happen at about two minutes and 40 seconds into What’s Opera, Doc? when Elmer turns to the audience and says, “That was the wabbit.”

One detail is the fact that he looks right at the audience and addresses himself to us. This isn’t the first time this happens in this cartoon. It happened early on when the camera first zoomed in on Elmer and, after asking us to be “vewy quiet” and he told us that he was “hunting wabbits”—notice the plural. Between these two instances Bugs addresses the audience twice and the he does so once at the very end when he tells us that he’s not dead but, in effect, is pretending to be so in order to satisfy operatic conventions.

43

So, in the space of a six-minute cartoon we have five violations of the so-called “fourth wall,” the one between the fictional world and the live audience. Well, they may be violations of the fourth wall, but I’ve come to suspect that such violations are consistent with the conventions of a certain kind of cartoon, and whatever kind that is, it is not particularly, cerebral, meta, or avant-garde.

On the contrary, it is typical and quite common in many cartoon shorts of the Golden Age. That’s the frame I’m talking about, the compact with the audience. It stages the relationship between artist and audience in a way that’s quite different from most live action features and from feature-length animation. It’s not just that these cartoons are shorter, but that they’re constructed on different principles. They aren’t stories that just happen to be short. They’re something else.

The cartoons that are constructed in this way don’t really have plots. The stories are strung together from gags, gags which generally depend on word play – e.g. a gun labeled “disintegrating gun” that disintegrates — or on physical tricks — e.g. being suspended over a cliff until you look down. We’re compelled through the cartoon by our expectation of another gag, not by our interest in what the characters are trying to achieve. We know that Wily Coyote is trying to catch and eat Road Runner and that Road Runner is trying to evade Wily Coyote; we know also that Wily will not succeed. And so it is with Tweety Bird and Sylvester, Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny, and so on.

These characters have personalities and those personalities are important, very important. But the personality isn’t important as a locus of a character’s desires and motivations. Those are fixed. The cartoon isn’t exploring them. Rather, it’s exploring their participation in and reactions to the gags. When Daffy’s pistol disintegrates in his hand, what does he do? When Wily starts falling, what does he do?

Now, and this is a tricky question, what does the use of gag-based narratives have to do with the relatively casual inclusion of remarks to the audience? Why are these aspects of the same mode of cartoon-making?

Whatever it is that’s going on, it seems to me that a cartoon like Duck Amuck is simply taking it to one logical extreme. Daffy is swamped in gags, gags happening over around under and through him. At the same time he’s constantly addressing us, except that it isn’t us he’s addressing. He’s addressing an unseen cartoonist who’s executing all those gags. So the cartoon is a back-and-forth interaction between Daffy and the unseen cartoonist such that, when Daffy addresses that cartoonist, he also addresses us.

By contrast, What’s Opera, Doc? comes close to eliminating gags of the usual sort, under Wagnerian influence, moves to the very edge of a story. Elmer’s revenge arises from within the story itself. It’s not something he brings with him as one of the factors generating the string of gags.

What I’m getting at, then, is that the gag-based cartoon is staged as a conversation between the cartoonist and the audience. They are, if only implicitly, back and forth interactions. These ‘cartoonic’ conversation turn on gags, with addresses to the audience functioning as a type of gag. The gags violate OUR sense of reality in one way or another, but not the reality of the cartoon characters. Speech addressed to the audience violates the reality that cartoon characters cannot, in fact, talk with real people.

In saying THAT I’m also asserting that both live action and animated features ARE NOT staged as conversations between the film-maker and the audience. Those films are not conversationally directed at the audience in the way these cartoons are. They just flow on, and the audience watches. When, on relatively rare occasions, the audience is addressed, that’s special.

More later. I hope.

44

Duck Dodgers and Some Gags into the Unknown Since last week’s post, What’s Up Between Cartoonist and Audience? I’ve been thinking about the fact that so many (most? almost all?) Golden Age cartoons are constructed with gags. We all know this, and yet, I must confess, that I for one don’t know what’s going on. What are these things, these gags? How do they work, why should we take such pleasure in a sequence of them? And why did they come to occupy such a large place in popular culture when they did?

I don’t know the answers to any of those questions, but I do know something about how to describe and analyze cartoons. I can at least take a look at some more cartoons and see how they work. As for those large questions, they’ll just have to wait.

Duck Dodgers Instructs His Pupil

Let’s take a look at Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century,9 a 1952 Chuck Jones cartoon featuring Daffy Duck, as Duck Dodgers, and Porky Pig and his space cadet sidekick. The earth is running out of Illudium Phosdex, the essential ingredient in shaving cream, and Duck Dodgers is sent to claim the only remaining source, on Planet X. And Planet X is in a zone that’s simply marked “unknown” on a huge space chart—notice that Daffy and his boss are standing on a podium high up in the room, which is itself on the 17,000th floor of the building. Daffy accepts the mission, of course.

Those who’ve been through middle school algebra are likely to pick up some resonance at this point, for the mysterious UNKNOWN in an equation is typically represented by a variable labeled “X”. X is the unknown, and that’s where the hapless Daffy is going with the help of Porky.

Skipping over this and that, we’re under way and Daffy is going to explain to his young charge just how they’re going to find their way to Planet X:

9 URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_Dodgers_in_the_24%C2%BDth_Century

45

Here’s how it’s going to go:

46

The explanation that goes along with this is pure gibberish:

Now then, eager young space cadet, here is the course we shall pursue to find Planet X. Starting from where we are we go thirty-three thousand six hundred turbo miles due up. Then West in an astroarc deviation to here. Then following the great circle down seven radial lubes South by down East, by asto astrobal to here, here, and here, then by space navigal compass to here, here, and then to here and here, by thirteen stratocumulus bearing four million light years and thus to our destination.

I suspect that then, as now, there were many in the audience for whom science and math made exactly that much sense, whatever they may have thought about space travel as adventure. Daffy doesn’t seen too convinced by his own explanation and asks Porky what he thinks:

Daffy: Now do you know how to reach Planet X? Porky: Ah, yeh yeh ah yeh ah yehyehyehyeh oh sure. Daffy: Well I wish you’d explain it to me sometime, buster.

Daffy finds Porky’s confidence both surprising and unnerving:

47

Porky notes, however, that if you look out there, you’ll see that the planets are labeled in alphabetic order. Perhaps we can get to Planet X by following that order. Daffy rejects the idea, then reconsiders, discovers that it was his idea, and off they go. Note that not only is Planet X marked with a large X, but it’s furnished with Xs as well.

48

Life Lessons So, what’s going on here? First, while Daffy is the one in charge, he’s incompetent. Porky’s competent but also quite willing to let Daffy run things. He even seems to respect Daffy’s position of authority, as though he can separate the authority from the competence.

This situation plays well from different angles. Sooner or later all adults have been in Porky’s position and so can appreciate seeing it played out this way on the screen. In particular, Porky’s willingness to let Daffy take credit for his idea—follow the letters—exemplifies standard advice for how to do with difficult people. Similarly, the adult world often seems baffling to a child and so it’s comforting to see Porky surreptitiously prevail over Daffy.

What is comforting to all is that the solution to the problem—follow the letters—is such a simple one. Things have labels and those labels are useful. They tell us what the things are and how they’re ordered. We’ve left the world of How to Win Friends and Influence People and entered the sacred precincts of philosophy, the relationship between words and things.

On that last point, however, we are being set-up for a sequence of gags based on the tricky relationship between words and things.

49

Words and Things No sooner has Daffy claimed the planet in the name of the earth than an odd little creature claims it in the name of Mars. And that odd creature has a disintegrating pistol; it says so right on the label:

Daffy’s not worried, though, as he informs us (yes, he addresses us, the audience), he’s wearing a disintegration proof vest. But alas, the vest doesn’t protect him:

50

Now we’ve got a problem. The cartoon’s only two-thirds over and our protagonist is a pile of dust. What’s going to happen?

Well, Porky saved Daffy once, when he showed him how to follow the letters. He’s going to do it again, with an integrating pistol? But what’s an integrating pistol? Disintegrating rays/guns/pistols are ubiquitous in science fiction, but who ever heard of an integrating ray/gun/pistol. It must be somehow related to the disintegrating pistol, as the words are related, but ...

51

By the time you’ve figured it out, it’s already happened on the screen. Daffy’s little bits have reintegrated into the heroic Duck Dodgers.

Far from being appreciative, however, Daffy acts like he had the strange little Martian cornered and orders Porky back to the spaceship.

He then pulls HIS disintegrating pistol on the Martian: “Got the drop on you with MY disintegrating pistol. And, brother, when it disintegrates, it disintegrates!” Which it does, but not in the way Daffy intends:

52

At the point Daffy beats a retreat into the safety of his spaceship and we have more gags, and more word play. But this is enough for now.

One thing about this sequence is that the order of the gags is important. You couldn’t change the order and have the same effect. Obviously you can’t integrate Daffy before he’s been disintegrated. And the play on the label of Daffy’s own pistol gets its force and surprise from the two previous gags, the vest that doesn’t protect Daffy and the pistol that reassembles him.

So that’s one thing, order is important—my impression is that that’s generally true in gag-driven cartoons. The other thing is that, as the previous scene, we see the peculiar power-relationship between Daffy and Porky. In both cases Porky saves Daffy’s bacon, as it were, and in both cases he has to do so from a position of subservience.

That won’t happen again in the cartoon. At the point Porky’s effectively out of the action. Daffy and the Martian will fight one another to a stalemate and destroy the planet in the process. The End.

And the Larger Issues? Of course, this little bit of analysis can’t contribute much to resolving the large issues I raised at the beginning. That would require many more cases, many.

But I would like to end with one simple and obvious point: These gags are intrinsic to the medium. They require the play of images and of words, both spoken and written.

But what does that have to do with the relationship between cartoon and audience? How does that support the way these characters are playing to and for the audience? That’s a matter I’ll continue to think about.