From Dick... to Duck... to Pluck!

This is the Tiny Toon Adventure short "The Return of Pluck Twacy", part of the episode "New Character Day", one of the last episodes of the original 65-episode run. It was written, 'boarded and directed by Eddie Fitzgerald. The opening few seconds of the video are the end of the first segment of the episode. You can ignore that.



First of all, I'd like to clear up any confusion caused by the multiple Tracy/Twacys:

Dick Tracy is a private detective from a newspaper comic strip.
Duck Twacy is from the 1946 cartoon "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery". In this cartoon Daffy avidly reads a Dick Tracy comic strip, knocks himself unconscious, and dreams about being a Dick Tracy style character named "Duck Twacy."
PLUCK Twacy is from the Tiny Toons episode. It is the character *Plucky* dreams about after hearing a speech by Daffy in his Duck Twacy persona.

All sorted? Good. Why do I think there might be some confusion? Well, the segment is supposedly Daffy/Duck Twacy's audition tape, and yet most of it is about Plucky/Pluck Twacy. Also, at one point on his blog Eddie Fitzgerald said that *Pluck* Twacy was a character from a 1940s cartoon who he brought back for TTA. (although he later deleted that, either when someone else pointed out his mistake or when he realised it)

Finally, there is the title, The *Return* of Pluck Twacy. We have never seen Pluck Twacy before, and never will again. So why The Return, unless someone mistook Pluck Twacy for a character who had already appeared?

Anyway, ignoring these problems (which is easy to do after the first few seconds) this is a pretty fun cartoon. The scenes where Plucky bashes himself over the head in order to cope with the tickling are really funny, and the bit on the neon train (a reference, perhaps, to GPBR's "Neon Noodle") is gloriously imaginative, although some may feel it drags out a little.

Some TTA fans are quite hard on it, including one review (on the Tiny Toons Reference Guide) who says that it "sinks to the level of its inspiration", which sounds like a criticism of the original "Great Piggy Bank Robbery". So, it's probably not one for audiences who are into 90s cartoons but not the ones from the 40s. (well, unless there are actually 40s WB fans who don't like "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery" for some reason)

I can kind of understand the problems some people might have with it. There's nothing particularly distinctive to Tiny Toons about it, except in the opening and closing scenes, set in Acme Looniversity, and the point where Plucky gets the vision of Daffy/Duck Twacy giving him advice (that is, because it follows the TTA theme that these are the fans/disciples of the classic characters). Mostly it's a mash-up of multiple classic Warners cartoons, made by someone who is clearly a fan of them and saw this as a chance to make his own.

Obviously, the main set-up comes from Bob Clampett's "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery". The "aura" character is based on Hata Marie from Frank Tashlin's WW2 era "Plane Daffy", and "Tickle-Puss" is Sloppy Moe from Clampett's "Wagon Heels", who saves the day by tickling the villain into submission. There may also be an influence from Bob McKimson's "The Super Snooper" in the way the aura behaves towards Plucky, but the style is much more influenced by Clampett and Tashlin. The scenes where Plucky is surrounded by criminals with weird names, and he gasps as he lists them, is directly from GPBR, although it had already been given a TTA treatment in "Return of Batduck." (I feel the Batduck version works a little better, as it is more imaginative and unexpected, and making all the criminals parodies of Batman's Rogues Gallery gives it a life of its own. Putting it in a setting more directly influenced by GPBR feels less imagintive and more derivative.)

Some shots even seem to be traced from the original cartoons: the long shots of Plucky surrounded by the weird criminals - who all of a sudden look much more like the GPBR villains than the ones in the rest of this cartoon, and the part where Plucky leaps off the guillotine and faces-off the aura - the helmet which he puts on to protect himself from the blade makes him look even more like Daffy in Plane Daffy.

The animation is by Glen Kennedy's studio, which is probably the best choice for a Clampett/Tashlin influenced cartoon. I'm a lot easier on Kennedy than a lot of people, but their animation here is a lot weaker than on some of their other episodes. The scene where Plucky wakes up on the floor of the classroom is particularly bad looking (and there's a strange mistake, where he is seen writhing around for the first few seconds without anyone surrounding him... is he, like, dreaming that he's waking up in an empty classroom, before he actually wakes up in a full one?) Jon McClenahan of Startoons fame animated the introduction where Babs and Buster audition Daffy, and speech Daffy makes to the class, although the last shot of Daffy with the apple seems to be a different animator. It's a shame there isn't more of him, though. I'm sure that Eddie himself was happy to see it assigned to Kennedy, because as we all know he admires Glen Kennedy's work. But I'm not sure if Glen actually animated anything on this one.

Oh, and the ending takes Daffy's "manic depravity" (John Kricfalusi's description of "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery") to a new level. When Daffy woke up, he found himself kissing a pig in a mud pen, and was disgusted for about a second before whooping around excitedly, no doubt because of how much fun his dream was. But in Plucky's case, he bashes himself over the head with a mallet so he can return to his dream! (watch Daffy's encouraging expression at this point!) Kind of reminds me of a certain cop show that I won't name to avoid spoiling people.

I don't know what to say the monkeys won't do!

Like many people, I'd imagine, the first version of this song I encountered was the one featured in the first episode of Animaniacs.



(if the video is taken down by the time you read this, just do a google search for "Animaniacs Monkey Song" or better yet pop in your Animaniacs Volume 1 DVD!)

But I was pleased to find the original version was also available on YouTube:



Some people might call the Animaniacs version a "parody" of the original, but it isn't really... it's just the Warners and Dr Scratchansniff doing their own version of it. The tune is the same, and most of the lyrics are very close. The instrumental breaks are in the same places (accompanied by scenes of other Animaniacs characters doing their schtick), and some of Belafonte's interjections are repeated by the Hippos. "Play that thing!"

It was a surprise that the Belafonte original has only one monkey causing him grief... I guess we naturally think of monkeys coming in trios? (notice the poses the Warners are doing at 2:27!) They just upped it to three monkeys for the Animaniacs version because there are three Warners.


Verse 1: First two lines very close, original has a repeat of the lines, Animaniacs version has two new lines which are specific to the characters and setting. (in fact, the Animaniacs version avoids line repeats a lot more than the original, with more lines rhyming with "Don't know what to say the monkeys won't do" in the chorus parts.)

Verse 2: This is the most different from the original version. Belafonte has the monkey letting his girlfriend in and pouring her a glass of gin. Scratchandsniff has the Warners doing a dance for the Nurse and pouring biting bugs down his clothes. The only similarity is that the end of the second line ("and what do you think?" vs "and what could be worse?") are quite close.

Also, a common theme in the original is the monkey copying Belafonte's actions: "I do X, monkey does X too." The only time something like this appears in the Animaniacs version is here, and it's the other way around: the Warners make Scratchansniff itchy so *he* copies *them.* "Monkeys dance, then I dance too!"

Verse 3 is almost exactly the same, but with the Nurse in place of Belafonte's girlfriend.

Verse 4: Also very close, but this is where the exaggeration of the original starts. Belafonte's "cabinet" was laid to waste, but Scratchy's entire bathroom is. Belafonte has to shave with toothpaste... but the Warners actively shave Scratchy's *head* with the stuff.

Verse 5 continues this exaggeration. Belafonte brushes his hair with a shoe-brush, the Warners use one to shine Scratchy's (shaved in the previous verse) head. Belafonte "almost" goes down (the toilet, presumably), while Scratchy is not so lucky.

Verse 6 is even closer to the original than verse 3... which is quite easy to believe, as trying to make a stew out of the Warners isn't exactly Scratchy's nature. (He's not an Elmer Fudd type hunter/predator, but more like a long-suffering parent or teacher when we usually see him) New to the Animaniacs version is the ensuing chorus which puts Scratchy in the stew himself.


So, as you can see, most of the lyrical changes were small variations to make the Warners more actively annoying than the original.

Say... if you're interested in more Animaniacs commentary, check out Mike R's incredible in-depth blog Hello, Nice Warners!

The Lion King opening sequence

A while back, someone sold a Lion King animator draft on eBay. I didn't buy it, but the seller included a few sample pages. I'm assuming it's genuine but someone with access to the studio archives can probably confirm if it's an accurate example of a 90s feature draft.






The sequence director is Rob Minkoff, one of the film's two directors.

There is more information on this draft than on the "golden age" drafts uploaded by Hans Perk, in that it doesn't just include the animator name but also the layout (for individual shots rather than the whole sequence) and background artists, plus something called "CU LO" (clean-up layout?) Unlike some of the earlier drafts, unfortunately, it doesn't identify which animator was responsible for which characters when they shared a scene. But for the most part we can work it out:

Animation of main characters is by Russ Edmonds (Sarabi and Baby Simba), Tony Fucile (Mufasa), Chris Wahl (Mufasa plus a group shot of the whole family and Rafiki), Ellen Woodbury (Zazu), James Baxter and Ron Husband (Rafiki). For the most part these are supervising animators responsible for their characters. Baby Simba is aimated by Sarabi's supervisor rather than one of the "Young Simba" animators listed in the closing credits. Ron Husband (who started out during the twilight years of the Nine Old Men, animating in Frank Thomas' unit in The Rescuers) is listed as a Pumbaa animator but gets a couple of brief shots of Rafiki here. There are a couple of scenes by a "Haidar" but I have no idea who that is. A Google search for the name plus "Lion King" shows the name has some significance to the lion species in myth and legend - whether this is an indication that this is a false draft, with the identification included as an injoke, or whether it was just a happy coincidence, I have no idea.

edit: This is probably Joe Haidar, credited as an animator on other Disney features of around the same time. IMDb says he was an uncredited "character designer" on The Lion King.

Most of the animation of the incidental animals is by people who also worked on major characters. They are animated by Andreas Deja (rhinos, also Scar), Michael Surrey (meerkats, also Timon, appropriately enough), David Burgess (cheetahs, also hyenas), Anthony DeRosa (gazelles, also Adult Nala), Phil Young (topis, also Mufasa), Dave Stephan (storks and flamingoes, credited with "additional animation"), Bob Bryan (elephants, also Adult Nala), Brad Kuha (elephants and guinea fowl, also Mufasa), Randy Haycock (gazelles and zebras, also Adult Simba), Brian Ferguson (giraffes, also Timon), Joe Ekers (ants and zebras, also Adult Simba), Michael Swofford (crowd scenes, also Zazu) and Gilda Palinginis (crowd scenes, also Adult Nala). It's hard to tell on the draft but Swofford and Palinginis might be animating Zazu and Mufasa respectively.

While one might expect the animators of Adult Simba and Nala, Timon and Pumbaa (who will not appear "as themselves" until half way through the film or later) to appear here, it's strange to see, for example, the supervising Scar animator Andreas Deja animating incidental rhinos. Maybe they wanted one of the masters to handle the first piece of character animation audiences would see in the film?

Layout artists are Ed Ghertner, Allen Tam, Tom Shannon (key layout/workbook) Tim Callahan, Samuel Michlap (layout assistants) plus people named Keller, Tucker, and Christenson.

Many of the same names appear as clean-up layout artists (?), plus Dan St Pierre (layout supervisor) Tanya Wilson, Jennifer Yuan (key layout/workbook), Robert or Doug Walker (layout supervisor, Florida unit or layout assistant) plus people named George III (key assistant layout artist Mac George?) and Toon.

Background artists are Don Moore, Gregory Drolette, Thomas Woodington, Dominick Domingo, Debbie Du Bois, Sunny Apinchapong, Kathy Altieri, David McCamley, and Serge Michaels.

The stuff we remember

I saw the Animaniacs segment "Bumbie's Mom" about 17 years ago. The plot is this: curmudgeonly veteran cartoon star Slappy Squirrel and her peppy nephew Skippy are watching the film "Bumbie, the Dearest Deer" (as you can imagine, it's a Bambi parody) and Skippy is traumatised by the mother's death. To cheer him up, Slappy takes Skippy to visit Vina Waleen, the deer woman who played the mother in the film.

Strangely enough, I only saw Bambi for the first time a couple of years ago - I had only known about it through osmosis before. It's interesting to compare the familiar parody with the unfamiliar original.

Specifically, the way the action is compressed. In the Animaniacs episode, the mother warns Bumbie that there is "no cover from the hunters" on the meadow, then, soon after, we hear a gunshot and Bumbie asks plaintively for his mother. (Cue Skippy bursting into tears) This is followed by the forest fire sequence, and Bumbie, still a fawn, calls again for his mother amid the burning trees.

That brief scene encapsulates what people remember about Bambi: Bambi is a baby deer, whose mother is shot by hunters, and there is a terrifying forest fire near the end. It was interesting, when finally seeing the film, to notice how much of a compression this is.

The part where Bambi's mother warns him about the hunters on the meadow comes long before she is shot by one... in fact, it's a completely different time of year. And, while the forest fire does follow from scenes where animals are in danger from hunters, it is even later... by which time Bambi is fully grown! He is also not still looking for his mother... in fact, I don't think his mother is even mentioned after the Prince (Bambi's father) tells him "Your mother can no longer be with you."

So, we have an amalgamation of three points in the film, separated by months or even years... concentrated into that one brief scene.

The Lion King makes no sense, etc.

Last night I had to put up with about ten students of varying degrees of drunkenness tonelessly "singing" a bunch of songs from the Silver Age Broadway-influenced era of Disney films. Probably the part of that which really epitomises the whole "fun to think back on, but not so great to actually endure" side of it is when all ten of them bellow the *spoken* parts of the songs.

Incidentally, I'm not so straight-laced that I can't enjoy a bit of mirth and music. But while I love Singin' In The Rain, The Bandwagon, and the style of songs from the 1940s which often appear in musicals from around that time, I'd never say I'm a "fan of musicals" because for most people that means being a fan of Les Miserables, Evita... um... you get the idea.

One of the things I brought up to the other people who were less than enthralled by this little music-fest (or rather, to anyone who I thought was likely to listen) was that many of the words from the Lion King songs make no sense in the context of the film. Simba sings about "the spotlight" and Scar makes a metaphorical remark about "the lights are not all on upstairs" (referring to the Hyenas' stupidity). It extends beyond the songs, too: Zazu says that Scar would make a "charming throw-rug". But the characters in the film should have no knowledge of electric lights, or furniture, or anything like that. There's no technology in their world. I know, they should have no knowledge of the English language either, but we can accept that as part of the internal logic of the film. Just like, if they actually *had* electric lights and so on, we could accept that as part of the film's internal logic, but not if they *don't* have any but still talk and sing about them.

(Incidentally, when I mentioned to one person about there being "internal inconsistencies", he pointed out that some of the animals, e.g. the antelopes, don't speak. That's an entirely different issue, and one I expect to write about in the near future.)

I guess anachronistic references in Disney films can be traced back to The Sword in the Stone, where there was a clearly established mediaeval setting, but where Merlin was able to reference things from the future -- always to the confusion of other characters -- because of his magic powers. This was taken to it natural conclusion (?) with the Genie in Aladdin. But then with The Lion King it just seemed to become "comic characters can know everything."

There should be a page for this on "TV Tropes", which deals with other media besides TV -- in fact there probably already is one, I just don't know what to look for. Basically, I'm meaning where a film establishes a world with its own internal rules, and then one character breaks these rules by making a joke about something no-one in that world should know about. This sort of thing doesn't always matter, of course. No-one cares about anachronistic jokes in Monty Python and the Holy Grail because the film doesn't try to pretend its world has any sort of rules about what its characters are or aren't familiar with. Shrek's kind of a grey area. I don't think Donkey should know what an in-flight movie is, because there are no planes in their world, but it doesn't feel like quite such a big deal somehow.

Everybody do the Kennedy Buster dance!

"Hare Today, Gone Tomorrow" was the first episode of "Tiny Toon Adventures" to be made, although seventeen other episodes were broadcast before it. It was written by Tom Ruegger, Wayne Kaatz, Gordon Bressack and Charles M Howell IV; directed by Ken Boyer and Eddie Fitzgerald, and animated by Kennedy Cartoons. You can watch it on the Tiny Toon Adventures Season 1 Volume 1 DVD.



In the first act of the episode Elmyra captures Buster, involving a lot of wacky high-jinks in Elmyra's house and a long phoney death scene for Buster.


The second act has Buster discovering Elmyra's other mistreated pets and setting them all free, but then getting re-captured himself.


The third act has the other characters, led by Babs, rescuing Buster and them all giving Elmyra a taste of her own medicine in an elaborate "Planet of the Bunnies" setpiece.

More thoughts on this episode from the animation fan community can be found on this discussion thread, where Speedy Boris describes it as a "very uneven mix of "80's adventure story" and [...] Looney Tunes-esque humor". In this interview Tom Ruegger seems to say that Fitzgerald directed the first and third acts, with Boyer directing the middle act. It makes sense that the middle act had a different director, as it is very different in tone. Although it contains a few gags, it doesn't have the Bob Clampett manic energy of the first or third act. (I'm not criticizing Ken Boyer, who directed several great episodes of the series) If Fitzgerald did direct 2/3 of the episode, though, it seems strange that most of the credited artists (storyboards, character layouts) are from Ken Boyer's unit.

Ruegger also describes the episode as "very bizarre half-hour story that feels more like three shorts", which suggests to me that each act had a different writer. I suspect that Bressack and/or Howell had something to do with the middle act where Buster releases the other pets from their cages, as similar scenes occur in "Sawdust and Toonsil" and "Hare-Raising Night", which they also wrote.

Apparently the third act was heavily re-written by Eddie Fitzgerald. I don't know whether the entire "Planet of the Bunnies" sequence was his idea, or whether he just expanded it and took it in his own direction, but it is a brilliant virtual non-sequitur. You might expect something like this to be the main part of an episode, but here it's just a bit on the end, which comes pretty much out nowhere.

It contains a lot of references to Bob Clampett's cartoons from the Golden Age of Warner Bros.


The giant pair of lips is from "Tin Pan Alley Cats" where jazz music sends a Fats Waller cat "outta this world" and into a WW2-era version of Wackyland. I don't believe they are announcing a science-fiction double-feature.


The scene where Buster and three other characters, disguised as Buster clones, all hide in Elmyra's bed and scare her seems to come from "Kitty Kornered" where Porky's cats disguise as Martians. Also, the little dance all the Busters do at the end of the scene was apparently inspired by the end of "Porky in Wackyland" where Porky discovers there are actually several Dodo birds and the one he has caught is not the last after all. And it contains a Clampett catchphrase "Now, we wouldn't say that!" That's three Clampett references in one short scene! It also inspired Glen Kennedy to create the Kennedy Buster Dance, something that would appear a lot in the episodes his studio animated.




Glen Kennedy, the animation supervisor of his studio, animated about two-thirds of this episode, (far more than usual) including the entire third act. His style is pretty easy to spot once you know what it is, but it really looks much more expressive in motion than these frame-grabs can show. One technique which I think is unique to his animation is when characters point up into the sky for no apparent reason.


Additionally, there are a few scenes which he doesn't appear to have animated, but which nonetheless contain some of his poses, such as a character running off-screen by stretching out of the frame and leaving his or her head behind.


The gag credit no doubt refers to the omnipresence of Glen's animation.


One short sequence, in which Buster dresses as a doctor, was by Jon McClenahan, when he was the only animator at his studio, StarToons, and was taking work from other studios. By his own admission he had not quite got a handle on the characters. He would go on to do great things in the rest of the series.


There are a few more scenes here and there which might be examples of his work before it grew into what it became. The shot above is from one such scene: it comes right after the "doctor" bit and seems to have been inspired by some of Chuck Jones' 1960s work.

You can understand why this episode was delayed instead of being the series premiere. Some of the character roles are pretty strange: Elmyra is treated as some sort of arch-nemesis, Babs is a presenter with nothing to do until the third act and who spends most of the time in her "Tinkerbunny" outfit. Plucky and Hamton make cameos outside the action (they show up out of nowhere during the "death scene", and only Buster seems to be aware of their existence). And Buster and Babs' accomplices for their plot against Elmyra are a strange mix of Furrball, Fifi and Tyrone Turtle!


Also, Charlie Adler hasn't quite got the hang of his Buster voice, especially during his death act. Acme Acres is vaguely defined as a "land of magic and enchantment".

The actual first episode to air, "The Looney Beginning" (an "origin story" which was the 48th episode to be produced), has more to recommend it as an introduction to the series, with Babs and Buster as the main characters, Montana Max as the villain, and the creation of Acme Looniversity. But I do kind of like the strange quirkiness of "Hare Today" - a look at how the series *might* have turned out.