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Daffy Duck is an animated cartoon character in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. Daffy was the first of the new breed of " screwball" characters that emerged in the 1930s and supplanted traditional "everyman" characters in popularity in the 1940s.Daffy is also one of the most difficult cartoon characters to define. Virtually every Warner Bros. animator put his own spin on the duck; Daffy may be a lunatic vigilante in one short but a greedy glory hound in the next. Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones especially made extensive use of two very different versions of the character.
1 Origin
Daffy first appeared on April 17, 1937 in " Porky's Duck Hunt", directed by Tex Avery. The cartoon is a standard hunter/prey pairing for which the studio is famous, but Daffy (not more than a bit player in the short) represented something new to moviegoers: an assertive, combative protagonist, completely unrestrained and completely unrestrainable. When audiences left the theaters, they could not stop talking about (as Porky PigPorky Pig is a animated cartoon character in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes series of cartoons. He was the first character created by the studio to draw audiences based on his star power, and the animators (particularly Bob Clampett) created many criticall puts it) "that crazy, darnfool duck."
This early Daffy is not a handsome creature; he is short and pudgy, with stubby legs and beak. His voice (performed by Mel BlancMelvin Jerome Blanc better known as Mel Blanc ( May 30, 1908 July 10, 1989) was a famous American voice actor for many animation studios, primarily the Warner Brothers and Hanna-Barbera studios. Blanc's ability to create voices for multiple characters fir and patterned after Warners producer Leon SchlesingerLeon Schlesinger ( 1884 December 25, 1949) was a Jewish producer at the Warner Bros. Schlesinger was born in Philadelphia. After working at a theater as an usher, songbook agent, actor, and manager, he became the head of Pacific Art and Title, where most's) is about the only part of the duck that would stay with him.
2 Clampett's Daffy
Animator Bob Clampett immediately seized upon the duck and cast him in a series of cartoons in the 1930s and 1940s. Clampett's Daffy is a wild screwball, perpetually bouncing around the screen with cries of "Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo!" Clampett also redesigned the character, making him taller and lankier, and rounding out his beak and feet.
3 McKimson's Daffy
By the early 1940s, director Robert McKimsonRobert "Bob" McKimson, Sr. September 27, 1910 September 27, 1977) was an animator best known for his work on the Looney Tunes series of cartoons from Warner Bros. After ten years of art education, McKimson went to work for Walt Disney. He stayed with Disn tamed Daffy a bit, redesigning him yet again to be rounder, less elastic. The studio also instilled some of Bugs Bunny's savvy into the duck, making him as brilliant with his mouth as he was with his battiness. This era also saw Daffy teamed up with Porky Pig, the duck's one-time rival now his straight man. Daffy would also feature in several war-themed shorts during World War II. Daffy always stays true to his unbridled nature, however, attempting, for example, to dodge the draft in " Draftee Daffy " ( 1945) and battling a Nazi goat intent in eating Daffy's scrap metal in " Scrap Happy Daffy " ( 1943).
