My Favorite Duck
Porky tries to relax on a hunting and fishing trip, but Daffy, smugly pointing out the "No Duck Hunting" signs, subjects him to constant irritation. Then the "Duck Hunting Season Open" signs start going up.
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- Cast:
- Mel Blanc
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Reviews
Lack of good storyline.
i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.
Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.
Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.
. . . this animated short in 1995, according to the closing credits of the version that I just watched. What is it about MY FAVORITE DUCK that spoke to our parents in the late 1900s, and possibly still speaks to our 21st Century Generations? When I took 20th Century American History, I vividly remember the part about Johnny Cochran getting his client President Bill (the old dude that's now Hillary's husband) off on an impeachment charge by waving a Jumbo Cigar at the Monica gal and rhyming, "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit!" Washington, Lincoln, Crazy Horse, and the other faces on Mount Rushmore NEVER could have imagined a Topsy-Turvy America in which the Fate of the Free World hung upon a stain on a Blue Dress. But Porky Pig certainly would, as Daffy gets him so discombobulated that he TWICE mistakes watery deeps for open air (and later perceives sky high as solid ground) during MY FAVORITE DUCK. Today, of course, a proved pawn and debtor to the Russian KGB kingpin--who's married himself to a foreign porn star--and who's widely considered to be History's only television game show host nuttier than Bob Barker, is about to gain control of America's nuclear bombs in the Oval Office. Daffy Duck would say, "I told you so."
My Favorite Duck (1942) **** (out of 4) One of the all-time greatest animated shorts finds Porky Pig going out to the country for some rest and relaxation but instead he runs into Daffy Duck who wants to make sure that pain and torment is all he gets. MY FAVORITE DUCK is without question one of the funniest animated shorts ever made because there's just so much great action and I'd argue that neither Porky or Daffy were ever better than what we get right here. It's hard to pick out one or two favorite scenes because the entire short is just one bit of greatness after another. If I was forced to pick a highlight it would probably be the sequence where Porky finally snaps, burns to a crisp and then starts his revenge. The film manages to be downright hilarious at times and the level of violence is just priceless.
Maybe there's nothing particularly new in "My Favorite Duck", but how can you not like to see Daffy irk Porky? True, we see this so many times, that this may come across as boring, but Daffy's antics - ranging from zany to sadistic - and Porky's reactions more than make up for it. In my opinion at least, the highlight is the "down here" scene. But the surprise ending is also pretty cool. They sure must have had fun filming this cartoon."That, my friend, is a matter of opinion." Well, I don't see how someone could not consider this cartoon a masterpiece. Another great one for the crowd behind the Looney Tunes cartoons.
'My Favorite Duck' may seem to be little more than a variation on the classic Bugs Bunny model, wherein an elusive creature, more normally thought of as easy prey, interminably torments his slow-witted hunter. And boy can Daffy torment, a whirligig irritant, managing to be in all places at once, on land, air or sea, in every conceivable position, at every conceivable angle. The thing is, Porky is no Elmer or Sylvester, he wishes Daffy no harm, he just wants relaxation and solitude in the great outdoors, as promised by decades of American Western mythology. Daffy goads him out of his solitude, his apathy, forces him to take action (he is a dark subconsious sprite mocking our unsociable, isolationist, private ideals), just as a year earlier, America was shocked into entering World War II.Daffy is the black to Porky's white, they are inseparable - without Daffy, Porky seems incomplete; with him he turns from a peace-loving, nature-seeking dolt into a fearsome murderer, whose inexorable forward drive, fuelled by anger and righteous vengeance, has all the brute force of an army, so powerful that it bursts open the frame, destroys the world of the film, that vast Western expanse, the very reel itself, turning our two protagonists, who are of course mere lines, into ghosts, playacting at movement, life. We many be over-familiar with such self-reflexivity now, but think back to 1942, the year of 'Casablanca' - it must have been unnerving, especially coming from Hollywood.'My Favorite Duck' is directed by Chuck Jones, one of the great directors, and he relishes the darkness, the playfulness, the formal implications of the story; the paradox of turning a rigid square frame into a site of insane movement and endless possibility, while at the same time reducing the vast Western outdoors, that mythic site unsullied by history, where a man can be free, of people, of his past, is narrowed, Leone-like, into a claustrophobic space, where you simply cannot get rid of that deuced awkward, protean Other (this is signalled earlier on in an establishing shot, where the landscape looks curiously like a duck's mouth).Amid all the gleeful carnage, there are two standout, gravity-defying sequences, which turn emblems of easy-going bourgeois Americana into nightmare scenarios, devoid of security or perspective by a mere flip, where the breaking of the laws of physics encourage rupture in the laws of property and identity; as a snoozing angler finds himself suspended from a sea-turned-sky, hurtling to his own imagined self, or joining his perfect home flying into space, exact in every reassuring particular except it's grounded on air. Magic!