Duck Season

Ode to an Actor with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Director John Dante was praising Bugs Bunny, claiming Bugs always won and was a good role model for kids. “Something one could never claim of Daffy Duck.” Funny but a cheap shot, Mister. You only worked with Daffy on a movie or two, director Chuck Jones (who did so much to coach Bugs and Daffy into defining their cinematic characters in the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s) knew him better, “Bugs Bunny is everything I wanted to be, Daffy Duck is what I really am.” You could tell Daffy was his favorite... mine too. After all I know Daffy, I have been Daffy. He is me, right up there on the screen.

It is odd to watch his body of work in chronological order and see his pluck vanish. He wasn’t always the cartoon most likely to need therapy. No, in the beginning he was just a duck -- a wild, mad, impetuous duck in love with the world and out to mess up Porky Pig in 1937’s “Porky’s Duck Hunt.” (It was Daffy’s first film and the audience loved him. On the test sketches, Daffy was known as “The Crazy-Darnfool Duck.” Thank god for the name change.)

To see him then, his world was so full of hope and possibilities. He always won. He was a force of nature that couldn’t be stopped but something happen in the intervening years. It is funny, yet tragic. He became Bob Hope to Bugs’ Bing Crosby. The comic paring was inspired to be sure: Bugs confident and in control, Daffy using his wonderful acting talents to play a duck more and more exasperated as his plans kept exploding in his beak. (Odd, somewhere alone the way his god-given snout was replaced with a fake snap-on one that he is forever chasing. Yet, Lord love a duck, he has the confidence to show he has fake bits. I’d love to see William Shatner or Pamela Anderson chasing their fake parts around a soundstage.)

That said, their is a fly in the ink: I have to wonder, is it all acting? His oft repeated routine, where he is a duck who’s just one gun shot to the beak from snapping, seems to have a real pathos to it. It must have taken its toll over the years. He just doesn’t get the respect that a fowl of his considerable talent deserves.

Everyone writes books about Bugs -- praises bugs, but Daffy? Dang. He is so worthy. He is a hero for the rest of us: a role model for those of us with anxieties and low self-esteem. As I think of heroes I can look up to in the movies with mental illness, I keep coming up short: Daffy and... and... Norman Bates? No wonder the world has a distorted view of mental illness. Couldn’t we make one of the Smurfs bi-polar? Mental illness in the movie industry shouldn’t be confined to a Mel Gibson press conference.

I also suspect the studio is keeping Daffy in that state artificially with rather questionable practices (a kind of webbed-footed Judy Garland). You just know he is hopped up on cartoon amphetamines and probably increasingly strong doses of toon-town crack. A screwed-up duck is a box office duck. A well adjusted duck? An empty theater.

I long to free Daffy and let him stretch his wings as an actor. I know he is capable of so much more than doing a sad take to camera as his beak and feathers vanish in yet another explosion. It is bittersweet for me to see his dreams (and the TNT) go boom. I laugh, but feel a tug at my heart too. Even more than Chaplin, he represents us -- a put upon soul who just wants respect -- and his old beak back.