Because Thanksgiving (United States version. I know Canada had their version in October and other countries don’t celebrate the holiday) is right around the corner, I decided to jump ahead and do a “Drawn and Quartered” installment for “Holiday for Drumsticks,” which came out in 1949 (I finished the 1938 cartoons and will start on 1939 after this and my report on “Patient Porky,” which is more-or-less a sequel to “The Daffy Doc”). Please enjoy, have a safe and happy holiday (assuming you celebrate it), and try not to fill up too much on turkey. Tryptophan knock-out is real.
Director(s): Arthur Davis
Summary: A hillbilly couple (obviously named Maw and Paw) are prepping their Thanksgiving turkey (obviously named Tom) by fattening it up to kill it. Daffy, jealous of Tom eating better than he ever has, convinces the turkey to lose weight so Maw and Paw will deem it too skinny for the oven and their bellies…and, in turn, eats so much that Maw and Paw decide that not every Thanksgiving meal needs to have turkey as the main course…
Fun Facts:
- In production order, this is the next to last Arthur Davis cartoon made (made in early summer of 1947 [somewhere between June and July]; released January 22, 1949. Back then, they didn’t care if holiday-specific episodes were released around that holiday, so you could have an Easter short come out in June, as seen with Robert McKimson’s “Easter Yeggs” or a Christmas one come out in February, as was the case with the Sylvester and Tweety short, “Gift Wrapped”).
- Despite his short-lived career as an animation director (which died because the studio only had enough money in their budget for three animation directors, which is why a lot of the post-1948 cartoons people remember because of their heavy rotation on television and home media are directed by either Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, or Robert McKimson), Arthur Davis was actually very accomplished in the world of animation (this isn’t a full list. You can look up online all the achievements in animation he’s done).
Davis is credited as animation’s first in-betweener.
Davis came up with “bouncing ball” for the “Follow the bouncing ball” sing-along cartoons of the 1920s.
Davis wasn’t afraid of working on television at a time when everyone else was (kinda like how there are people who embrace A.I. and all that it can do, while everyone else either mocks it or sees it as a sign that the world as they know it is going to Hell or already is there). His post-Warner Bros career does include a lot of credits for the TV-based Hanna-Barbera series, as well as working on DePatie-Freleng’s “Pink Panther” cartoons and creating some post-Golden Age Looney Tunes shorts, like “The Yolk’s on You” and “Daffy Flies North.”
Davis’ rubbery, almost visually surreal animation style got its start at Columbia Studios, where he did cartoon shorts there. “The Foxy Duckling,” “Bone Sweet Bone,” and “The Rattled Rooster” are three such Warner Bros shorts that feel like they’d be more at home as Columbia animated shorts.
Davis was awarded the Windsor McCay Award in 1994 for all his work in the world of animation.
- The aesthetic and humor of an Arthur Davis cartoon falls somewhere between being like Bob Clampett near the end of his stint at Warner Bros (still wacky, but mellowing out somewhat) and Robert McKimson starting out (rubbery character movement and strange interludes and lapses in logic, only Davis’ was more open with that than McKimson).
- Davis’ cartoons are also notable for having the established characters acting out of character. You had Bugs Bunny psychologically torturing a man in the only Bugs short Arthur Davis ever did: “Bowery Bugs” (1949). Then there was that time where Davis made Chuck Jones’ Pepe Le Pew a relentless pest, but took away the romantically/sexually problematic baggage, focused more on the fact that he’s a skunk, and had him fight a dog (Wellington from “Doggone Cats”) over who gets to stay in a winter cabin (“Odor of the Day”; for the novelty alone, people who normally don’t like the Pepe cartoons should be touting this as “the only good one.” I don’t know why it’s not more popular in this era where no one really wants to make fun of sexual harassment and stalking anymore). And we can’t forget the two times Arthur Davis changed Sylvester the Cat: once in “Doggone Cats” where he doesn’t talk and has a orange/yellow partner in crime who likes to troll dogs, and again in “Catch as Cats Can,” where Sylvester can talk, but sounds like a dopier version of Barney Rubble from The Flintstones and takes his orders from a green parrot who looks like Bing Crosby, reads horse racing forms like Bing Crosby, and is in a rivalry with an emaciated, Frank Sinatra-esque canary…like Bing Crosby. With Daffy Duck, Davis pretty much combined the wacky Daffy that was established with Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, and Frank Tashlin (to a lesser extent) with the burgeoning greedy jerk Daffy that Chuck Jones would be known and blamed for by viewers who don’t like Daffy’s personality change. It’s definitely apparent in “Holiday for Drumsticks” than it is in “The Stupor Salesman,” “Riff Raffy Daffy,” and “What Makes Daffy Duck?”
The Channel(s): ABC (as part of The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show)
Part(s) Edited: Two scenes of gun violence/suffocation, since network TV back in the 1980s and 1990s (the 1990s, especially) cracked down on violence like that:
1) The beginning scene where Paw’s hillbilly neighbor keeps firing shots at him, only for Paw to shoot back (with the neighbor’s agonizing scream heard from off-screen), was cut. I’m not sure if the scene of Paw tallying his latest kill (which totals up to 74 shot neighbors) was cut for continuity reasons**. The approximation video doesn’t show it as an edit, but the jury is out on whether this actually happened.
2) The part at the climax where Daffy (who has now eaten so much that Paw decides to kill him for dinner instead of Tom the Turkey) tries to quickly lose weight so he doesn’t get shot cut Daffy running into the sauna machine, which almost looks like the one from “Odor of the Day.” Either that’s a coincidence or that’s one of Davis’ recurring bits, like how Friz Freleng cartoons have references to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, took place during The American Civil War, or had background Easter eggs showing the names of fictional products and companies named after Friz Freleng himself or any member of his animation unit (usually it was Hawley Pratt as “Hadley Pert”), only for Paw to shoot at it and the sauna machine to shrink around Daffy’s neck. The other scenes of Paw shooting at Daffy as Daffy is trying to exercise the pounds off weren’t cut**.
**I should remind my readers/viewers that the parts that weren’t cut could have been edited, but no one has reported anything. Unless I found an edited copy from back when ABC aired The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show to confirm or deny, I can only assume that those scenes weren’t edited.
What Grinds My Gears About the Edit(s): The first edit was done well enough, but since it’s not known whether or not Paw marking his latest shot neighbor on the wall was also cut, I don’t know if that means ABC left that in to show that Maw and Paw have had 74 turkeys come into their home and were either starved to death or scared off by Daffy rather than the 74 tallies representing all the neighbors that tried and failed at gunning them down. The second cut is your typical hypocritical cut: ABC left in Paw shooting at Daffy while running on a treadmill, boxing a speed bag, and lifting a barbell, but inexplicably drew the line at hiding in a sauna. As the video states, the only reason it would be cut was that ABC edited out characters getting strangled (whether by bare hands or by a noose or some kind of rope) in other cartoons and this just happened to fall in that category. Unlike the first edit, it doesn’t make or break the story/joke, but it is weird that it would be cut, since it’s one of those unrealistic/cartoony type scenes that would slide on other networks.
Video Comparison: Still using CapCut, but Black Friday/Christmas will be here soon, so hope and pray that I return to Filmora (it’s, as of this writing, on its 15th version and comes with a lot of cool tools that not only will elevate my dormant Snow White Remix remake, but will also make the Drawn and Quartered videos more engaging):
Availability Uncut: This cartoon was first released in 1996 on the Stars of Space Jam VHS (the Daffy Duck collection) in America. In the same year, over in the United Kingdom, “Holiday for Drumsticks” was released as part of the sixth volume of the Looney Tunes Bumper Edition video collection. A year later (1997), the cartoon was part of the Japanese version of the Stars of Space Jam: Daffy Duck laser disc collection. Twenty-four years after that (2024), “Holiday for Drumsticks” was released on Blu-ray (completely bypassing DVD and HD-DVD release) as part of the Looney Tunes Collector’s Choice set (fourth volume), as well as the repackaged version that has all four volumes compiled together.
Is/Was It on Streaming or Digital Download: Yes and no. It wasn’t on HBO Max (or Max, both in the United States and in the Latin America/Brazil region), definitely wasn’t on the short-lived streaming service Warner Media RIDE, and it doesn’t have any digital download releases on iTunes or Amazon Prime Video (that I know of), but Boomerang’s streaming app had this cartoon from 2018 to 2024 and it is one of the 700 to 800 Warner Bros shorts available for free on Tubi.
‘Til next time, Stay Looney, and Be Merrie.
No comments:
Post a Comment