To Smear or Not to Smear

My favourite part of Chuck Jones’ ‘To Duck or not to Duck’ is when the dog turns to the camera and says “There’s something awfully screwy about this fight, or my name isn’t Larrimore. And it isn’t.” Of course, Elmer Fudd’s been calling his dog Larrimore all through the picture.

But this is also a cartoon for fans of smear animation. Presumably it’s by Bobe Cannon, who gets the animation credit on this cartoon where Daffy Duck beats up the dopey Fudd in a boxing ring, though Fudd gets revenge in the end.

The gag is Daffy notices Elmer is getting “a little thin on top” and has a bottle of hair stimulant that’ll take care of it. There’s one drawing per frame through the whole sequence. You can see in the second drawing below Daffy’s head and the bottle are getting stretched wider.






There four more drawings were Daffy kind of holds in position, then the clobbering. Beautiful drawing of Daffy upon impact.






We get twelve more drawings (a half second) of the fluid running down Elmer, Daffy moving about slightly in mid air and Fudd closing and opening his black eye. Then, Daffy turns around in multiples and zooms off the scene.





The scene cuts to Daffy self-congratulating himself to the crowd. One more smear.







Ken Harris, Rudy Larriva and Ben Washam would have been animating in Jones’ unit at this time but I don’t know if someone can spot their work on this cartoon.