Studio: DePatie-Freleng Enterprises
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures / The Vitaphone Corporation
Produced by: David H. DePatie, Friz Freleng
Short Synopsis
On Halloween, Daffy Duck's nephew goes trick-or-treating dressed as a witch and knocks at the house of a real one, Witch Hazel. Terrified, he runs home. Daffy scoffs: there is no such thing as a witch, and he sets out to prove it by visiting her himself. Meanwhile Witch Hazel is fed up with working all the time and wants a holiday. She needs someone to fill in for her, so she turns Speedy Gonzales into her double with a magic piece of cheese. He keeps his own fast-talking manner, but Hazel decides he'll do and leaves for Hawaii. When Daffy arrives, Speedy, disguised as Hazel, serves him tea brewed from her potions, which transforms Daffy into a creature with a flower for a head. Hazel comes back, turns Speedy back into a mouse, and considers cooking Daffy for dinner. She restores him to normal, but he escapes on her broomstick, jumps, and finds himself parachuting down with an anvil. Back home, he reassures his nephew that witchcraft is all superstition, without noticing that he has turned back into the flower-headed creature.
Why It Matters
- The film is a collage of Warner history. It reuses Witch Hazel animation from Chuck Jones's Broom-Stick Bunny and the flower-headed Daffy from Duck Amuck, both classics, and brings together Daffy and Speedy Gonzales, who were paired in many of the studio's last shorts.
- It is the last classic-era cartoon to feature Witch Hazel and June Foray's voice for her, and it comes from the period when Warner had closed its own cartoon studio and contracted DePatie-Freleng to make Looney Tunes. Its reliance on recycled animation reflects how far the budgets for theatrical shorts had fallen by the mid-1960s.
Notes and Trivia
- June Foray returned as Witch Hazel in a 2003 episode of Duck Dodgers.
- The title comes from the children's song "A-Hunting We Will Go".
- See also: Book Revue (1946), Stupor Duck (1956).