Studio: Warner Bros. Cartoons
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
Short Synopsis
At midnight in a bookshop, the books come to life. The Complete Works of Shakespeare turns out to be clockwork, ticking to "My Grandfather's Clock". On the cover of Young Man with a Horn, a caricature of Harry James plays "It Had to Be You", and a scrawny Frank Sinatra croons to swooning listeners from other covers. A full jam session breaks out, with caricatures of Tommy Dorsey, Gene Krupa and Benny Goodman. Then Daffy Duck bursts in and stops the music. He launches into a wild scat-singing number in a mock Russian accent, a parody of Danny Kaye, cavorting across the covers. Along the way he teases the Big Bad Wolf, who chases him from one book to another. The police arrest the Wolf, and a judge from a magazine cover sentences him to life. He escapes, but with Sinatra's help he falls into the cover of Dante's Inferno. The party starts up again to "Carolina in the Morning", until the Wolf climbs back out of the Inferno to complain.
Why It Matters
- Daffy's scat performance is one of the great moments of character animation: Rod Scribner and Clampett push his body through extreme, rubbery distortions in perfect time with the music, and his zoot-suited energy captures the wildest version of the character. Animation historian Steve Schneider called the film "an encyclopedia of what can be done in the animated medium".
- It is a peak of Clampett's final period at Warner Bros., a semi-remake of his own A Coy Decoy (1941) that also borrows from Frank Tashlin's book-cover cartoons of the 1930s. Its density of pop-culture caricature and fearless distortion made it a model for later animators.
Notes and Trivia
- It was reissued in 1951 as Book Review, losing the pun on "revue", a variety show.
- See also: The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (1946), Porky's Pooch (1941).