Studio: Leon Schlesinger Productions
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
Produced by: Leon Schlesinger
Short Synopsis
In a bunker somewhere in Germany, Commander Von Vultur, a German vulture, is fuming because so many American commandos have slipped through his lines. A telegram from the "Gestinko Gestapo" warns that if one more gets through, it will cost him his career. He takes his anger out on his orderly, Schultz, by hitting him on the helmet with a mallet. An American plane passes over; they sweep the sky with a searchlight and spot Daffy Duck parachuting down, singing a Cockney music-hall song. Daffy shouts "Put out those lights!", lands unseen, then uses the searchlight to make shadow puppets on the clouds, a dog and a trio of chorus girls. In the bunker he hands Von Vultur a ticking time bomb "as a little token of our esteem"; it blows Schultz through the roof. Daffy hides under Schultz's helmet and turns the mallet on Von Vultur. A chase follows, through a telephone booth, into a plane that disintegrates around Daffy under fire, and into a "tunnel" that turns out to be the barrel of a cannon. Von Vultur fires it, and Daffy flies unharmed into Berlin, landing at a rally, where he cracks his mallet over Adolf Hitler's head.
Why It Matters
- Daffy here is a wartime hero in the anarchic style of his early years, mocking the enemy with sheer cheek, and Freleng packs the film with fast, verbal and visual gags. The disintegrating plane and the cannon-barrel "tunnel" are classic Freleng escalation.
- It is one of the most famous of Warner's wartime cartoons, which used the studio's stars to ridicule the Axis for home-front audiences. Its copyright was not renewed, so it circulates widely.
Notes and Trivia
- Von Vultur's mistaken telephone call, "Is that you, Myrt?", quotes a catchphrase from the radio comedy Fibber McGee and Molly.
- Daffy's parachuting song is the British music-hall number "She Was Poor but She Was Honest".
- See also: Falling Hare (1943), Confusions of a Nutzy Spy (1943).