Studio: Paramount Cartoon Studios (formerly Famous Studios)
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Seymour Kneitel, Isadore Sparber
Short Synopsis
Baby Huey is sent to school. The giant duckling, bigger than the schoolhouse door, sits down at a desk built for ducklings and crushes it, and from there the day is a catalogue of destruction: he answers the roll call by bringing down the ceiling, plays with the class and flattens the playground, eats the lunches, and reduces the teacher, a stern old hen, to hysteria, all with the best will in the world. Then the fox who haunts the Huey cartoons arrives in disguise, hoping to pick off a duckling or two, and Huey's clumsiness, as always, does for him: every scheme the fox sets in motion ends with Huey landing on it. The school is a ruin, the fox is in a worse state, and Huey is the hero of the class, if not of the teacher.
Why It Matters
- It is a late Baby Huey cartoon, directed by Dave Tendlar, who had animated the character's debut, and it shows the formula fully set: Huey's innocence, the fox's greed, the destruction of everything in reach; the schoolroom gives the gags a new set of props, and Sid Raymond's voice is unchanged from 1950.
- The film is in the public domain in the United States, its copyright among the Noveltoons that National Telefilm Associates let lapse, and it is one of the last of the series to have lapsed, the studio's later output being sold intact to Harvey Comics; the studio had by now been renamed Paramount Cartoon Studios.
Notes and Trivia
- Baby Huey's comic-book career, with Harvey, outlasted his cartoons by thirty years.
- Morey Reden, co-animator, had worked on the Fleischer Superman series.
- See also: Quack-a-Doodle-Doo (1950), Teacher's Pest (1950), Crazytown (1954).