Studio: Leon Schlesinger Productions (Looney Tunes)
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures, The Vitaphone Corporation
Produced by: Leon Schlesinger
Short Synopsis
Daffy Duck guards a wartime scrap pile and sings "We're in to Win", urging Americans to get the tin, the brass, the iron and the lead out for the war effort. Hitler, reading that Daffy's scrap is helping to beat Mussolini, orders the pile destroyed, and a German submarine fires a torpedo containing a goat, which lands and starts eating the scrap. Daffy, hearing the noise, offers the hiccupping goat an Alka-Seltzer, then sees the swastika on its collar and attacks. The goat wins, and Daffy, beaten, is visited by the ghosts of his duck ancestors from American history, who tell him "Americans don't give up"; he rises as Super-American, a caped superhero, and pounds the goat and then the submarine into scrap, before waking up: it was a dream, and the goat is still eating.
Why It Matters
- Tashlin's cinematic staging, with the submarine periscope shots and the Super-American sequence done as a parody of the Fleischer Superman films, makes this the most elaborate of Daffy's wartime cartoons, and Daffy's ancestors, from Pilgrim to Yankee, are a good gag. The scrap-drive setting ties it precisely to the summer of 1943.
- The film is in the public domain through non-renewal and is one of the most-seen wartime Looney Tunes as a result; it is also available as an extra on the DVD of Warner's Air Force (1943), with which it played. It belongs with Daffy the Commando and Spies as the studio's war trilogy of that autumn.
Notes and Trivia
- Daffy calls Hitler "Schicklgruber", the surname of Hitler's father before he changed it, a favourite wartime insult.
- The cartoon was released in black and white; colourised versions were made for television.
- See also: Daffy the Commando (1943), Spies (Private Snafu, 1943), Yankee Doodle Daffy (1943).
