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He nailed it!
3 years ago
My son Max came over last night to watch Hitchcock's Marnie. We began the evening with the Looney Tunes' cartoon The Scarlet Pumpernickel, wherein Daffy Duck is pitching a script to "J.L." (Warner, the IRL boss of Warner Bros.) for a movie starring himself as the title character.
I chose it for its meta "cartoon about a movie" theme, plus one of the reasons I love it is, to my knowledge the only Looney Tune where the other WB characters are used as actors in a "fictional" setting - the script Daffy is pitching. (Henery chicken Hawk as a scribe, Elmer Fudd as a humble innkeeper, etc.)
Anyhoo, I read the cartoon's Wikipedia entry afterwards & came across the following quote from animation historian Greg Ford:
"It's the 'real-life' Daffy, as seen in the cartoon's wraparound plot of the studio script meeting, that best clues us in to what separates this film from the spate of animated genre parodies currently being churned out. Most modern-day satires trade on anachronism, and the hero and the audience end up complicit in their smug superiority to the antiquated vehicle." (My bolding.)
Just to make it clear, the "antiquated vehicle" he's referring to is NOT The Scarlet Pumpernickel itself, but to the source movies those "genre parodies" are making fun of...
I bolded the above "smug superiority" because that's exactly the vibe I've always gotten out of Tiny Tunes and Animaniacs: "we know that you know that we know exactly what we're doing here, so boy, aren't we both hip?!"
Opposing (or concurring) opinions are welcome below.
I chose it for its meta "cartoon about a movie" theme, plus one of the reasons I love it is, to my knowledge the only Looney Tune where the other WB characters are used as actors in a "fictional" setting - the script Daffy is pitching. (Henery chicken Hawk as a scribe, Elmer Fudd as a humble innkeeper, etc.)
Anyhoo, I read the cartoon's Wikipedia entry afterwards & came across the following quote from animation historian Greg Ford:
"It's the 'real-life' Daffy, as seen in the cartoon's wraparound plot of the studio script meeting, that best clues us in to what separates this film from the spate of animated genre parodies currently being churned out. Most modern-day satires trade on anachronism, and the hero and the audience end up complicit in their smug superiority to the antiquated vehicle." (My bolding.)
Just to make it clear, the "antiquated vehicle" he's referring to is NOT The Scarlet Pumpernickel itself, but to the source movies those "genre parodies" are making fun of...
I bolded the above "smug superiority" because that's exactly the vibe I've always gotten out of Tiny Tunes and Animaniacs: "we know that you know that we know exactly what we're doing here, so boy, aren't we both hip?!"
Opposing (or concurring) opinions are welcome below.
And my only memory of Tiny Toons was when a bunch of them walked across an open gorge specifically by not looking down. At least in its own way, it taught the meaning of post hoc ergo propter hoc. (And it was funny, too.)
So many movies and TV shows that I would otherwise have liked were ruined by constantly sticking their elbows into my ribs, so to speak.