Daffy Duck

Daffy Duck is an animated cartoon character in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. more...

Daffy was the first of the new breed of "screwball" characters that emerged in the 1930s and supplanted traditional "everyman" characters, such as Mickey Mouse, in popularity in the 1940s.

Daffy is also one of the most difficult cartoon characters to adequately define. Virtually every Warner Bros. animator put his own spin on the duck; Daffy may be a lunatic vigilante in one short but a greedy glory hound in the next. Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones especially made extensive use of two very different versions of the character.

Origin

Daffy first appeared on April 17, 1937 in Porky's Duck Hunt, directed by Tex Avery with Bob Clampett as uncredited co-director. The cartoon is a standard hunter/prey pairing for which the studio is famous, but Daffy (not more than a bit player in this short) represented something new to moviegoers: an assertive, combative protagonist, completely unrestrained and completely unrestrainable. When audiences left the theaters, they could not stop talking about (as Porky Pig puts it) "that crazy, darnfool duck."

This early Daffy is not a handsome creature; he is short and pudgy, with stubby legs and beak. His voice (performed by Mel Blanc and patterned after Warners producer Leon Schlesinger's) is about the only part of the duck that would stay with him.

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