Frank Tashlin uses ghost multiples to enhance a fight scene involving Daffy Duck and a Nazi goat in Scrap Happy Daffy (1943).

15 examples.



The scene is animated on ones; the ghost drawings are on underlays. Sometimes, the ghost image moves while the other is held.

Art Davis is the credited animator. I suspect Izzy Ellis, Phil Monroe and Cal Dalton worked on this as well (others will know better who else was in the unit). The layouts were by Dave Hilberman.

Judging by Thad Komorowski’s site, this was the first cartoon put into production with Tashlin directing after taking over the unit from military-bound Norm McCabe. This is a sheer propaganda cartoon like McCabe was stuck making, but the pace is certainly quicker than anything McCabe directed.

There’s an early UPA-stylised stack of metallic garbage on a background near the start of the cartoon that Tashlin pans up.

Tashlin directed ten cartoons for Warners in, this, his third time at the studio, before jumping to the Sutherland/Morey stop-motion operation.

Light and shadow and effects open The Case of the Stuttering Pig, a 1937 Warners cartoon directed by Frank Tashlin.



Tashlin indulges himself with various camera angles looking up at the settings to create a mood of suspense.



Tashlin and writer Tubby Millar apparently did their jobs too well. A theatre manager in Ligonier, Indiana complained to the Motion Picture Herald that “this story is all too scary for the subject of a cartoon which is primarily made for children.” Leon Schlesinger admitted in a newspaper interview that one of his cartoons had a villain that was too frightening and that would be toned down in future cartoons.

Sorry, theatre manager, but Billy Bletcher is wonderfully menacing as the lawyer-turned-monster and the artwork fits the horror scenario (with a comic ending). Ya big softie!

Volney White is the credited animator.

Frank Tashlin didn’t make many Bugs Bunny cartoons, did he?

Actually, he made twice as many as the Art Davis unit. Two. The first was The Unruly Hare, released in 1945 (the last with Tashlin’s name on it) and Hare Remover, which came out the following year.

This cartoon is one of several from the mid-‘40s that has a garish edit in it. Elmer Fudd is yelling “Hurray! Hurray! I twapped him” with Bugs looking like he’s about the knock on Elmer’s derby. This is a pretty butt-ugly in-between.



There’s a quick cut to Elmer and Bugs in completely different positions. Not only that, it sounds like the soundtrack has been sliced. There’s a quick chopping of Elmer’s dialogue and the next scene sounds like it begins in mid-cue. Maybe someone has researched what happened. (There are similar obvious edits in Bob Clampett’s The Big Snooze.



And what’s with the gap-toothed Elmer and Bugs?



Tashlin had left Warners in August 1944 to work for Morey and Sutherland, two months after it bought Leon Schlesinger's cartoon studio.

The credited animators are Dick Bickenbach, Izzy Ellis, Cal Dalton and Art Davis.

The official release date of the cartoon is March 23, 1946. As usual, several theatres screened it earlier.

A sex gag starts off The Goldbrick (1944). Private Snafu is snoring.



The camera pulls back to show the effect of the snoring on a pin-up.



Like many of the Snafus, the dialogue is in a Seuss-like rhyme. We even get a Seuss-like incidental character flying out of an apple tree. (An apple tree? In the South Pacific?)



The cheescake is courtesy of director Frank Tashlin. This appeared in the Army-Navy Screen Magazine in September 1943.

Nazi spy Hatta Mari gives off an electric shock kiss to “woman hater” Daffy Duck in Plane Daffy (1944). Four colours.



The old "melt" gag.



Let’s try the gag again.



Director Frank Tashlin and writer Warren Foster throw a switch.



Daffy channels Jerry Colonna. “Ah! Something new has been added!”



An old-style, Clampett-esque Daffy “Woo-hoo!” exit.



Now, an inside joke.



My best guesses at the studio personnel referred to here: Fred Abrams, Warren Foster, Tubby Millar, Dick Thomas, Curt Perkins, Leon Schlesinger, Ray Patin (or maybe Ray Katz), Ace Gamer and Cal Dalton.

Being the best kind of war cartoon, Hitler is embarrassed by the “secret” message and Himmler and Goering Goebbels commit suicide. In real life, Hitler followed. As Daffy tells us, “They lose more darn Nutzis that way.”