Daffy Duck and Porky Pig Are a Comedy Duo for the Ages
There’s a new Looney Tunes movie in theaters right now, yet Bugs Bunny — by far the biggest star of the franchise — is nowhere to be found. The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, is the story of Daffy Duck and Porky Pig thwarting an alien invasion. And apart from Petunia Pig, no other recognizable Looney Tunes characters appear in it. It’s a bold choice, but also an exciting one: the 90-minute film allows for a fully-developed story to take place between the duo — one that feels like a natural progression of their comedic partnership that began 88 years ago.
Introduced in 1935, Porky Pig quickly became Warner Bros.’ first star cartoon character. This was likely because he was their first lead that wasn’t a direct Mickey Mouse ripoff. So Porky went on to star in all kinds of shorts in the mid-1930s, including Tex Avery’s Porky’s Duck Hunt, which featured the first appearance of Daffy Duck. In it, Porky plays an Elmer Fudd-type role as an incompetent hunter while the unnamed Daffy acts as an insane little black duck who shouts “woo-hoo!” and delights in antagonizing the pig.
Daffy’s third, fourth and fifth cartoons all also starred his porcine compatriot. The three shorts were directed by Bob Clampett, who is generally regarded as the looniest and most unpredictable of the Warner Bros. directors. The first in the trio, What Price Porky, again saw the Porky versus Daffy dynamic, but the 1938 Porky & Daffy depicted the two as roommates in an amicable relationship; Daffy acts as a boxer and Porky as his trainer. And then, in the very next short, The Daffy Doc, Daffy is back to torturing Porky.
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Clampett would continue to depict Daffy and Porky as both true enemies and Odd Couple-like best pals through the mid-1940s and until the end of his time at Warner Bros. Clampett’s Daffy would remain true to his name — he was a daffy (i.e., insane) duck — while Porky was his comedic straight man doing what he’s always done best: react to the craziness around him with his signature stutter.
Beginning in the 1950s, however, a new Daffy would begin to emerge via director Chuck Jones, whose cartoons tended to focus more on interactions between the characters and less on outright lunacy. While there were hints at this Daffy in 1950’s The Scarlet Pumpernickel, 1951’s Rabbit Fire showcases an entirely new duck. Instead of an anarchist wild man who antagonizes people and shouts “woo-hoo!” repeatedly, he’s more of a greedy jerk who’s also very funny, yet not all that crazy. As The Day the Earth Blew Up director Pete Browngardt recently explained, this new Daffy played better off the supremely confident Bugs Bunny who Daffy would be teamed up with on screen more and more often.
Fortunately, Daffy and Porky also continued as a pairing, but the new Daffy forced a new relationship with Porky to emerge. Now Daffy began to star in more elaborate set pieces, like the western Drip Along Daffy and the space epic Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century. But Porky and Daffy were no longer foes or Odd Couple-like equals. Instead, Daffy played more of the Don Quixote-like hero, supremely overconfident and a bit dim-witted, while Porky became his Sancho Panza: a smarter and more knowing sidekick who regularly rescues the hero from trouble.
It’s important to note that Jones wasn’t the only director of Daffy shorts in the 1950s. Robert McKimson, for example, continued to make many of the cartoons until 1967. In these, Daffy was often less wild than he was under Clampett’s direction, but not quite as bitter as with Jones.
Jones’ influence over the Looney Tunes characters, however, was ACME-anvil-level strong. When Warner Bros. stopped producing the shorts in 1969, Jones’ versions of the characters more or less froze in place for the next 45 years. Bitter, greedy Daffy would dominate his appearances, and he didn’t get a ton of screentime with his frenemy Porky. That is, until the 2003 Cartoon Network series Duck Dodgers, which served as a nice showcase for the dumb hero/smart sidekick dynamic created by Jones. (The ongoing series was based on Jones’ 1953 short Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century.)
In 2015, however, things changed. Cartoon Network (and Boomerang) launched the show Wabbit, which began with shorts starring Bugs, but by the second and third seasons expanded to cover all the major Looney Tunes characters. In the show, which was renamed New Looney Tunes, Daffy Duck reverts to his earlier, loonier persona and is reunited with Porky. Once again, they found themselves as adversaries, but occasionally also as Odd Couple-like pals.
New Looney Tunes concluded in early 2020, but only a few months later Max debuted Looney Tunes Cartoons — generally regarded as the modern Looney Tunes incarnation that is most faithful to the shorts under Clampett. In these, a “woo-hoo” hollering, crazy Daffy is again teamed up with Porky. Sometimes they’re antagonists, but more commonly, they’re just two buddies up against the world.
It’s this dynamic that’s used so beautifully in The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie. In the film, an opening montage reveals that Porky and Daffy were raised together on a farm essentially as brothers. Now, in their adulthood, they live together in the house where they grew up. Their life together is mostly a mess — one that can be blamed pretty squarely on the wacky waterfowl.
They may be wildly unqualified to save the planet against an alien invasion, but they’re more than ready to headline their own film. Through 88 years of varying character interpretations, Porky and Daffy remain the ultimate on-again-off-again couple, primed for another century of woo-hooing antics.
