Speedy Ghost to Town (1967)

Director:

Alex Lovy

Writer:

Cal Howard (story)

Release Date:

29 July 1967 (USA)

Genre:

Animation | Family | Short | Comedy

Plot:

Daffy Duck overhears Speedy Gonzales and another mouse talk about a hidden cheese storage area, thinking it is really gold they are talking about. |

Plot Keywords:

Cartoon | Daffy Duck | Merrie Melodies | Speedy Gonzales | Bullfighting

Cast

Mel Blanc

...

Daffy Duck / Speedy Gonzales (voice)

Runtime:

6 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Finland:S | USA:G

Company:

Warner Bros. Animation

Movie Connections:

Featured in "No 73: (#8.22)" (1987)

The dark era begins...

This was the first cartoon made by Warner Bros. Animation when they reopened in 1967. And unfortunately, like Sander Schwartz's stint at WB Animation president from 2002 to 2007, the studio has never been the same. They mostly hired new staff members and very few veterans, and had Walter Lantz/Hanna-Barbera -director Alex Lovy direct the cartoons. He seemed to take the limited animation influence with him in these cartoons. Daffy is drawn severely off-model and looks very weird, and Speedy doesn't look as good, though at least he isn't drawn as badly as he was in 1968. The writing sounds like a bunch of kids wrote this short, with a highly-predictable ending. And other animation motions seem to resemble Hanna-Barbera or Filmation or UPA, and it comes out looking just plain low-budget. They even had Daffy do the old "bongo feet" thing when running off, just like the H-B characters do, and they also had some of the Hanna-Barbera sound effects used in it, looped over and over and only using a portion of H-B's vast sound FX library (sort of like when the studio would make "What's New Scooby-Doo?" in 2002), and Bill Lava's music sounds cheesy as well. But as I say, don't judge a book by this cover, and not all of the WB cartoons from this period were like this (only the Speedy vs. Daffy shorts). Luckily, they went and created Cool Cat, and that livened things up a bit.