Daffy as Dripalong Daffy: DRIPALONG DAFFY (1951)—note brand from daughter’s prep school, Quarter Circle V Bar Ranch School, later Orme School, near Mayer, Arizona
The animation director and writer have an enormous advantage here, because we mine ourselves, dredge the Daffy in us to the surface, become Daffy, look at the world through Daffy’s eyes, speak with Daffy’s voice, move with Daffy’s peculiar and unique musculature.
Knowing Daffy and thinking Daffy, we now ask ourselves a simple question: Where, as Daffy, am I? And how can I give that environment a slight, an ever so slight twist?
Being Daffy, I know that he would:
—Refuse to fly south (we would all like to be individualists). Title: Norm McCabe’s Daffy’s Southern Exposure
—Marry for money. There is a small pocket of avariciousness in all of us that whispers: Who wouldn’t? Title: Friz Freleng’s His Bitter Half
—Play Robin Hood and be unable to prove to anybody that he is Robin Hood. Title: My Robin Hood Daffy.
Robin Hood Daffy and Porky (Friar Tuck) Pig: ROBIN HOOD DAFFY (1958)
Wouldn’t we all like to actually be the hero, not just dream about it, or, in this case, play Buck Rogers?
So this is where we got one of our ideas: Daffy Duck as Buck Rogers.
Maurice Noble’s layout sketch for DUCK DODGERS IN THE 24½ CENTURY (1953), designed ten years before any such craft had appeared at Cape Canaveral (or Kennedy)
An idea has no worth at all without believable characters to implement it; a plot without characters is like a tennis court without players. Daffy Duck is to a Buck Rogers story what John McEnroe was to tennis.
Personality. That is the key, the drum, the fife. Forget the plot. Can you remember, or care to remember, the plot of any great comedy? Chaplin? Woody Allen? The Marx Brothers?
“[The writer] merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality. He knows the selected locality, and he trusts that he can plunge those people into incidents with interesting results.”
—MARK TWAIN
All right. We now have a locality (the twenty-fifth century), an incident (the search for something), and some characters that interest us and, therefore, we hope, will interest an audience.
So let’s get started.
First of all, we want a title. “First of all” only in terms of the finished picture; the title may appear at any time during production. Don’t fight it, it will only slow you down. The title will appear.
Finished background by Phil De Guard
The title should be honest and simple and, one hopes, to the point:*
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century
Just as in the 1920s, The Covered Wagon was followed by a short comedy, Two Wagons, Both Covered.
LOCALITY: Far from imitating Buck Rogers, we go way beyond the clutching bonds of the earthbound live-action camera and what were then the miniature cities of the Future. We do this because we can, because we have that great and imaginative designer, Maurice Noble, to create a city of the future, a city that, even with today’s advances in technology, still stands as the city to stimulate live-action directors such as George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.
Ten years before Cape Canaveral, Maurice also designed a forty-story rocket/spacecraft, complete with gantry never before seen by man. Wonderful!
THE INCIDENT: In science fiction, usually a quest for something is needed, something lost, something lifesaving. In our case, Mike Maltese and I realized that “the earth’s supply of Illudium Phosdex, the shaving cream atom, is alarmingly low.”
So now we have all we need to start a film. And here is how we went about it at Warner Bros.
1. THE IDEA: A loving parody of Buck Rogers.
2. THE CHARACTERS: Daffy and Porky and Marvin Martian and Dr. I.Q. High.
3. THE INCIDENT: The search for Illudium Phosdex.
4. THE ENVIRONMENT: Outer space and the city of the future.
I. STORY The writer and the director agree on the story idea or premise, and the writer (Mike Maltese) starts some rough storyboard sketches, ignoring continuity, concentrating on “business” between the characters. After about a week, the director calls a story session known as …
Johnny Burton, C. Martin Jones, and Friz Freleng, about 1958
II. THE JAM SESSION—attended by three directors (Friz Freleng, Bob McKimson, and me), three writers (Warren Foster, Tedd Pierce, and Mike), and the production chief (Johnny Burton), and—often, sadly—the producer. (The layout men did not ordinarily attend the jam session. It was felt best to bring them in on completion of the storyboard, coincidentally working with the director as he does the character layouts.)
This session was, I believe, an event unique to Warner Bros. Unique at that time, perhaps anytime. Because this was not a brainstorming session in the usual sense, it was a “yes” session, not an “anything goes” session. Anything went, but only if it was positive, supportive, and affirmative to the premise. No negatives were allowed. If you could not contribute, you kept quiet. For want of a better term, I have always called it … THE “YES” SESSION. Again, the “yes” session is not a brainstorming session; repeat, it is not a session in which anything goes. The purpose is to advance an idea or ideas, not an emotional outburst for the emotional benefit of the participants or as a story man’s confession of a buried affair with a girl’s track shoe. The “yes” session only has one objective: to write a story.
Anybody can crush an infant idea with a cement “NO!”
The “yes” session imposes only one discipline: the abolition of the word “no.” Anyone can say “no.” It is the first word a child learns and often the first word he speaks. It is a cheap word because it requires no explanation, and many men and women
