User Reviews

Aqua Duck is not the best Looney Tunes cartoon but I for one liked it. The pacing is quite leisurely here, and the desert rat has little to do and I agree it doesn't have that much of a character. Daffy however does really well with carrying the cartoon, with both his manic and greedy not to mention increasingly desperate personalities merging. The animation is very nice, the story is good, the music is pleasant, the dialogue has enough wit and is funny and the visual gags(more the hallucination gags than anything else) are amusing. Overall, Aqua Duck is not an exceptional cartoon, but it is funny and definitely worth watching particularly for Daffy and of course Mel Blanc's superb voice characterisations. 8/10 Bethany Cox

Title! Bad qualities: 1. Bad ending. While it is a taste of karma, ifI had directed the cartoon Daffy would have stolen the gold nugget back or at least acknowledge that he only needed to wait a few more seconds to make it less abrupt.

2. Very slow pacing. Feels more like 25 minutes than 6.

3. There's Accidental Nightmare Fuel involved. Mainly, Daffy getting close to the camera from how thirsty he is.

Daffy Duck is lost in the desert and eventually decides he needs to dig for water or he'll die. Did as he may, he can't find water but does find a large lump of gold. However a little desert rat also sees him find the gold and plans to take it from him by fair means or fowl (sorry), something that becomes harder for Daffy to resist as he begins to hallucinate.

Despite the little plot device of the gold and the mouse, this whole short is about Daffy going nuts in the desert due to lack of water. So he thinks he sees a lake, a telephone, in a bar or at a baseball game; all of these are punctuated by the mouse trying to get Daffy to give him the gold for water. While the punctuation isn't funny, the hallucinations are quite good and worth watching.

Like any short, the characters are important and Daffy does well to hold the attention. Here his two characters merge a little - he is greedy and ruthless but also is a little crazy too like he used to be. The desert rat has very little character and very little to do but perhaps the wiser thing was to very much let Daffy carry the film.

As it is this is an amusing little cartoon that trades on the hallucination gags more than anything else but it is worth seeing if you are a fan of Daffy, as I am.

In his book, "Of Mice and Magic," Leonard Maltin cites "Aqua Duck" as an example of the nadir of the Warner Bros. animation studio. Indeed, it is very late; released in September 1963, not long before Warners closed its studio proper and began to outsource such work to another, employing the very same people that they had previously retained. However, even the quality of this short is miles above anything done by the DePatie-Freling unit in the later 1960s. Daffy is out in the desert, succumbing to dehydration, and manages to excavate a large gold nugget in the course of his search for water. Being a "greedy little duck," he rebuffs repeated attempts by a silent pack-rat to offer him water in exchange for the nugget. It's essentially a one man show for Daffy, and in its use of spare, desert backgrounds, "Aqua Duck" tries to recapture some of the effect, and magic, of "Duck Amuck" with a more conventional storyline derived from the tradition of the Western.

Although the finished product employs nowhere near the level of creativity of "Duck Amuck," it works well enough to at least fit in with Daffy's other output; he doesn't do anything we wouldn't expect him to do, and he does not play off the pack-rat as unnecessarily mean as he does with Speedy Gonzales in DePatie-Freling subjects. The music score, by William Lava, is dedicated rather than generic, and while it does not employ the humorous synchronicity of a Stalling-Franklyn score it doesn't get in the way either. Mel Blanc only has to play one character, and the timing is a little rushed as in later Daffy Duck cartoons, but not nearly as badly.

While "Aqua Duck" is less than deserving of its terrible reputation, that doesn't mean that it is altogether free from the brush of failure that rather obviously paints later Daffy Duck subjects. It's just a matter of the Warner Bros. animation studio, with resources growing short, attempting to achieve something convincing and characteristic of its product while waiting to learn of its fate. In a way, "Aqua Duck" can be seen as a metaphor for what the Warners' unit was going through at the time, in the same manner as so many of their other cartoons have that sort of self-confessional tone. In this case, though, they are trying find a way to make some rain, which, for the studio, never came.

Terrible Daffy short from Bob McKimson. This is one of the last solo Daffy cartoons before he was paired up with Speedy Gonzales for the remainder of the classic era. Basically the whole cartoon is about Daffy dying of thirst in the desert and hallucinating. He digs up a gold nugget for no other reason than to set up the punchline for the ending later. There's a big mouse or something that pops up out of the ground...in the desert...and the mouse wants the gold? Why? I just don't know. This is a really tired effort from all involved. It's the kind of cartoon you know was made just because they had to make something, not because anyone had any enthusiasm for this great idea. The animation is sloppy and poor. The music is annoying and the sound effects are too loud. Daffy doesn't stop talking yet he never says a single funny line. Mel Blanc seems 'off' as well. His Daffy voice seems a little more nasal than it usually does. This is really the pits. It'll give you a headache.