Director: Charles M Jones
Story: Michael Maltese
Animation: Ben Washam, Lloyd Vaughan, Ken Harris
Layouts: Maurice Noble
Backgrounds: Philip De Guard
Voice Characterisation: Mel Blanc
Musical Director: Carl W Stalling
Cast: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd
Date of release: February 28, 1953

This superb animation opens to medieval titles and Daffy Duck resplendent in Cavalier costume leaping onto the screen wielding a sword. Almost immediately he parries forwards into an empty space as the background hasn’t been drawn. What ensues, pushes the boundaries of what can be done with a short cartoon to the limit. Chuck Jones and his team create one of the all time greatest animated cartoons.

Essentially the entire short is a dialogue between Daffy and the unseen animator. Who rubs, out, draws and paints right onto the screen, infuriating, taunting and generally torturing the hapless Daffy.

The short is packed with scene changes and Daffy is brought to breaking point before our eyes as he is transformed into a variety of caricatures one by one before our eyes. A farmer, winter skier, Hawaiian Dancer, Cowboy, a marooned Sailor where Daffy utters the immortal phrase “Thanks for the sour persimmons, cousin!” (Chuck Jones later credited this line to animator Ben Washam) and a fighter pilot. Daffy is painted in bright colours, rubbed out and transformed into a frog footed, flower headed “Screw Ball” creature.
He wrestles with the black border of the cartoon and the premature closing fanfare and the contracting iris normally reserved for “The End” of a movie. In one scene he even fights with himself from a previous frame of the movie.

Finally as a “buzz boy” in an aeroplane he is forced to crash into a hastily drawn mountain and have his parachute replaced with the ubiquitous anvil. He finds himself beating himself over the head with a hammer in a surreal landscape where the only road is seen zig-zagging impossibly in the distance. The animator draws a huge artillery shell under his failing hammer’s trajectory causing Daffy to be reduced to a sooted shadow of his former self. A furious Daffy calls for an explanation, “enough is enough” he screams as the animator draws a door and closes it in Daffy’s face.

Finally the camera pulls back to reveal that the animator is none other than Bugs Bunny. “Ain’t I a stinker” he giggles.

Chuck Jones claimed that the ending was just a gag and the point of the cartoon was to explorer how far you could stretch the character and still recognise it as Daffy Duck. It’s a hilarious masterpiece, full of exquisite animation and more flourishes of animator talent than an entire season of most animated cartoon’s made today.

In 1994, this cartoon was voted #2 of The 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members of the animation field.

In 1999 it become only the second short animated film to be deemed “culturally significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.