A Coy Decoy

A Coy Decoy
Looney Tunes/Daffy Duck/Porky Pig series
Directed by	Bob Clampett
Produced by	Leon Schlesinger
Story by	Melvin Millar
Voices by	Mel Blanc
Music by	Carl W. Stalling
Animation by	Norman McCabe
Distributed by	Warner Bros. Pictures
Release date(s)	June 7, 1941
Color process	Black & White
Running time	8 min.
Language	English

A Coy Decoy is a 1941 Warner Bros. cartoon, directed by Bob Clampett and featuring Porky Pig and Daffy Duck. The film is set in a closed bookstore at night, when the many characters and elements featured within the books come to life.

Contents 1 Plot 2 Cultural references 3 Censorship 4 References

Plot

Porky Pig, featured on the cover of The Westerner, comes to life and sings Ride, Tenderfoot, Ride. Across the way, Daffy Duck, featured on the cover of The Ugly Duckling, comes to life and sings Git Along, Little Dogies.

A wolf emerges from The Wolf of Wall Street and lures Daffy to him using a female duck decoy. Daffy follows and grabs what he thinks is the decoy but is actually the wolf's nose. Once he realizes he is in danger, Daffy tells the wolf that he is not worth eating and runs away.

Daffy uses the books to defeat the wolf. He opens a copy of The Hurricane to blow the wolf away, and lightning from the book Lightning strikes the wolf.

Daffy returns to the decoy. Porky berates him, saying they could never "mean anything to each other." Daffy sticks up his nose and swims away with the decoy, followed by four tiny decoys that look like Daffy.

Cultural references

• Many well-known books can be seen in the book store, including: The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Oliver Wiswell by Kenneth Roberts, Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, One Foot in Heaven by Hartzell Spence, Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, The Green Bay Tree by Louis Bromfield, The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, and For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway.

• Ride Tenderfoot Ride, a film starring Gene Autry, was released in theatres one year prior to A Coy Decoy. Here, Porky Pig is a caricature of Gene Autry. He sings Ride, Tenderfoot, Ride, which was the title song of the earlier film.

• Git Along, Little Dogies is a staple cowboy song. In Daffy's version of the song, the lyrics are: I can't get a long, little doggie / I can't even get one that's small.

• While singing this song, Daffy enters the book Black Beauty and rides out on a large black woman. This is one of the many instances when racial caricatures were used in the early Warner Bros. cartoons (see "Censorship" note).

• The Ugly Duckling is a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen.

• While being chased, Daffy turns to the wolf and says, "You're a hard man, McGee." This was a catch phrase for The Great Gildersleeve, a recurring character on the classic radio show Fibber McGee and Molly.

• At the beginning of the cartoon, the opening bars of Ludwig van Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata can be heard in the score. This music is used to imply that the time is Night.

Censorship

• The syndicated "Merrie Melodies Show", Nickelodeon, and Cartoon Network (with the exception of The Bob Clampett Show) edited this cartoon to remove the part where after Daffy sings, "Get Along, Little Doggie", he leaps into a copy of Black Beauty and comes out riding on the shoulders of a black mammy-looking woman (though Cartoon Network cut the entire "Get along, Little Doggie" sequence while "The Merrie Melodies Show" and Nickelodeon left in the "Get Along, Little Doggie" part and cut out just before Daffy gets into Black Beauty) [1].

Preceded by You Ought to Be in Pictures

Daffy Duck Cartoons 1941

Succeeded by The Henpecked Duck

References