BOOTLEG FILES 795: “Duck Amuck Reanimate Jam” (2020 fan film that reimagines the classic cartoon “Duck Amuck.”).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: Unauthorized remake of a copyright-protected work.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Nil.
In 2018, an unlikely project caught the fancy of animation addicts: a group of 90 animators were gathered together to reanimate the 1942 Warner Bros. cartoon classic “The Dover Boys at Pimento University.” Each animator was given a small slice of the cartoon to reanimate – the soundtrack of the original film remained and the scene had to adhere to the basics of the sequences’ actions, but the animators were able to redesign the characters and animation style in any manner they desired.
The resulting “The Dover Boys Reanimated Collab!” was an inventive and surreal short that pinballed wildly between various animation techniques and visual aesthetics. It became a minor viral video hit, helped in large part by using a public domain work as its source material.
Two years later, another reanimation jam brought forth a different spin on a Warner Bros. cartoon classic, in this case the 1951 “Duck Amuck.” This one had fewer participating animators (27 in total) and tiptoed into potentially problematic territory by plumbing a copyright protected work – a matter that the creators sought to tiptoe around by prefixing the work with the acknowledgment that Warner Bros. was the copyright owner of the source material and the new product was a fan film that was created in pursuit of fun and not profits.
“Duck Amuck Reanimate Jam” didn’t get the same level of attention and enthusiasm as “The Dover Boys Reanimate Collab!” However, I think it is a more invigorating film of the two. Whereas “The Dover Boys” allowed the reanimator artists to reinvent a specific production style involving one-shot characters, the original “Duck Amuck” is something of a reanimate jam with poor Daffy Duck going through a Dadaist hell as scenes, costumes and animation styles violently change on him every few seconds. Thus, the artists are reanimating a work of constant reanimation.
For a film that is slight less than seven minutes long, “Duck Amuck Reanimate Jam” is so thick with unexpected sight gags and subversive visual deviations from the Chuck Jones original that it truly needs to be viewed more than once to absorb all of its wit. Giving away too much of the humor creates a spoiler situation, as anyone coming to this work fresh needs to experience it without waiting patiently for a specific happening to pop up on the screen.
But one key reason why “Duck Amuck Reanimate Jam” succeeds is the brilliance of Mel Blanc’s voice performance as Daffy Duck and Carl Stalling’s remarkably inventive musical score. (This film’s one big flaw is misspelling the composer’s surname as “Starling.”) The increasingly manic nature of Daffy’s crisis and the unpredictable melodic shifts highlighting his existential hell are so strong that the radical changes to the “Duck Amuck” visuals do not weaken the material – but, instead, in a weird way, the new visuals and the often-radical changes that unexpectedly arise serves to reconfirm the power of the 1951 production.
My advice on “Duck Amuck Reanimate Jam” is to see it for yourself, and perhaps you will then understand why I am enthusiastic about this work but hesitant divulge too much about its contents in this column.
I will, however, give a shout out to Andrew Kaiko, the animator and organizational genius who assembled and edited the “Duck Amuck Reanimate Jam” into its wonderful form. You can follow him on Twitter and he has a Patreon page.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.
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