Greg Ford is unique among the Warner animation historian forefathers… he actually created some Warner animation. All cartoon fans owe him a debt of thanks for spreading the word in those dark ages about what made the Golden Age golden, but a lot of millennials recognize his name (and Terry Lennon’s) from the credits of the first new Looney Tunes cartoons in decades of any enjoyable quality. Before the ‘90s Warner TV animation heyday, Greg worked under some unenviable limitations to deliver largely wraparound material for “compilation” TV specials (Bugs Vs. Daffy: Battle of the Music Video Stars, Bugs Bunny’s Wild World of Sports) that featured something that at least felt like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, as well as several highly self-aware new cartoons like The Duxorcist, Blooper Bunny, and Invasion of the Bunny Snatchers.
One of his projects was Daffy Duck’s Quackbusters, the final in a series of compilation movies comprising cutdown versions of the original post-1948 Warner classics with newly animated wraparounds to tell something of a story. These started as Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng self-tributes and got increasingly worse and incoherent. (I fondly remember Leonard Maltin’s description of Daffy Duck’s Movie: Fantastic Island: “They didn’t even use the good cartoons.”) They served their purpose in those bygone days of cable TV and before the “every cartoon ever” DVD collections as introductions to the Warner cartoons for younger viewers and have little relevance today.
Even so, Quackbusters is quite entertaining in its own right as a retrospective of the “best” in Looney Tunes grotesquery, with a clever wraparound story (Daffy establishes a horror-exterminating company to keep his late benefactor from taking the money with him to the great beyond) and quite a bit of high-quality animation (a stretch of footage, animated by Mark Kausler, that sets up clips from The Prize Pest matches the look and feel of the 1950 Robert McKimson unit so perfectly it’s unsettling).
A rare photo of Greg Ford (right) – in 2014, with Jerry Beck at left.
“I was working a lot in movie programming, and a film critic for Rolling Stone and other places. I ended up curating shows in theaters of animation, including the Museum of Modern Art. Mainly the Thalia Theatre. I don’t know how many shows there, maybe a million. It was the period of Andrew Sarris’ “auteurism”. I started seeing the way Friz would do something, the way Chuck would do something, the way Clampett would do something. So I was spreading the word doing shows. I had a regular show called “Cartoonal Knowledge”. Warners got the idea that, “He’s really interested in this stuff,” and called me in.
A producer at Warner Bros., Ed Bleier, wanted me to write a script for a feature, a compilation feature of the sort they were making at the time. I’d say mine was good, but it was too good. It was called “Hare-Port”, it was a comedy about the characters getting stuck on a plane and they’re going through their past lives quickly. Daffy figured prominently. So I got in with that and started doing TV stuff at the same time I was doing these shows in New York.
“I think it was right to pair [Terry Lennon and I], and give us the same credit. “Written and directed by Greg Ford and Terry Lennon.” That’s absolutely true. Now did I do a lot of the directing? Yes. I did. Did he… maybe not as much of the writing, but he was better than that, because he was a good audience. I’d know if something was funny as I ran it by him. I leaned heavily on the writer side of it and director side of it, but Terry’s timing was very good. We sat and did exposure sheets together and yell at each other. “That should be three frames!” But we were both deeply into the cartoons. I did most if not all of the writing, but that’s the only thing I’ll claim for myself. Terry would clean up my crude storyboards.
“I never did a cartoon without doing a storyboard first. I worked with people like Owen Fitzgerald, who was really a great designer. He did whole stretches of the last one I did, Invasion of the Bunny Snatchers. There’s a lot of Owen in that. My boards were so crude. He’d be looking at my boards and saying, “Why can’t you draw Bugs Bunny right?” Owen had a lot do with that, “Hey, gran’ma!” “TA HAVE!” [Little Red Riding Rabbit, which Fitzgerald did the layouts for.] And Herr Meets Hare. Owen just turned up, I was astonished he wanted to do it with me. As a matter of fact, I was working with Owen on something, and Chuck came in, which he rarely did, and started talking to Owen. It was like, “Holy shit, this is like going back in time.”
“Robert Givens, too. Something odd. The last two years of his life, he had a phone call with me, the phone call was about two days. He told me so many things I didn’t know. I think he realized he was dying and he wanted people to spread the word about this and that. He was still worried about not being remembered as the guy who designed the first Bugs Bunny that was really Bugs Bunny. He told me, “I showed Tex this cartoon I had done, Rhapsody in Rivets, and he said, ‘That’s Droopy!’” So he said, “Tell everybody Tex Avery was donated Droopy and Bugs Bunny by me, Bob Givens!”
“I worked with so many great animators on those cartoons. Mark Kausler was so important to many of my pictures. So were Nancy Beiman, Doug Compton, Dan Haskett… I was just really fortunate.
“The unbelievably surprising success of The Duxorcist was just because it was the first attempt in years to actually do a real Warners cartoon. That’s all it was. “Why The Exorcist?” Because it was a contemporary film. So it seemed like a funny thing to satirize. For The Duxorcist, sex comedy films came to mind, the one by Norman McCabe with the Indian girl and Daffy [The Daffy Duckaroo]… I actually worked quite a bit with Norm and asked him to remember that picture when he was working on Duxorcist. And the McKimson with the vampy duck in it [The Super Snooper]. And Tashlin’s Plane Daffy. One of the secrets of that was me improvising with my then late partner Ronnie Scheib. We liked improvising Groucho Marx and Thelma Todd a lot. We tried for that. Interestingly, I’d do the Thelma Todd and she’d do the Groucho Marx. A lot of the dialogue came from that. Ronnie definitely came up with, “Mary had a little lamb—but I ate it!” That sort of sexual tension is automatically funny in a Marx Bros. movie. I was also thinking of the Crosby-Hope pictures. Sex is funny.
“Ed Bleier looked at the box offices. He said, “We really should do a Daffy Duck feature now. Oh look, Ghostbusters is really popular”. So he calls me up and says, “Daffy Duck’s Quackbusters. Whaddaya think?” I’m thinking to myself, “I’m gonna kill myself.” But that’s how it came into being. And then someone told him Warners didn’t own Ghostbusters anyway. “Well, OK, we’re doing the remake of Little Shop of Horrors. How about Daffy Ducks’s Little Shop of Quackbusters.” I’m not kidding, he said this. Even his assistant fainted practically when he said that.
“Some of it’s good, that’s what I say. I told Trevor Thompson, who calls me all the time, I mentioned to him that the producer Steve Greene said, “Here’s the slogan: ‘It’s everything it’s quacked up to be.’” Oy. Here’s my slogan for it: “Daffy Duck’s Quackbusters: Some of it is good.” Which would’ve gotten a bigger laugh.
Daffy Dilly (used as the framing device for Quackbusters) is one I like very much, Phil Monroe did a lot of it [Daffy’s opening sales pitch], it’s Chuck Jones’ alter ego almost. And in Scarlet Pumpernickel. A funny thing happened, Pete Alvarado [the cartoon’s background painter], we animated a TV set because it was originally a radio when he’s listening to the message [in Daffy Dilly]. And Pete came in and said, ‘You’re not going to believe it but here’s what we had originally.’ And it was a TV set. It was an early, early version of a TV screen. He showed me the original drawing. So it wasn’t our idea to turn it into a TV. They kept it out because TVs weren’t big enough yet when it came out.
“It was hard with Mel Blanc at that point. Dan Haskett, of all the animators, was the most appalled by Mel’s voice. “You gotta do something!” He got better eventually. I think around time of Night of the Living Duck he nailed it. He loved that script, it’s the only film I ever gave him that he said, “You know, this writing is exceptionally good.” I kept trying to get it right, and I didn’t control all of the ways the tech people pitched the voices. The real struggle was having him do Foghorn Leghorn for a series of commercials for Kentucky Fried Chicken. That doesn’t make any sense at all, but that’s what it was. Of all the people on the credit list, the only one people really knew was Mel Blanc, so we didn’t have any choice anyway. And I did my best with Mel, and we were friends, and easy to work with. Except when he wasn’t.
“The other films are more ambitious, certainly. I was trying to break a bunch of third walls with Blooper Bunny and Invasion of the Bunny Snatchers obviously. Get rid of Tiny Toons was my main statement, and all this ‘Baby Bugsy’ stuff. The most terrifying thing, the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, they lose their souls. And they’re soulless versions of the characters… and sometimes as badly drawn.
“The only drawing that made it to the screen that I ever did is in Snatchers. “What’s the worst drawing of Daffy you could possibly do?” I drew what became the Clutch Cargo lips character. I drew it as Gandy Goose basically. So I’m very proud of that drawing. It got the biggest laugh in the picture.
“Chuck Jones would actually come to me because he couldn’t remember which film was which in his repertoire. I just remembered them better. He requested I do that PBS show with him, which I wrote, the title was Chuck Jones: Extremes and Inbetweens. For the first time he said something nice about one of my films. He always wanted to seem like not an advocate of anybody. He did say, “I do think you’re doing the best cartoons right now.”