Robin Hood Daffy
1958 · 7m · USA
Directed by Chuck Jones
Genres: adventure, animation, comedy
Tones: darkly comic, humorous, whimsical
Daffy Duck, posing as Robin Hood, tries to prove his identity to a skeptical Friar Tuck (Porky Pig) by robbing a wealthy traveler, but every swashbuckling attempt ends in slapstick disaster.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Chuck Jones turning failure into religion — every yoinks is a slap at heroism itself. Holds up better than most things made this century.
Chuck Jones at his most architecturally precise, building a fugue of escalating self-injury around 'yoinks and away.' The restored Archive print is a gift.
Chuck Jones structures the whole short around escalating physical failure — each 'yoinks and away' is timed to undercut the previous gag by exactly the right beat. Restored HBO Max Latin America print on Archive at 362MB suggests good image quality for the Maurice Noble layouts.
Reviews
Jones brings his mind for gags to its fullest flower here, with everything from Daffy's beak folding to the tripping bit to 'Ho Ho, parry, thrust' to maybe my all-time favorite gag in any Looney Tunes short ('yoinks and away') hitting the mark.
A sumptuous and hilarious short from the late era of Warner Bros., one of the great classics of animation.