The Scarlet Pumpernickel
1950 · 7m · USA
Directed by Chuck Jones
Genres: adventure, animation, comedy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic
Daffy Duck pitches a swashbuckling screenplay to studio head J.L., casting himself as the Scarlet Pumpernickel — an 18th-century rogue who must rescue fair maiden Melissa from an arranged marriage to the villainous Grand Duke (Sylvester the Cat), in this meta-comedic parody of The Scarlet Pimpernel and classic adventure films.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Daffy pitching his own screenplay while the plot eats itself — meta before meta was annoying. Volcanoes and plummeting prices is the kind of nonsense escalation I'll always sign for.
Jones and Mel Blanc construct a recursive screenplay-within-a-cartoon that anticipates Duck Amuck's metafiction, with Daffy's pitch unraveling into an inflationary apocalypse. A small marvel of self-aware structure.
Daffy pitching his own screenplay in real time, with the cartoon visualizing every desperate plot escalation — that meta structure required Jones to commit to two layers of comic logic simultaneously. The volcano-and-falling-stock-prices punchline is editing comedy.
Reviews
What's funny about The Scarlet Pumpernickel is the tremendous investment its hero puts into his costumed character, and the vast chasm that yawns between Daffy's inflated perception of himself and the highly flawed little black duck that he really is.
The Scarlet Pumpernickel is the first of Jones's Daffy cartoons in which Daffy serves as a misguided hero, starting a great series of shorts.