THE SUPER SNOOPER (1952)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Like most people who've grown up with TV, I've watched and enjoyed thousands of cartoon shorts, many of them from the "Golden Age" of Warner Brothers. But it occurred to me to ask myself in this venue, "which if any of these seven-minute Warners shorts qualify as 'mythic' by the criteria I've laid out?"

One way of breaking the question down is to note that the vast majority of theatrical shorts were concatenations of gags, and that there were two most-used strategies for organizing the gags. The first and most popular means was to structure the gags around some frenetic activity. Examples include events like a dance, a musical performance, a chase, a fight, or a contest.

The less-used strategy was the spoof of some easily recognized genre or series of narrative tropes. The first type didn't really allow the writers to play with symbolic concepts, but the second couldn't help but duplicate some abstract ideas from the original stories in order to parody them. In the late forties and early fifties, Warners turned out a number of these: "Bugs Bunny Rides Again" (written by Michael Maltese and Tedd Pierce), "The Scarlet Pumpernickel" and "Drip-Along Daffy" (both Maltese). 

Daffy Duck also had two major modes for his comedy: usually he was either the "darn fool crazy duck" who tormented others with his craziness, or he was an insecure poseur who kept trying to assume heroic roles, but who usually got clobbered because of his weakness and incompetence. In "Pumpernickel" he's a would-be swashbuckler, while in "Drip-Along" he's a wannabe tough cowboy. 

Tedd Pierce had written assorted spoofs over his long career as well, but his most mythic parody was 1952's "The Super Snooper." Like other such shorts it's full of slapstick pratfalls, but Pierce's dialogue is full of wry twists on the private detective genre (strictly of the trenchcoat breed, despite the introductory shot showing Daffy in a Sherlock Holmes outfit). Though the duck's character is named "Duck Drake," I'll call him Daffy throughout.

Detective Daffy is summoned to investigate a murder at the ritzy "Axehandle Estate" (by itself, a spoof of the trope in which low-class sleuths investigate high-class tycoons). Upon meeting a creepy butler at the door of his supposed destination, Daffy questions the servant, but then remarks to the camera that "the suspicious acting butler is never the real culprit in these pictures."

Despite this remark, for the rest of the short Daffy is sedulously bound to carry out the tropes of the detective genre. With the butler gone, he asks no one in particular, "Where's the body" (of the supposed victim). Daffy never actually sees a corpus delicti, but he does get a body, in the form of a statuesque female duck who responds that "I'm the Body"-- the only name we ever get for the rich babe, apparently the only resident of the mansion. Daffy tells the audience that she's "the inevitable amorous babe who's just crazy about us hardboiled gumshoes," and the Body is quick to conform to the trope by smothering Daffy with kisses. Still, she claims to be "innocent" of whatever crime this gumshoe has on his mind (prompting from Daffy a clever pun on another meaning of "innocent.") 

So for four gag-sequences, Daffy roleplays ways in which he thinks the Body committed the crime (even though he hasn't seen a corpse or garnered any info about the cause of death). First, he assumes (correctly) that the femme fatale has a "little pistol" in her purse, pulls it out, hands it to the Body and coaxes her into firing it, blasting him several times. As if to support her claim of "innocence," the Body evinces shock and drops the weapon.

The Body keeps trying to make love to Daffy, which in detective movies is a sign of a woman using sex to cover her guilt. But Daffy's married to his narrative. He grabs a (fully loaded) deer rifle off the walls, thrusts it into the Body's hands, and insists that she act out the way she supposedly murdered "the old goat" (loosely implying that she's a young trophy wife who killed some elderly rich dude). The Body then shoots Daffy about a dozen times, causing his body to rebound back and forth as in a shooting gallery. This time her expression is utterly impassive as she shoots, neither shocked by or enjoying the violence she performs upon the obsessed shamus.

Daffy returns to his theme, "And then what did you do?"(To her response, "Search me," he responds, atypically, "Business before pleasure, please.") He then tries a new RPG, using a pulley to haul a piano up to the ceiling, calling her an "ee-vil woman" as he does so. (She bats her eyes as if flattered.) Daffy hands the Body the cable while he demonstrates exactly how she supposedly dropped a piano on the murder victim. (I like how Daffy puts real effort into hauling the huge object up to the ceiling but given the rope, the slender femme fatale holds it in place with zero strain.) Daffy, not content with all the pain he's suffered so far, yells at the slinky siren, startling her into dropping the dead weight right atop the defective detective.

For the last gag, the Body doesn't even get directly involved, lying prone on a sofa while Daffy shows her how she arranged for the victim to be run over by a train. Daffy's constant displays of terminal stupidity do nothing to discourage this "scarlet woman's" mad love for the masochistic mallard. When he again returns to his theme, she drops the bomb that there's been no crime (though she did say she was innocent earlier) and that Daffy's at the wrong location. However, the Body then confesses-- not to a crime, but to being crazy about the "gorgeous hunk of duck." Daffy reads a "ball in chain look" in her eyes and flees. The Body pursues, with the end image making it certain that she will overtake and tame the would-be adventurer and drag him to the altar, whether by persuasion or by force. In comparison to the conclusions of many genre spoofs, which simply often just shift into some irrelevant gag (as in the aforementioned "Bugs Bunny Rides Again"), SNOOPER's ending is a perfect repudiation of the power-fantasy of the private detective. Instead of the "super snooper" defeating the power of the seductive femme fatale by ferreting out her criminality, the Body sentences this crime-happy incarnation of Daffy to the imprisonment of matrimony. That said, Daffy often suffered far worse fates than being married to a gorgeous, rich lady duck. So for once, even though Daffy loses the contest, he kind of wins too-- as long as she doesn't develop a thing for dropping pianos on his head.