Not even cartoons are immune to remakes. Five years after making 'A Coy Decoy', Robert Clampett would remake this cartoon as the better (and better-known) 'Book Revue'. Both toons have the same premise: a wolf chases Daffy Duck through a bookshop, with the titles of the books supplying gags.
We get here one of Clampett's typical racist jokes: Daffy falls into a copy of 'Black Beauty' and emerges riding a kerchief-headed 'mammy' stereotype.
One thing that bothers me about both this 1941 cartoon and its remake 'Book Revue' is that most of the so-called 'book' titles in both toons -- such as 'The Wolf of Wall Street', seen here -- are actually movie titles. In cases where a title could apply to both a book and a film (such as 'The Bridge of San Luis Rey' here, or "Dante's Inferno" in 'Book Revue'), it's obvious that the audience were expected to think of the movie rather than the book. Either the Warners scriptwriters didn't know many book titles, or else they wouldn't give their audience credit for being literate. In 'A Coy Decoy', I was pleasantly surprised to see references to 'The Yearling' and 'For Whom the Bell Tolls', best-selling books which (as of 1941) hadn't yet been filmed.
'A Coy Decoy' gets its title from a plot development here which wasn't used in the remake: the wolf uses a clockwork female duck to entice Daffy. This is a running theme in many Clampett cartoons, continuing right into his 'Beany and Cecil' era: a male protagonist is lured by an artificial female; either a male in disguise, or else a mechanical surrogate (a fembot?). Clampett seemed reluctant to put genuine female characters into his toons.
There's a nice tinkling music-box motif for the she-duck (Warners cartoons almost always had excellent music tracks), and there's a cheeky final gag, one of Clampett's less obvious sexual entendres. That final gag is the only place where this cartoon surpasses its remake 'Book Revue', which is superior all down the line until it ends in a weak 'cissy' joke (another of Clampett's predilections). I'll rate 'A Coy Decoy' five points out of 10. Take out that unnecessary racist joke, and I might bump it up to six.
We get here one of Clampett's typical racist jokes: Daffy falls into a copy of 'Black Beauty' and emerges riding a kerchief-headed 'mammy' stereotype.
One thing that bothers me about both this 1941 cartoon and its remake 'Book Revue' is that most of the so-called 'book' titles in both toons -- such as 'The Wolf of Wall Street', seen here -- are actually movie titles. In cases where a title could apply to both a book and a film (such as 'The Bridge of San Luis Rey' here, or "Dante's Inferno" in 'Book Revue'), it's obvious that the audience were expected to think of the movie rather than the book. Either the Warners scriptwriters didn't know many book titles, or else they wouldn't give their audience credit for being literate. In 'A Coy Decoy', I was pleasantly surprised to see references to 'The Yearling' and 'For Whom the Bell Tolls', best-selling books which (as of 1941) hadn't yet been filmed.
'A Coy Decoy' gets its title from a plot development here which wasn't used in the remake: the wolf uses a clockwork female duck to entice Daffy. This is a running theme in many Clampett cartoons, continuing right into his 'Beany and Cecil' era: a male protagonist is lured by an artificial female; either a male in disguise, or else a mechanical surrogate (a fembot?). Clampett seemed reluctant to put genuine female characters into his toons.
There's a nice tinkling music-box motif for the she-duck (Warners cartoons almost always had excellent music tracks), and there's a cheeky final gag, one of Clampett's less obvious sexual entendres. That final gag is the only place where this cartoon surpasses its remake 'Book Revue', which is superior all down the line until it ends in a weak 'cissy' joke (another of Clampett's predilections). I'll rate 'A Coy Decoy' five points out of 10. Take out that unnecessary racist joke, and I might bump it up to six.