The Great Piggy Bank Robbery
The Great Piggy Bank Robbery is a 1946 Warner Bros. "Looney Tunes" theatrical cartoon directed by Bob Clampett. The cartoon was released on July 20, 1946, and stars Daffy Duck. The short is Clampett's penultimate Warner cartoon, produced shortly before he left the studio. Plot. On a farm, Daffy awaits his new Dick Tracy comic book to the tune of Raymond Scott's song "Powerhouse". The mailman then arrives, delivering the comic book. To the tune of Franz von Suppé's "Poet and Peasant" overture, he sprints to a corner of the farm and  begins reading it, noting how much he "love(s) that man!." At one point in this issue, Dick Tracy is fighting Noodlenose. Imagining what it would be like to be Dick Tracy, he knocks himself out with his own fist. While unconscious, he dreams that he is "Duck Twacy, the famous de-tec-a-tive." He dismisses a series of calls asking about stolen piggy banks as too inconsequential for him, suggesting that the callers had been too reckless, until he finds that his own piggy bank has been stolen from his safe. He decides to call Duck Twacy (at one  point having a phone conversation with himself) before he realizes he himself is Duck Twacy. He calls a taxi to follow a car without him, just to keep the villains on their toes. Daffy's search leads him to cross paths with Sherlock Holmes, then onto a streetcar (driven by a mustachioed Porky Pig in a silent cameo) leading to the gangsters' not-so-secret hideout. He falls through a trapdoor when he rings the doorbell, and follows footprints, even climbing up a wall (which makes him think that the culprit might be the Human Fly) to a mousehole. He  concludes that the culprit is "Mouse Man," demanding, "Come out of there, you rat!"—whereupon a huge, muscular, and angry mouse emerges, and towers over him. Gulping in fear, Daffy timidly tells him to go back in again, and so he does. He runs away, but is surrounded by all the dangerous criminals in town (many of which are parodies of Dick Tracy's rogues gallery), and consisting of: ...and a host of other unnamed grotesque criminals. He then, with a certain lack of tactical sense declares ""You're all under arrest!"" The villains then roar at Daffy and the chase  begins. In one sequence, the villains are seen using well-known Dick Tracy villain Flattop's head as an airstrip with planes taking off. When Daffy is trapped against a wall, Rubberhead ""rubs him out"" with his eraser head, but Daffy immediately reappears. Pumpkinhead moves in with submachine guns blazing. Daffy tosses a hand grenade directly to Pumpkinhead and he becomes a stack of pumpkin pies. As most of the villains jump to trap him in a closet, Daffy squirms out, slams the door shut on them, and eradicates the group with sustained fire from a Tommy gun. He opens  the door, and the bullet-riddled bodies fall like dominoes. Neon Noodle (who survived because he is a mere neon outline with no physical "center" for Daffy to shoot) sneaks up on Daffy and tries to strangle him. Daffy defeats him by turning him into a neon sign that reads "Eat at Joe's" (a standard WB cartoon gag). Daffy then finds the missing piggy banks, including his own. He begins to kiss his bank but, since he is dreaming, he does not realize that he is on the farm again, kissing a real female pig. The plump-yet-curvaceous  pig is rather smitten by Daffy since she believes that he is trying to woo her with the barrage of smooches which he plants all over her face. He wraps up his kisses with a peck to the cute pig's nose. In an elegant female voice, she asks, "Shall we dance?" and lovingly kisses him right on the mouth. Now wide awake, Daffy disgustedly wipes away the kiss and runs away. The lady pig then remarks, ""I love that duck!"," and laughs. Reception. Animation historian Steve Schneider writes, "Banners and bouquets to the great Bob C. for this still -astonishing melange of ultra-silliness and film noir. He creates a realm where stylizations feed into the fugue states so beloved of the director, where animation's capacity for compressing and distending space and time (and bodies!) is stunningly realized, where terror and hilarity are shown to be natural bedmates, and where the whacked-out visions come so fast and thick that the thing seems to anticipate MTV by forty years." Legacy. Animation historian Steve Schneider said of this picture: Animator John Kricfalusi (creator of Ren and Stimpy) called "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery" his favorite cartoon: "I saw this  thing and it completely changed my life, I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever seen, and I still think it is." "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery" was the first of several cartoons in which Daffy Duck would do a parody of a well-known character, but the only one in which he was actually competent. In other take-offs, such as "The Scarlet Pumpernickel", he was somewhat buffoonish, though still able to intimidate the villains. But, in later stories such as "Stuporduck", "Boston Quackie", "Robin Hood Daffy" and "Deduce, You Say?" (in which he played "Doorlock Holmes ), Daffy was hopelessly outmatched. In 1994, it was voted No. 16 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members of the animation field.