From the late 70s onward, for whatever reason, no one at the animation department of Warner Bros. seemed to be all that interested in coming up with a new Looney Tunes special that incorporated all-new footage to tell one half-hour story. The specials were either clip shows, with about five minutes of new footage and about twenty newly recorded lines from Mel Blanc to wrap around numerous clips from the classic theatrical releases from the 40s through the 60s, or presented three brand-new shorts, which would be inserted into the rotation of The Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner Show (and later, The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show).
The two Looney Tunes Thanksgiving specials, neither of which have much to do with Thanksgiving, are both clip shows, though the second, Daffy Duck's Thanks-For-Giving Special, also included the debut of a brand new short.
The first special to debut, Bugs Bunny's Thanksgiving Diet, was directed by David Detiege, an associate of Friz Freleng. The premise was that Bugs had, rather inexplicitly, become a diet doctor, and his new patient was Millicent, a large, yellow rabbit with an Eastern European accent who had previously appeared only in Robert McKimson's largely forgettable 1957 short "Rabbit Romeo". Twenty-one years later, she needs Bugs to help her lose weight. To accomplish this, he tells her stories that set up various clips.
While McKimson is represented by the Tasmanian Devil short "Bedeviled Rabbit", and Chuck Jones via clips of several Coyote/Roadrunner shorts, much of the special is made up of Freleng's output, most prominently via the Yosemite Sam short "Rabbit Every Monday" and the Sylvester short "Canned Feud". The special was fine for what it was, but like all clip shows, it was a bit pointless. After all, all the shorts shown would eventually pop up in the Saturday morning rotation, so why only show brief clips?
Two years later, Jones got to make his own Thanksgiving special, with the focus squarely on Daffy. If Thanksgiving Diet's connection to the holiday was rather tenuous, Daffy Duck's Thanks-For-Giving Special was almost non-existent. In the cold open, Daffy discusses how he wants to turn Thanksgiving into a day when people honor him, but that premise is all largely dumped after the first commercial.
The rest of the special has Daffy trying to convince the studio's boss to let him star in a dramatic role, specifically the one in the script he had brought, for "Duck Dodgers and the Return of the 24 1/2th Century", a sequel to Jones's classic sci-fi spoof from 1953. We do eventually see the short in its entirety, of course, but first, we see clips from two other of Jones's Daffy films, 1958's classic "Robin Hood Daffy" and the nearly as classic 1951 Western spoof "Drip-Along Daffy". For some reason, we also have to sit though part of Freleng's rather misogynistic 1950 short "His Bitter Half", in which Daffy's dream of a life of leisure is shattered by his domineering new wife and her obnoxious brat of a son. The (at the time) new short is amusing enough, as Daffy's Duck Dodgers and Porky's space cadet encounter Marvin the Martian on a distant planet. I'd rather have watched the original short, though.
The odd thing about Thanks-For-Giving is, while the short is new, the wrap-around material is not. It's pretty much lifted whole from Jones's "The Scarlet Pumpernickel", with new dialogue recorded. Thanks to "Duck Dodgers", Thanks-For-Giving has more new footage than Thanksgiving Diet, but it employs it in odder ways.
To be honest, there's not really a good reason to watch either special. The clips are funny, but there are generally much easier ways these days to see the original shorts in whole. For Looney Tunes fans, that's what they should be doing, rather than seeing them parceled out in limited batches.
Next time: The most popular strip of the 80s closes out the decade with Thanksgiving.
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