Daffy Duck

"You're despicable!"

- Daffy Duck's famous catchphrase.

Daffy Duck is the deuteragonist of the Looney Tunes franchise. He has been a regular cast of the mainstream heroes of Looney Tunes, but he is not always a hero, he is more accurately termed as an anti-hero and at times can even become a leading villain.

Daffy can be credited with some rather cruel and unusual incidents throughout his career and has antagonized several notable heroes, such as Bugs Bunny and Speedy Gonzales. It could be argued that the same holds true for all Looney Tunes characters, as, with the exception of 100% good Porky Pig and 100% villainous Yosemite Sam (though note that villainous does not necessarily mean evil) all of them have been consistently portrayed as anti-heroes or anti-villains.

However, Daffy Duck has gone one step further than Bugs Bunny or Foghorn Leghorn and actually passed from the occasional anti-hero to the occasional villain as he is often portrayed as a selfish, mean-spirited, attention-stealing braggart and mostly as a greedy con-artist who craves for fame and riches and who does not really care about honesty. He was used to be crazy and a screwball. His designated victim is the gullible Porky Pig, whom he tricks in selling him many useless things, often with the goal of causing him troubles so that he could sell him a more expensive and not more useful "remedy."

For some examples in the cartoon Well Worn Daffy, Daffy's mean-spiritedness is taken to it's extremes and he outright denies a group of mice access to desperately needed water out of sheer malice: this is without a doubt one of the most blatantly cruel things that Daffy has done (and, to be fair, is slightly out of a character). He also hates Bugs Bunny and in the cartoon Rabbit Fire, Daffy tried to get Bugs killed by Elmer Fudd.

It should still be remembered that, while Daffy may be mostly evil, he has done plenty of heroic acts which have shown that he has a good side to him. In Duck Dodgers, for example, he is always the hero. An idiot hero, but still certainly not an anti-hero (there is one exception, see below).

Bugs Bunny Rabbit Rampage
Believe it or not, Daffy Duck is featured as the final boss and the main antagonist of the video-game Bugs Bunny Rabbit Rampage - in this version of events, Daffy has taken his rivalry with Bugs to a whole new level and gained the power of the artist in a similar fashion to Elmer Fudd during a famous Looney Tunes cartoon.

Using his newfound powers, Daffy Duck causes all manner of mischief for Bugs Bunny, but is ultimately resigned to his usual defeat at the hands of his rival.

It is very likely that Daffy Duck was also trying to exact revenge on Bugs Bunny for pulling a similar trick on him in the Looney Tunes cartoon "Duck Amuck".

Duck Dodgers
In Duck Dodgers, Daffy Duck (aka Duck Dodgers) serves to protect the galaxy alongside Porky Pig (aka The Cadet) from Marvin The Martian.

While still lazy, dimwitted and sometimes coward, Daffy maintains a heroic status on that series, the only exception occurring on a two-part episode in which he sabotages a peace treaty to prevent losing his job, an act for which the Cadet takes the blame. Dodgers later regrets the sabotage, saves the Cadet from prison and publicly admits his guilt.

Bah, Humduck! A Looney Tunes Christmas
On that TV special adapted from A Christmas Carol, Daffy plays the role of the greedy, heartless and abusive owner of a mega-store who changes his behavior and becomes a generous fellow after being visited by three spirits on the Christmas Eve night; as happened with Ebenezer Scrooge in the original story.

The Looney Tunes Show


"Sometimes you have to treat others wrong to treat yourself right."

- Daffy in "We're in Big Truffle".

Daffy returns as a main character in this 2011 spin-off of the Looney Tunes. Although mostly being a neutral character, he has had some villainous roles.

Villainous Roles

 * The most notable example is "The Float", where he bankrupts Porky Pig by lying about a kidney transplant just to buy a yacht.
 * In "Members Only", he uses Walter Bunny's membership number to get into a club.
 * He commits a littering crime in "Jailbird and Jailbunny" by throwing a tin can into the Grand Canyon.
 * In "Off Duty Cop", he impersonates his favorite actor and arrests innocent people doing it.
 * He also accuses several of his neighbors for stealing his newspaper in "Newspaper Thief".
 * In "The Shelf", after being invited to stay with Porky (due to his home needing renovations), he quickly takes advantage of Porky's hospitality, turning him into his butler and making him wait on him hand and foot to the point where he verbally and even physically abuses him if he gets his outrageous demands wrong.
 * In "Customer Service", he becomes the supervisor of a cable company and fires the other employees for no reason. He redeems himself by firing Cecil Turtle, the main antagonist of the episode. Daffy himself is then fired for firing everyone else.
 * He develops a hatred against Porky in "French Fries" for eating fries that were allegedly for him. Soon he finds out the fries were actually for the table. After this, however, he becomes a total hypocrite by eating Porky's pizza.
 * In Best Friends Redux, he grows jealous of Bugs' former best friend Rodney. So he time travels to ensure the two never met, only to realize he had erased Bugs' memory of him. Thus Daffy fixes his mistake to restore his friendship with Bugs, learning a valuable lesson along the way.

However, this is balanced out with more positive portrayals, such as in "Bobcats on Three" where he goes out of his way to help a children's water polo team win. "Best Friends" where he goes to extreme lengths to try and prove he's good friend to Bugs (their rivalry turned down to more of a competing friendship, that Daffy always loses, in this adaptation). Perhaps the best example is "We're in a Big Truffle" where he willingly gives up a fortune to save Porky. These traits prevent him from ever becoming the villain of the series.

Trivia

 * Daffy's earlier appearances in the cartoons were much more different than in later cartoons. In the late 30's and early 40's, he was a crazy duck who jumped around and yelled "Whoo-whoo-whoo-whoo-whoo-whoo!!!". In the late 40's and 50's, however, director Chuck Jones made him more greedy and stupid and he became more villainous. During the 60's, he also became the archenemy of Speedy Gonzales.