Yakky Doodle in Foxy Proxy

Produced and Directed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera.
Credits: Animation – Dick Lundy, Layout – Dan Noonan, Backgrounds – Art Lozzi, Written by Mike Maltese, Story Director – Paul Sommer, Titles – Art Goble, Production Supervision – Howard Hanson.
Voice Cast: Yakky Doodle – Jimmy Weldon, Fibber Fox, Fuzzby, Psychiatrist – Daws Butler.
Music: Hoyt Curtin.
Episode: Production R-49.
Copyright 1961 by Hanna-Barbera Productions.
Plot: Fibber Fox tries to eat Yakky by pretending to be his mommy but starts acting like his real mommy.

How many times did Sylvester try to lure Tweety into a pot or a pan by playing some kind of game? And wasn’t there a Warner Bros. cartoon where a dog was driven nuts by sadistic gophers and started flying like a bird?

Well, these ideas found a home in the Yakky Doodle cartoon Foxy Proxy. Unlike Gopher Broke, this cartoon isn’t creepy. It’s just silly. Fibber Fox tells a psychiatrist at the start of the cartoon that he enjoys being a fox, we have a flashback where the charms (?) of Yakky turn him into a protective mother type, then return to the psychiatrist’s couch where he “has an irresistible urge to fly south for the winter,” starts quacking and flies south, joined by Yakky to end the cartoon.



Writer Mike Maltese added an interference character about two-thirds of the way through, a green fox named Fuzzby who keeps waiting for the now-reluctant Fibber to eat Yakky, grabs the duck, swallows him, then is choked into spitting him out (off-camera) by the “mommy dear” fox. (Warners used this hungry third-character concept, too, with Sam the orange cat in the Tweety cartoons, as well as other animated shorts).

Yakky’s a little more tolerable in this cartoon. His “I’m an orphan. I don’t have a momma” isn’t delivered tearfully or pathetically. And he’s pretty naïve. When he plays “cold snack” with Fibber (similar to the “sandwich” game Sylvester once played with Tweety), Yakky has no clue the fox really wants to eat him. “Oh, you’re the nicest, best-est momma I ever had,” says the duck. “I love you, momma.” Such dialogue could be wretch-inducing, but Jimmy Weldon says it with such sincerity, and Daws Butler puts just the right amount of emotion into Fibber’s response to the audience (“He loves me”) that it comes across well. Daws, of course, was a master at dialogue. Weldon did a fine job, too, though it’s no secret I dislike the Yakky character.



Maltese didn’t supply much witty dialogue; he seemed to save that for Snagglepuss. However, he gave Fibber “You close your eyes and count to bordelaise. I mean, uh, that’s French for ‘100’,” and “I’ve done sneakier things in my day but, somehow, I just can’t remember what they were.” Fibber is, by far, my favourite character in the Yakky cartoons. Maltese also tossed in a standard pepper/sneeze gag.

Dick Lundy’s animation is, sad to say, little more than serviceable. By 1961, even mildly-outrageous takes were out for the most part in cartoons, especially on television.

Art Lozzi, as usually, provides some inspired backgrounds.



And Lozzi seems to like green in this cartoon.



The opening shot of the psychiatric hospital. See the stylised cars.



There’s plenty of medium up-tempo music from Hoyt Curtin’s tracking library (Touché Turtle, Flintstones) to keep the atmosphere of the cartoon happy.