Rating:
I confess I was sorely afraid that Bah, HumDuck! A Looney Tunes Christmas would be untrue to its source material. Not to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—it’s been adapted enough times and can handle a few deviations from the script. No, I worried this would besmirch the name of Looney Tunes by being only a pale imitation of the classic Warner Bros. cartoons we all love so much.

I’m pleased to report that those fears were wholly unfounded. This little movie was just great.

The story does play a little fast and loose with the specifics of A Christmas Carol, but that’s just fine; fast and loose is the very essence of Looney Tunes. Here Daffy Duck is the cruel but staggeringly wealthy owner of a department store. He forces his employees—including his forever put-upon assistant manager Porky Pig—to work extra long hours with no overtime, heaps abuse on everyone he sees and, of course, hates holidays.

That kind of miser is just asking for a haunting and that’s what he gets, first in the form of the ghost of Sylvester the cat, the “unscrupulous CEO” who was Daffy Duck’s idol. That’s right, Sylvester is dead. Squashed by a forklift, in fact.

Sylvester warns Daffy about the three ghosts to come, and they arrive in short order. The Ghost of Christmas Past is actually two ghosts: Granny and Tweety. (And is that June Foray, still kickin’ ass as the voice of Granny? You’d better believe it.) They show Daffy a scene from his childhood in an orphanage and have barely arrived before they hand him off to the Ghost of Christmas Present, a role filled by Yosemite Sam.

Sam shows Daffy how miserable he’s made Christmas for his employees. Marvin the Martian is desperately homesick but can’t go to his family on Mars because he has to work. Porky can’t buy his sweet little girl the Pretty Pudgy Piggy doll she wants because Daffy pays him such a pittance.

Filling out the rest of the spectral cast is Taz in the robes of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. He shows Daffy the requisite grim vision of the future, where Daffy dies alone and unloved on Christmas. (At least Porky’s little daughter doesn’t die. In fact, in this telling of the tale the child isn’t even sick.)

So it’s true to the spirit if not the details of Dickens’ novel. But it’s also tru to the spirit of the great Looney Tunes cartoons that came before it. All your favorite starring characters appear here, as do just about every other Looney Tune you can name, such as Pete Puma, Hubie and Bert, and Gossamer.

Gossamer’s this one

Gags both verbal and visual fill every minute of the cartoon. And not just attempts at gags. Genuine, high quality cartoon humor that had me laughing aloud many times. (One in particular, where Daffy falls out of a window and lands head-first on a fire hydrant, had me laughing so loud and hard I thought I’d have an infarction.)

From an animation standpoint, too, this is just right. The frantic, crazy action is all there and so too are the hilarious subtle eye movements and nose twitches of the sort that marked the greatest work of Chuck Jones.

That’s right, comparison to the cartoons of Chuck Jones. That’s high praise indeed.

The movie tells a can’t miss-story, is full of great gags, and moves along at a fair clip, never allowing itself to sag. (The pacing is at times a touch more subdued than in the cartoons of old, but it’s never slow—and, after all, it does run five times as long as “Duck Amuck” so you’ve gotta have room to breathe.)

Though released to DVD in 2006, this was the first time I’d seen or even heard of Bah, HumDuck! A Looney Tunes Christmas. After this one viewing I’ve fallen totally in love, and will give the movie a prominent, honored place in my Christmas viewing schedule every year. So too should you.

That’s all, folks.

If You Hated This, You Will Also Totally Hate:

• Mickey’s Christmas Carol
• Tom and Jerry: A Nutcracker Tale
• Mickey’s Once Upon a Christmas
• Scrooged
• Fun and Fancy Free