Edgar Allan Pooh
. . . is the susceptibility to be easily bamboozled. Non-Americans are particularly adept at hoodwinking the soft majority of U.S. citizens, who fancy themselves to be bleeding hearts, eager to turn the other ventricle. Aliens aggressively abuse the feckless fellowship of this ilk, who are eager to give them their last cookie, as well as their tot's final bottle of milk, and the key to the family safety deposit box WITHOUT even being asked! Elmer Fudd is the title character of A PEST IN THE HOUSE. As this Warner Bros. animated short opens, the narrator implicitly designates Daffy Duck as an unqualified Alien Hotel Hiree, signed on to save Upper Management a few bucks by not paying a living wage to a Genuine American Citizen. It's clear that Daffy actually is a Professional Disrupter--an Agitator out to sabotage the "Gland Hotel." This loud-mouth saboteur wages a Reign of Terror against one of the Gland's last few paying customers. Tortured to the end of his rope through sleep deprivation, this patron rightly punches out Daffy's mealy-mouthed enabler--Elmer Fudd--six times. Totally inept in his supervisor's role, Fudd deserves worse. Just before I played A PEST IN THE HOUSE, I heard Ted Cruz explain during CNN's Wisconsin "Town Hall Meeting" exactly WHY America cannot coddle such pests any longer. Warner just recognized the problem 69 years before Ted did.
utgard14
Elmer's the manager of a hotel and Daffy's the bellboy. A tired (and very large) businessman checks in and makes it very clear to Elmer that he needs his rest and if anyone disturbs him, Elmer will suffer the consequences. So Daffy spends the entirety of the short doing one thing after another that disturbs the poor man. Elmer gets the crap beat out of him repeatedly because of Daffy's actions. Fun Elmer & Daffy cartoon, with Daffy as annoying as possible. Several amusing gags and lines. Great voice work from Arthur Q. Bryan and Mel Blanc. Nice animation with lovely colors. The music is lively and whimsical. How much you'll like this probably depends on how much you like earlier Daffy when he was all about being wacky and zany.
ccthemovieman-1
Daffy the bellhop drives a customer batty. He's a big goon who only wants one thing: peace and quiet at the hotel so he can get some sleep. He tells the desk clerk (Elmer Fudd) that if he doesn't get it, he'll punch him in the nose. "Likable chap, isn't he" asks Daffy to us, the audience. I guess that made it better to endure some guy, since he's pictured as a jerk, getting mentally tortured by our overzealous and crazy bellhop who makes life miserable for the man who wants "peace and quiet" a phrase Daffy uses six times in about 20 seconds. Yeah, this duck could drive anyone crazy! The guy's suite number is 666, too, which is an omen of things to come. Actually, Daffy is trying to help the guy. He's not nasty in here, just ignorant.Daffy ruins the customer but poor Elmer pays the price. The gags in this one are so-so and our duck friend is so loud and obnoxious he was irritating. Justice was not served in the end, either.
Lee Eisenberg
At face value, "A Pest in the House" looks like the average wacky Looney Tunes cartoon, as bellboy Daffy Duck keeps awaking a sleepy guest who proceeds to punch clerk Elmer Fudd in the nose. But I notice something else. At the beginning, the narrator says that there was a labor shortage, so places would hire anyone...or anything (at which point we meet that famously loony member of the genus Anas*). This cartoon was released in 1947, the year of the Taft-Hartley Act. The Taft-Hartley Act cut off unions' power. Therefore, not only would a labor shortage have made sense, but one could say that they were hiring non-union labor in the form of Daffy Duck.OK, I've gone irrevocably overboard in trying to analyze this cartoon. I'm sure that in reality, it was just intended as zany entertainment to get shown right before a feature film (and it is really funny). So check it out. And the next time that the phone rings, don't answer; it might be a fist (although in this age of text-messaging cell phones, we're probably safe).*Anas is the genus to which ducks belong.PS: the guest looks a little bit like Arthur Q. Bryan, who provided Elmer Fudd's voice. I don't know whether or not that was just a coincidence.
AD
