Egghead (in a voice imitating radio comic Joe Penner) is annoyed by a silhouetted man in the theater audience (Tedd Pierce) who refuses to sit down. After he sits down twice and finally gets shot by Egghead when he will not stay down, out comes Daffy Duck biting his nose. While fighting, a tortoise (imitating radio comic Parkyakarkus) comes and tries to give Daffy and Egghead new weapons. When the tortoise goes away, Egghead uses his real gun and Daffy tries to make him shoot the apple on his head. Egghead misses every time, so Daffy puts a blind sign, a cup of pencils, and disguise glasses on Egghead. Daffy then sings a song (considered semi-obligatory for a Merrie Melodies cartoon at the time), and when he concludes, his own reflection in the water surfaces in three dimension and shakes his hand before they swim away together.
Later, Egghead finally manages to capture Daffy by shooting a pair of gloves from his gun, knocking Daffy out and allowing Egghead to place him in a net. Just as Egghead celebrates, a duck from the mental ward (seemingly his reflective doppelgänger from the earlier scene) comes to claim Daffy. He thanks Egghead for helping to catch Daffy, and tells him that Daffy is 100 percent nuts. "Yeah?", Egghead asks. "Yeah!", answers the duck warden. At that moment, both he and Daffy beat Egghead up before woohoo-ing out into the distance. Egghead becomes fed up with the antics and decides to join them as the cartoon ends.
According to the copyright date in the cartoon's original opening title cards from 1937 and in the Blue Ribbon Merrie Melodies reissued opening title cards from 1946, this cartoon began production in 1937. But this was released in theaters on January 1, 1938.
Daffy Duck & Egghead features the early, zany version of Daffy Duck, who spends the film harassing Egghead (making his second appearance in this cartoon as a hunter after making his first appearing Egghead Rides Again), and also marking the second appearance of Daffy Duck (after Porky's Duck Hunt), his first in color, and first where he is given his current name. It includes a set-piece song-and-dance number by Daffy, doing his own variation of "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down" (which had recently become the theme for Looney Tunes).[5]
Some scenes were reused from the previous Looney Tunes cartoon Porky's Duck Hunt, from Daffy nipping the hunter's nose, to his whooping and hollering as he bounced in and out of the water.
This cartoon was re-released into the Blue Ribbon Merrie Melodies program on April 20, 1946. The original opening, credits, and closing title cards were found and restored with the release of the third volume of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection in 2005. However, the audio used for the remastering of this short was taken from the European Turner "dubbed version", hence why the ending rendition of "Merrily We Roll Along" is incorrect.
Censorship
When the short was aired in the United States during the 1990s and 2000s on Cartoon Network, Boomerang and The WB, the scene in which Egghead kills the silhouetted audience member was cut.[6]
^Scott, Keith (2022). Cartoon Voices from the Golden Age, 1930-70. BearManor Media. p. 27. ISBN979-8-88771-010-5.
^Beck, Jerry; Friedwald, Will (1989). Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons. Henry Holt and Co. p. 66. ISBN0-8050-0894-2.
