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Book Revue
Looney Tunes series
Daffy Duck and Little Red Riding Hood during the scat-singing scene in front of Gran'Ma's House
Directed by	Robert Clampett
Story by	Warren Foster
Voices by	Mel Blanc Sara Berner
Music by	Carl Stalling
Produced by	Edward Selzer
Studio	Warner Bros. Pictures
Distributed by	Warner Bros. Pictures
Release date	1946
Format	Technicolor, 7 minutes
Language	English
IMDb page

Book Revue (later re-issued as Book Review) is a 1945 Looney Tunes cartoon short featuring Daffy Duck, released in 1946. It is directed by Robert Clampett, written by Warren Foster and scored by Carl Stalling. An uncredited Mel Blanc and Sara Berner provided the voices. The title is a pun, as a Revue is a variety show, while a Review is an evaluation of an artwork.

The loosely-drawn plot was a send-up of Warner Brothers' own "books come to life" cartoons of the type that frequently appeared under the Merrie Melodies banner. In fact, Book Revue did such a masterful job at lampooning the studio's own genre that Warner Brothers never made another. The short started out in the same, pastoral "after midnight at a closed bookstore" fashion of previous versions to the strains of Moonlight Sonata. The storefront is realistic, suggesting it was rotoscoped. Initially the cartoon has a serious feel to it. Then, when an inebriated "cuckoo bird" pops out of a cuckoo clock to announce the arrival of midnight (and signaling the "cuckoo" activities to follow), the cartoon's first lampoon and pun appears, namely a book cover called "COMPLETE WORKS of Shakespeare". The title is taken quite literally; Shakespeare is shown in silhouette while his "works" are clockwork mechanicals (along with old-fashioned "stop" and "go" traffic signals) set to the "ninety years without slumbering, tick-tock, tick-tock" portion of My Grandfather's Clock.

The cartoon immediately cuts to a book titled Young Man with a Horn upon which a pastel-colored caricature of Harry James breaks loose with a jazz trumpet obbligato similar to James' You Made Me Love You which instead resolves into the standard, It Had to Be You. The song is counterpoint to a striptease about to begin on the cover of a book called Cherokee Strip. Book covers with the names of The Whistler and The Sea Wolf show their characters shouting and whistling at the off-screen action. (The Sea Wolf's howl segués into a sentence, sometimes rendered as "Howwwww old is she?" but that phrasing is unclear, perhaps purposely.) The now-panting Shakespeare silhouette's inner workings explode in a shower of gears and clocksprings.

The catcalls continue with a purple and orange-clad Henry VIII howling like a wolf and then barking like a seal. The cartoon then falls back on an old Warner Brothers cliché (from the catchphrase of the popular radio program, The Aldrich Family) in which the king's "mother" calls out, "Hen-REEEE! Henry the Eighth!" "Coming, mother!" is the king's cracking-voice reply, and he runs to the book cover where Mother waits. As she begins to spank her "naughty boy", a new singing voice and caricature appear, namely that of Frank Sinatra. The gray, blanketed, emaciated character, overemphasizing Sinatra's real-life physique, enters the cartoon on the cover of a book called The Voice in the Wilderness. A large, male orderly pushes the Sinatra character across the screen in a wheelchair... one with a ribbon microphone into which he begins to croon the lyrics of It Had to be You.

Female characters, including Henry's mother, bobby-socked versions of Little Women and even Whistler's Mother and Mother Goose (and her hatchling) begin to whistle and catcall (just as the men did for Cherokee Strip), and swoon and faint at the sound of Sinatra's voice, each of them uttering the catchphrase "Fraaankie!" before passing out.

Next, Book Revue breaks loose with a hyperactive swing version of It Had To Be You played by book cover caricatures of Gene Krupa (his drumset is labeled "GK"), Benny Goodman (as "The Pie-Eyed Piper"; some mice cheer, "Yeah, Benny!") and Tommy Dorsey who join in with the Harry James caricature. Annoyed by the revelry, Daffy Duck steps out of the cover of a Looney Tunes comic book (at which moment a sharp-eyed viewer might spot in the background a book by "Ann Anonymous" titled The Invisible Man: A Biography of Robert Clampett), dons a zoot suit and curly, blond wig, shouts for the celebration to halt from in front of a book cover called Danny Boy and launches into a Russian-accented imitation of Danny Kaye, saying "phooey" to jazz and swing and instead reminiscing about his "native willage" and "the happy peoples sitting on their balalaikas, playing their samovars" (misusing those two Russian terms). The quiet doesn't last for long as Daffy launches into a wild, short version of La Cucaracha. This short segment has a plain background, suggesting it was cartooned separately and inserted tentatively, possibly due to some slight innuendos Daffy makes about a girl named "Cucaracha", parodying Lucky Strike cigarette ads: "so round, so firm, so fully packed, so easy on the draw!" Daffy then returns to the fake Russian accent and sings, Carolina In The Morning ("nothing could be feener than to be in Caroleena...") while teasing the Big Bad Wolf, who at this point is still in the window of "Gran'Ma's House". A Little Red Riding Hood based on Margaret O'Brien appears; when she does, Daffy Duck launches into a scat to warn her off...later chewing on her leg for emphasis. A full-throated scream by Red Riding Hood isn't aimed at Daffy Duck but instead at the Wolf who, in turn, is now outside the house and is sprinkling salt and pepper on Daffy's leg. In perhaps the most outrageous double-take in animation history, Daffy turns into a giant eyeball - complete with lashes and blood vessels - when first coming face-to-face with the Wolf before also screaming, and running for his life.

A chase between the Wolf and Daffy Duck ensues, but the Wolf is captured by the "long arm of the law" where he is sentenced to life, as in Life Magazine. He escapes, only to be tripped up by the gigantic nose of Jimmy Durante which nearly causes him to fall along the cover of a book called Skid Row into Dante's Inferno. The Wolf manages to scramble to the top of the book cover, but the Sinatra caricature reappears, held in the orderly's hands as if he were a doll. The Wolf swoons at the sound of "Frankie", just as the female characters did, and skids head first into the inferno. As the book cover characters loudly celebrate to a swinging Carolina In The Morning, the Wolf makes one final appearance to shout, "Stop that dancing up there...ya thillies!" [the lisping delivery of "sillies" caricatures Joe Besser, a popular comedian of the time]. Clampett's famous "bee-yoop!" vocalization ends the cartoon on a sort of "shaggy dog" note.

• The Wolf's final shout was the actual title of a song (less the lisped "sillies" part) by Harry "The Hipster" Gibson which he recorded in 1944.
• Later releases of the short had the title card replaced with Warner Brothers' "Blue Ribbon" title card on which the title was misspelled (see above). The original title card has since been located and the fully restored short can be seen on the Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Vol. 2 four-DVD box set and the Looney Tunes Spotlight Collection: Vol 2 two-DVD set.
• In 1994 it was voted #45 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members of the animation field.
• In one episode of Animaniacs Yakko Wakko and Dot held a Video Review after being released in a videostore. Just like the books, they run in and out of films and mingled with movie characters.
• In one segment of the Tiny Toon Adventures episode "Inside Plucky Duck", Plucky performs Daffy's giant eye double-take (dubbed "a Clampett Corneal Catastrophe"), only to be stuck in eye form, unable to "de-take" until the segment's end.
• Most of the ostensible "book" titles in this cartoon are actually the titles of contemporary magazines or movies while some of the more surreal backgrounds, particularly those in the scat-singing scene, apparently used actual newsprint. Even Dante's Inferno was the title of a film released a few years earlier by 20th Century-Fox. Either the gag writers at Warners didn't read many books, or they didn't trust their audience to have much knowledge of literature.

• The part where Daffy is being chased by the Wolf through "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is edited out on Cartoon Network (except for when it was shown on "The Bob Clampett Show").^{[citation needed]}
• When aired on The WB, Daffy's line about La Cucharacha, "So round, so firm, so fully packed, so easy on the draw" was cut (possibly because of its sexual innuendo, though this line is actually one of the taglines for Lucky Strike cigarettes).^{[citation needed]}

• IMDb entry for Book Revue
• List of the "50 Greatest Cartoons of All Time"