Duck Dodgers in CE3K
Updated: 2 days ago
As I got to know Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I fixated on a wonderful scene that used a classic Looney Tunes cartoon, Duck Dodgers and the Twenty-Fourth-and-a-Half Century, playing against action in the film.
The toon works beautifully behind Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) waking up in his den, presumably on a Saturday morning after his argument with his wife, where his little daughter is watching TV across the room ("Are you going to yell at me?"). As Roy emerges from sleep, he rips the top from a clay mountain that he has obsessively grafted onto his toy train landscape that dominates the room, and he has an epiphany. Carl Stalling's cartoon music underscores Roy's revelation. This is what he has been seeking since his recent UFO encounter.
But the continuity of the cartoon that we see on the Neary family TV is, however, not how the music plays in the original cartoon.
In the Neary den, the cartoon plays in perfect musical counterpoint to Roy's actions. This is an echo of a scene in The Sugarland Express where Spielberg played a Road Runner cartoon of Wile E. Coyote plunging from a cliff to foreshadow doom in a tense dramatic scene. The cartoon music in Close Encounters mocks Roy as he wakes, and then, as he has his cosmic revelation, finally recognizing the now-flattened mountaintop as the implanted vision he has been clawing towards, Carl Stalling sweeps him up in a grand operatic reveal. It’s magic.
From what I can tell, to make that diegetic musical underscore work, Spielberg's film editor Michael Khan pieced the cartoon music together from five fragments.
These play on Neary's TV as follows:
(1) Daffy lands on Planet X.
(2) He pulls out the Acme Ultimatum Deliverer.
(3) Porky Pig hands Marvin the Martian a sizzling stick of dynamite.
(4) Daffy exclaims, "That's the last straw..." building to:
(5) The planet explodes.
In the 1953 cartoon, these scenes play in different order. Thus, this was an editorial creation. But it was not always the plan.
On La-La Land Records' 45th anniversary release of the soundtrack, we can hear how John Williams recorded a special musical accompaniment for this scene (called 'Lava Flow'). I guess the idea was that this Stalling-esque recreation was to help the cartoon background music flow more musically. But, to my ears, the final film mix mostly uses parts of Stalling's score, especially for the final reveal of Roy's decapitated mountain. That's real Daffy Duck music, re-shaped and choreographed against the action.
It's a marvelous piece of editing and cinematic counterpoint.
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