An Oral History of ‘Duck Dodgers,’ Cartoon Network’s Space-Age Looney Tunes Show

‘Duck Dodgers’ Despicably Long Development Period

Tony Cervone, Co-Creator and Co-Showrunner of Duck Dodgers: Spike and I have always had a connection to Chuck Jones. He was our favorite Looney Tunes director and, of course, we both had a connection to Duck Dodgers and the 24½th Century. We watched it a million times, and we felt that, even though it’s just six or seven minutes long, there was a whole universe in there that we could go and live in for a little while.

Spike Brandt, Co-Creator and Co-Showrunner of Duck Dodgers: One of the cool things is Duck Dodgers and the 24½th Century is part of that series of Daffy and Porky shorts where they are themselves, but they’re playing other characters, like The Scarlet Pumpernickel and Robin Hood Daffy.

Cervone: That’s why we always thought that Duck Dodgers is a role. Yes, that’s Daffy Duck playing Duck Dodgers, but Duck Dodgers is kind of his own guy. That’s why, even in the opening of our show, it says “Daffy Duck as Duck Dodgers.” That gave us a little bit of freedom and liberty to explore the world a little bit more.

That said, we talked about and pitched Duck Dodgers as a show for six years before it got made.

Brandt: In the late 1990s, Tony and I had been working on a would-be primetime show called The Daffy Duck Program. Ultimately, something that seemed like a sure thing sort of fizzled out and everything fell apart. But some of the characterization of Daffy from that version of the show filtered into what we developed as Duck Dodgers.

We said, “Hey, that thing is gone. What are we going to do?” We had worked on some other Duck Dodgers stuff. There was a 3D film in 1996 called Marvin the Martian in the Third Dimension made for theme parks. That wasn’t that far in the past when we started developing this as like, “Hey, Duck Dodgers could actually be a show.”

We began working on this in late 1997. We figured that Daffy is a great character and with Duck Dodgers we can tap into every science-fiction, Star Trek, Star Wars thing.

Cervone: But it wasn’t like we had this idea and then we made it. There were many at-bats and re-developments of the show before it got greenlit. First, it was developed as a TV series that went through a whole gamut of development. In that version, there was a third crew member — a female character named Sparky. That didn’t go through.

Brandt: Then there was a second TV show pitch where we brought in John McCann, and we added Lola Bunny to it because she was a popular character at that point. 

Cervone: Then we developed it as a feature film. We even made a fake trailer, a pencil test, for the movie with animator Dean Wellins. Big chunks of that pencil test footage would end up in the opening credits of the eventual series. 

Bob Bergen, Voice of Porky Pig as Eager Young Space Cadet: I remember getting a call from Spike or Tony not long after we did Space Jam. They said they wanted to do Duck Dodgers the movie, and they had me record Porky, Daffy and Marvin for a mock movie trailer, but it didn't sell.

Cervone: The feature idea fizzled. 

Brandt: As did a direct-to-video feature.

Cervone: Meanwhile, we developed a show for Kids WB that was kind of reinventing the Looney Tunes, which was very loud and purposefully a little obnoxious. That didn't get made either, but we had created another teaser for it. Then, producer Sander Schwartz said, “Why don’t you pitch that to Mike Lazzo, the head of Cartoon Network?” This Kids WB idea ran counter to all Cartoon Network sensibilities and we knew that, but we pitched it anyway and Mike Lazzo hated it. Then, Sam Register, who was a Cartoon Network executive at the time, entered the picture and said, “Let’s try something else.”

For Sam, Spike and I were developing this Green Lantern TV series, and Sam mentioned that Lazzo was looking for something with Marvin the Martian. We said, “Well, we have this” — referring to the trailer for the Duck Dodgers feature. We showed it to Sam, and he loved it. He literally grabbed the tape and ran down to Lazzo’s office. A little while later, Lazzo took us out to lunch and asked us, “What do you want to make, this Green Lantern show, or Duck Dodgers?” and, without hesitation, we both said, “Duck Dodgers!”

Exploring the ‘Duck Dodgers’ Universe

Cervone: Taking the original 1953 short and expanding it into a series, we knew that Dodgers and the Martian Commander would be adversaries. We knew that no one had really explored Mars that much, and we had ideas about it. We always liked the idea of the Martian Queen, and we liked the idea that Marvin is kind of an odd duck in his own society. He’s the only one who looks like that. They all have black, featureless bodies, but he’s the only guy with a bowling ball head. When we were designing them, we decided that the other Martians are these somewhat Roman-looking soldiers.

Brandt: The same thing with Dodgers. Like Tony said, Duck Dodgers is a role that Daffy Duck is playing, so there are some differences. 

Cervone: For example, there’s his relationship with Cadet. He’s awful to Cadet, but he is lost without Cadet and he knows that, so there’s a little more self-awareness to Dodgers than there is to Daffy. Dodgers also gets away with stuff, whereas with Daffy, it would blow up in his face. Dodgers sometimes succeeds, but Daffy doesn’t.

Bergen: Dodgers wasn’t Daffy, but I do think Eager Young Space Cadet was Porky. I played him exactly like Porky. He could have been dressed in a sport coat, red tie and no pants, and it would’ve been the same.

Brandt: The missions Dodgers would go on had to be more believable, too. In the original short, Duck Dodgers is sent out for a ridiculous reason: because there’s a shortage of shaving cream atoms. Our missions were important, they just should have gone to someone other than Dodgers. 

Speaking of which, by looking at the original short, Dodgers seemed to be working for something like the Federation in Star Trek. In the original cartoon, Dr. I.Q. Hi seems to be sending him on a mission; he's Dodgers’ boss, in some regard. So, we figured that Dr. I. Q. Hi is the bureaucrat who works for our version of the Federation. And if that’s the case, it means there are other characters out there like Captain Kirk, somebody very capable.

Cervone: That’s where Star Johnson came from, and, of course, he would be constantly frustrated by Dodgers. 

We also knew that the world was kind of human. It wasn’t a world of other ducks and rabbits and roosters. Because in those Chuck Jones cartoons, they were the only animals. Everyone else was a person. That’s part of the comedy of it. The straighter and more legitimate their environment is, the better the satire works. If you take Dodgers, Cadet and the Commander out of our show, it would just be a straight sci-fi show. 

When it came to the show’s style of humor, well, the English have a great history of enjoying scoundrel characters. Black Adder was on my mind a lot. Years later, when I see all those Danny McBride shows like Righteous Gemstones, that’s the kind of scoundrel character we saw Dodgers being. 

Brandt: Another thing we talked about was Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show. Fife was the second banana to Andy Griffith, but we flipped that. Cadet is more like Andy Griffith because he’s generally the more capable one, and we made the incompetent Barney Fife character the star.

Cervone: We always talked about Duck Dodgers’ misplaced confidence in himself. That was very important to us. That’s the Barney Fife in him.

Starring Daffy, Porky, Joe and Bob

Cervone: From the very first stories we were developing, their voices were locked and we already knew who the characters were and it was easy to write for them. 

Brandt: Because we had been so focused on Daffy and Porky over so many years, once we got to make the show all we had to do was put them in a situation and it would just play in your mind what would happen.

Cervone: When it came to the actors, we always heard Joe Alaskey for Duck Dodgers and Bob Bergen for Cadet. It is very specifically Joe and Bob. 

Bergen: Joe Alaskey, who passed away in 2016, was one of the most brilliant voice actors who ever lived. He was passionate about his work and the accuracy of his work. Joe and I were so in sync with our knowledge of the Looney Tunes that we just matched each other so well. Joe and I knew these characters backwards and forwards. There were times when I’d say to him, “Hey, let’s do this take with a little less Chuck Jones and a little bit more Tex Avery,” and he’d know exactly what I meant.

Brandt: In addition to Joe and Bob, we also had some other great voice talent that were a regular part of the show. Tia Carrere was in many of the episodes as the Martian Queen and Richard McGonagle did I.Q. Hi. 

Cervone: Michael Dorn was the voice of all the Centurion Robots and, finally, John O’Hurley as Star Johnson always put it right over home plate. We also had a lot of celebrity guest stars. For instance, we had Burt Reynolds and Dom DeLuise together. 

Bergen: There was also Henry Winkler, Stan Freberg, June Foray, Loni Anderson, Brian Wilson, Ed McMahon and Quentin Tarantino. I remember Quentin Tarantino came in with a Fred Flintstone T-shirt on, jumping up and down like a kid on Christmas morning. He walked up to me and Joe and he went, “Oh my God, I’m so excited. I get to work with Porky Pig and Daffy Duck. This is the coolest day of my life!” I said to him, “You do realize you’re Quentin Tarantino, and you’ve done some pretty cool things. Pulp Fiction comes to mind.” He goes, “Never as cool as this.”

Chuck Jones Meets… Tom Jones?

Cervone: Yes, that’s Tom Jones doing the theme song. 

Brandt: The idea was that we wanted the opening theme to be something that Dodgers would’ve written for himself, like a James Bond-style theme.

Cervone: The theme song is absolutely Dodgers’ point-of-view. It’s all about the glory of Duck Dodgers. The Flaming Lips wrote the song, did the music and the production. And then, because there was a very classic James Bond feeling to it, Suzi Civita, the music executive at Warner Bros. at the time, said, “Let’s just ask Tom Jones to do it.” Tom Jones wanted to work with The Flaming Lips, and The Flaming Lips wanted to work with Tom Jones. They recorded at Abbey Road Studios. It was a big deal.

It gets better because, after the recording, we got a call from Tom Jones’ people saying, “Tom really loved that, and he’d love to be part of the show. Is there anything you want to do with Tom?” That’s why Tom was on the show as a guest star. That was Tom Jones’ idea.

Adventures in the 24½th Century

Cervone: Originally, Mike Lazzo ordered 13 episodes straight to series. 

Brandt: The cool thing about the way that we did this show was, because they didn’t need it for a certain air date, we spent the first six months just roughing out the Season One storyboards. It was a truly board-driven show. The two of us worked on the rough boards while Paul Dini and Tom Minton were there writing and honing and pitching and refining. Ted Blackman was also doing some background designs along with Dennis Venizelos. We also had a line producer, Bobbie Page. Besides that, there was almost no other crew on it. It was a real luxury not having a whole crew to have to worry about. That was from June of 2002 until the end of the year and then, in January, the cleanup crew came in. There was a character designer, and storyboard artists would take these rough things and turn them into real boards.

About a month before the show was released, we played an episode at Comic-Con in 2003. We chose “The Fowl Friend,” which was a parody of The Iron Giant. There was a lot riding on that because it was the first time anybody got a look at the show, and it was exciting to get a good reaction from the crowd.

By that time, we’d already gotten a renewal for Season Two, another 13 episodes. The renewal came pretty early on — I think because Warner Bros. probably didn’t want a show that only had 13 episodes. They needed enough episodes for it to be replayed.

Cervone: As much as we could, we tried to do the same board-driven process in Season Two, then the scripts were written from the boards. We tried, but we couldn’t do quite as much as we did in Season One because we now had a whole crew and episodes were coming back from Korea and we were fully in production. 

The renewal for the third season, another 13 episodes, was a little more iffy, and when we got it, we knew that was going to be it. Because we couldn’t really deliver the shows on a normal basis, for the third season we went to scripts first and it was run more like a normal show. That way we could deliver the shows in a more timely way. That’s when Mark Banker was really spearheading things. He was brought on as the main writer, and he did a nice job with that. We were all very like-minded.

Mark Banker, Writer and Story Editor on Duck Dodgers: The first two seasons weren’t scripted, and so, they brought me in for Season Three with the idea that somebody has to write scripts. We all knew that it was unlikely that there would be a fourth season, so I had an idea for the finale pretty early on. What I wanted to do was sort of a parody of The Office, the original one, for the finale so that it would be a big, special episode that would feel different than the rest of the series. We started talking about maybe doing a show within the show, a profile on Duck Dodgers by this documentary series that looks at heroes. We also thought it’d be fun to get kind of meta with it.

Brandt: If you watch the very end of that episode, we included caricatures of Bob Bergen and Joe Alaskey at the mic. Then, Porky can’t summon his famous line, “That’s all folks!” so all of the characters come in and do it for him.

Bergen: It was a special three-year run. What I loved most about Duck Dodgers was the very true homage to Chuck Jones. At that point, I’d done a lot of Looney Tunes content, and this was the closest classical Looney Tunes thing I’d ever done up to that point.

Cervone: The show, in its initial run, didn’t have the biggest audience. It got moved around a lot — it was even moved to Boomerang for the last half of Season Three — but it did have a cult following. It was really fun and enjoyable, especially in those first six months. We also got to go deep into the movies and shows that we love, and we got to go deep into these characters that we love. I think that’s why those who watched Duck Dodgers remember it pretty fondly. Every now and then, we’ll have people tell us that they grew up on that show. They’ll tell us that they go back and catch things that they didn’t catch the first time. Like, “I didn't realize that that battle was The Wrath of Khan.”

That’s exactly what the original Looney Tunes did for us. You could watch those cartoons again and again and find new levels to it based on your own experiences. And so, in that way, with Duck Dodgers, I’m like, “Mission accomplished.”