The Duck Factory
"Sure Beats Working for a Living"
performed by Mark Vieha
Tom Wells
United States
English
1
13 (list of episodes)
Allan Burns
30 minutes
April 12 –
July 11, 1984
Background[edit]
Burns had started his career as a writer/animator for The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show and George of the Jungle before turning to live action and co-creating The Mary Tyler Moore Show; Klynn had worked in various production capacities on Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing-Boing, amongst many other cartoons.
Overview[edit]
The premiere episode introduces Skip Tarkenton (Carrey), a somewhat naive and optimistic young man who has come to Hollywood looking for a job as a cartoonist. When he arrives at a low-budget animation company called Buddy Winkler Productions, he finds out Buddy Winkler has just died, and the company desperately needs new blood. So Skip gets an animation job at the firm, which is nicknamed "The Duck Factory" as their main cartoon is "The Dippy Duck Show".
Other Duck Factory employees seen regularly on the show were man-of-a-thousand-cartoon voices Wally Wooster (played by real-life cartoon voice artist Don Messick); cynical, sometimes lazy comedy writer Marty Fenneman (played by real-life comedy writer Jay Tarses); veteran artist and animator Brooks Carmichael (Jack Gilford); younger storyboard artist Roland Culp (Clarence Gilyard); sarcastic editor Andrea Lewin; and hard-nosed, penny-pinching business manager Aggie Aylesworth. Buddy Winkler Productions was now owned by Buddy's young, ditzy but good-hearted widow, Mrs. Sheree Winkler (Teresa Ganzel), a former topless ice dancer who had been married to Buddy for all of three weeks before his death.
Production[edit]
Seen in some episodes were clips from various "Dippy Duck" cartoons the Buddy Winkler crew were working on—sometimes fully animated, sometimes in pencil sketch or animatic form. The opening and closing credits were also animated. Series co-creator Klynn was also credited as the show's "creative animation consultant", while production of the actual animated material was done by Ted and Gerry Woolery for which each won an Emmy.[2][3]
Home media[edit]
In 1995, at the height of Carrey's career, some episodes of the series were released in the United States on two VHS videocassettes by MTM Home Video. One tape contained the first three episodes, and the other, the final three.[6][7] These two volumes were released in the United Kingdom in 1997, slightly expanded so that the first four episodes were on one tape and the last four (which had never been broadcast in the UK) were on the other.