BCDB: Cartoon Reviews: Chicken A La King

This cartoon is set in an ancient middle eastern motif, with a rooster as a sultan and hens for his harem (or is it a henem?). Along comes Duckie Wuckie, a buxom Mae West-type of female duck who seems to have some sort of a previous intimate association with the Sultan. Of course the harem is curious about this unsual combination, and becomes suspicious. The Sultan and Duckie engage in an entertaining tango to "La Cucaracha", which is actually reused animation from the POPEYE cartoon, THE DANCE CONTEST (1933). Suddenly Duckie's boyfriend, a green-turbined duck with a jutting jaw and large forearms reminicent of POPEYE whils in in the form of a turnado, giving a duck-like Tarzan yell. He braks the two up, and proceeds to play havoc on the Sultan Rooster. Could this love triangle been a means to bring the two duck characters back together at the expense of the Sultan? Needless to say, the status of the Sultan has been destroyed, the Drake whrils away with his girlfriend, and the harem takes to beating the Sultan with their rolling pins. With the exception of the Duckie Wuckie sequence, this is a rather forgetable short with rather pedestrian and formulaic elements and some rahter ordinary animation. Other than catching his girlfriend in the harem, the Drake's torturing of the Rooster is not clearly motivated. At least in the POPEYE cartoons, the violent revenge in the end was motivated by a conflict in the beginning of the story. This is not the case here.