General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Great Piggy Bank Robbery

The Great Piggy Bank Robbery is a 1946 Warner Bros. Looney Tunes animated short directed by Bob Clampett, in which Daffy Duck, after knocking himself out while reading a Dick Tracy comic book, dreams that he is the detective Duck Twacy investigating the theft of every piggy bank in town.¹^•² It was released on July 20, 1946, runs about 8 minutes, and is one of Clampett's last cartoons at the studio.¹^•³

Key fact	Detail
Release	July 20, 1946, Warner Bros., Looney Tunes series, about 8 minutes¹^•²
Director and writer	Robert (Bob) Clampett; story by Warren Foster¹
Voice cast	Mel Blanc as Daffy Duck / Duck Twacy and the villains; Porky Pig appears in a non-speaking cameo⁴^•²
Animation crew	Rod Scribner, Manny Gould, Bill Melendez, and Izzy Ellis; layouts by Thomas McKimson, backgrounds by Philip DeGuard⁵^•⁶
Music and editing	Carl W. Stalling (music), Treg Brown (film editor), produced by Edward Selzer⁵
Source parodied	Chester Gould's Dick Tracy comic strip; the title plays on the 1941 film The Great Train Robbery⁷^•⁸
Standing	Number 16 in Jerry Beck's 1994 book The 50 Greatest Cartoons⁹

Spoilers

Plot

Daffy Duck lives on a farm and waits impatiently at the mailbox for his new Dick Tracy comic book, declaring, "I can hardly wait to see what happens to Dick Tracy! I love that man!"⁹ Acting out the detective's moves, he accidentally knocks himself unconscious, and the dream begins: he is now "Duck Twacy, famous detective," facing a crime wave in which piggy banks, including his own, are being stolen all over town.²^•⁹

On the case, Twacy bumps into Sherlock Holmes and tells him, "Scram, Sherlock. I'm working this side of the street."⁴ He boards a streetcar bound for the gangsters' hideout, driven by Porky Pig in a silent cameo, and confronts a gallery of grotesque criminals with names drawn from and exaggerated beyond Dick Tracy's rogues: Mouse Man, Snake Eyes, 88 Teeth, Hammerhead, Pickle Puss, Pumpkinhead, Neon Noodle, Jukebox Jaw, Wolfman, Flattop, and Rubberhead, among others.⁸^•⁹ Snake Eyes parodies the comic's B.B. Eyes and Pickle Puss parodies Pruneface; Flattop, an actual Tracy villain, has planes taking off from his head during the final battle.⁹^•¹⁰

After announcing "You're all under arrest!" and being chased, Twacy traps the gang in a hallway closet and fires a Tommy gun through the door; the scene of bodies tumbling endlessly through the bullet-ridden door is one of the short's best-known images.⁴^•¹⁰ He defeats the last adversary, Neon Noodle, by twisting him into a neon sign reading "Eat at Joe's," recovers the piggy banks, and, kissing his own bank, wakes up on the farm hugging a female pig, who declares, "I just love that duck!"⁸^•⁹^•¹⁵

Production

The short was made at the end of Clampett's tenure at Warner Bros. He directed at the studio from 1937 to 1945, and The Great Piggy Bank Robbery, released in 1946, was his third-to-last cartoon there before he moved into television, where he later produced the Beany and Cecil series.¹¹^•¹⁰^•³ The animation credits Rod Scribner, Manny Gould, Jose Cuauhtemoc "Bill" Melendez, and Isadore "Izzy" Ellis, with Thomas McKimson on layouts and backgrounds and Philip DeGuard on backgrounds.¹ Mel Blanc supplied the voices, and Carl W. Stalling composed the score.⁵

Stalling's cue "Powerhouse" plays during several sequences, including Daffy pacing at his mailbox and his walk up the wall and ceiling of the gangsters' hideout.¹² The short's visual world of dark shadows, neon signs, and shifts of size and perspective draws on film noir and, in the view of one critic, on surrealist artists such as Salvador Dali.¹⁰^•⁷

Style and reception

The film is a parody of Chester Gould's Dick Tracy strip, which was hugely popular when the cartoon was produced; the detective had debuted 90 years before the short's 75th anniversary in 2021.⁹ The Senses of Cinema survey of Clampett describes the cartoon as reveling in the juxtaposition of forms and tones: bizarre camera angles and "lighting," shape-bending chases, slapstick and expressionist imagery, and nightmarish dream imagery, and calls it possibly Clampett's most successful transformation of another source's visual style.¹⁰ The Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion calls it Clampett's masterpiece, with precision-timed cuts and animation that merits frame-by-frame viewing.¹¹

Reception has not been uniform. The Stop Button's review rated it 1 out of 3, calling the animation cheap-looking and the cartoon "way too loose," though it acknowledged inventive takes on the villains for Tracy fans.⁵ By contrast, the Daily Grindhouse essay called it the writer's favorite Warner Bros. cartoon and compared it only to Clampett's own Porky in Wackyland (1938) and The Big Snooze (1946) for surrealism.⁷ Animation historian Steve Schneider, writing in The 50 Greatest Cartoons, described it as "a work of the highest cinematic poetry," with images that remain among the most indelible in cartoon history.⁴

Legacy

The short ranked number 16 in Jerry Beck's 1994 book The 50 Greatest Cartoons.⁹ Warren Beatty liked the cartoon enough to request it be shown before his 1990 live-action Dick Tracy, but Disney, which produced that film, refused because the short was not its own property.⁷ A 2021 essay in Reactor noted that the short is exalted by professional animators as much as by the general public, that its techniques are still applied in cartoons today, and that animators have examined its sequences frame by frame.⁶

The short has been restored and released on home video, including the Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 2 (2004 DVD) and the Looney Tunes Platinum Collection: Volume 1 (2011 Blu-ray, restored HD, with commentary by animator John Kricfalusi).¹³ The Duck Twacy character and lines such as "Neon Noodle!" and Rubberhead's "I'm gonna r-r-r-r-rub you out" remain frequently quoted among fans of the series.¹⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026