Daffy Duck's Movie: Fantastic Island (1983)

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Sorry, this movie sucks

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

It is not deep, but it is fun to watch. It does have a bit more of an edge to it than other similar films.

Daffy Duck and Speedy are on a deserted island where they come across a treasure map which they hoped for treasure but instead they found a magic well that can talk. And it has the ability to grant anyone a fantasy of their own.Daffy after experience a fantasy that didn't went too well. He demanded to be owner of the island or well keeper I think.So the well changes the deserted island into a more tropical like island. Daffy and Speedy automatically got their own white suits to make them look like the owners of Fantasy Island.A plane comes by with other Looney Tune characters who want to experience their own fantasies with the power of the well.Meanwhile after a ship battle with Bugs Bunny, Sam and Taz got shipwrecked and ended up being on the same isle with the magic well. Sam notices his map is gone and is determine to know who took.This movie is similar to the other early Looney Tune TV movies. About 50% of it is new footage while the rest is reused Looney Tune shorts done by Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng.If you like Daffy Duck's Quackbusters, you'll like this movie.

Bugs Bunny was the lead of three films, and here is one of two with Daffy Duck taking the leading role. Daffy is stranded on a desert island with Speedy Gonzales, and they are still waiting to be rescued. Then they see two ships in the distance and try to get their attention, but it is Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam with the Tazmanian Devil fighting each other. Yosemite's ship blows up and a box drops of Daffy, it contains a treasure map of the island, which they follow to find. Yosemite Sam and Taz find the map is missing, and try to find where it is by finding someone who wears black feathers. Daffy and Speedy find the treasure, they discover it is a wishing well, and they wish for a tropical paradise resort, and to invite people to pay $500 to have wishes granted. The people who comes include Granny, Foghorn Leghorn, Pepe Le Pew, Spike and Chester, Porky Pig, Sylvester, Prissy and eventually Yosemite Sam. In the end, the map is destroyed, which makes the well take back all the tropical luxury and grant a final three wishes, which Speedy and Daffy waste, but Yosemite wishes a ship to leave the island and fight Bugs Bunny with, to which Daffy says "your despicable". Pepe Le Pew was number 73, Foghorn Leghorn number 61, Daffy Duck number 30, Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies number 20 and Bugs Bunny number 10 on The 100 Greatest Cartoons. Good!

"Daffy Duck's Movie: Fantastic Island" is basically an animated rip-off of "Robinson Crusoe" and "Gilligan's Island". Daffy Duck and pint-sized side-kick Speedy Gonzales (who has always been ridiculed falsely as a stereotypical character of Hispanic Americans) get stranded on the titled island and come into contact with a magical well that will grant wishes to all comers. Naturally Yosemite Sam and the dreaded Tasmanian Devil are along as the villains here. Once again new animation is glued together with older shorts. In the end the film is about as good as it can be, but that is not really saying much. 2.5 out of 5 stars.

The biggest problem with this film is a common one in all these compilations: you can see (and probably have seen) most of this material elsewhere (mostly in Saturday-morning kiddie shows on TV). However, anyone looking for the trademark anarchic, sometimes surrealistic humor of the WB cartoons, surely won't be disappointed with "Fantastic Island". Of course, some episodes are more enjoyable than others; there is one dud (Porky Pig as a producer searching for talents), but there is also at least one short, starring a jive-talking rooster ("Crazy, man. C-razy!") that can perhaps be fully appreciated only by adults. (**1/2)