A Day at the Zoo


A Day at the Zoo is a 1939 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon supervised by Tex Avery. The short was released on March 11, 1939 and features Egghead, an early version of Elmer Fudd.

Plot

This is one of the cartoons that Warner Bros. would occasionally produce in the late 1930s and early 1940s that was centered around a series of gags, usually based on outrageous stereotypes and plays on words, and topical references, as a narrator describes the action in a rapid-fire succession of anthropomorphic behavior, pun gags, or any combination thereof.
In this cartoon, the unifying thread is a visit to the zoo and the various animals therein: a wolf in his natural habitat, a pack of camels, a North American Greyhound, "two bucks..." "...and five cents", two friendly Elks, monkeys who toss peanuts to their spectators, a baboon that convinces the zookeeper to switch the baboon's place with a similar-looking human onlooker, another monkey that scolds an old lady for defying the order not to feed the monkeys, a groundhog, another skunk gag in which the skunk is seen reading How to Win Friends and Influence People, a giraffe that is fed its meal of corn by way of a ladder, white rabbits that multiply via adding machines, an owl, a "South African talking parrot" that eschews crackers for "a short beer," an "Alcatraz jailbird" who insists he is innocent alongside a stool pigeon that insists the jailbird is guilty, an ostrich laying a large egg that, when she stumbles, cracks and reveals a dozen chicken eggs, an elephant new to the zoo without his trunk because it got lost in luggage on the way there, pink elephants left over from last year's New Year party, a former circus performer reading a newspaper who used to perform as a lion tamer before he reveals a lion bit off his head, and a Rocky Mountain wildcat.
The running gag in this cartoon involves Egghead, who is repeatedly seen taunting a lion in its cage. The narrator repeatedly warns Egghead to stop, at which point Egghead shies away and admits "I'm a ba-a-ad boy" before eventually returning to his taunting. In the end, the lion is seen at peace; when the narrator presumes Egghead learned to leave the lion alone, the lion shakes his head in disagreement, opening his mouth to reveal Egghead swallowed whole.

Voice cast