Reception
When the film was released, the distributor did not promote it heavily, and most reviewers disliked it. Because the film was X-rated, the New York Times refused to run the film's advertisement. This was a somewhat awkward situation, as the ad included a positive review from the New York Times. According to Swenson, "it didn't have a big following, . . . but it is still in video stores." The film played for about two weeks in New York. Jerry Beck wrote a review in which he called the film "raunchier than Ralph Bakshi's films." He went on to say that the animation and humor of the film "is good, but the design and drawing is downright awful. It seems to be sort of a cross between Jules Feiffer and Gahan Wilson, if that can be imagined." Beck also stated that the film was "very similar to R. Crumb's Mr. Natural and Flakey Foont. There is no reason that the duck should be a duck. Every character in the film is human, and he just seems to be a duck just to give the film a catchy title. There are some highly imaginative animated ideas here, but the film's entertainment value is at a minimum." Beck later called the film "one of the most overlooked animated features of the 1970s, a glorious experimental mess of a film, which, from today’s vantage point, looks incredibly creative and daring, and something current Hollywood studios would never attempt."
Playboy noted that the advertisements for the film said, "this film has no socially redeeming value" and continued "well, that's dead right, yet this movie has some value as a promising X-rated cartoon in the tradition of Ralph Bakshi's Fritz the Cat. The New York Times called it a "zany, lively, uninhibited, sexual odyssey that manages to mix a bit of Walter Mitty and a touch of Woody Allen with some of the innocence of Walt Disney urban smarts of Ralph Bakshi," while Charles Solomon of The Los Angeles Times called it "a sprawling undisciplined piece of sniggering vulgarity that resembles nothing so much as animated bathroom graffiti. degrading to women, blacks, Chicanos, gays, cops, lesbians, and anyone with an IQ of more than 45," and Variety said that the film "has little to recommend."
Read more about this topic: Down And Dirty Duck
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)