The Duck Factory

The Duck Factory is an American sitcom produced by MTM Enterprises that aired on NBC from April 12 until July 11, 1984. It was Jim Carrey's first lead role in a Hollywood production. It was also the only time Don Messick appeared in a live-action role, although he also voiced a cartoon character within the sitcom as well. The show was set at a small independent animation studio, and was co-created by Allan Burns and Herbert Klynn. It won two Emmy Awards.^[1]

Burns had started his career as a writer/animator for The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show and George of the Jungle before turning to live action and co-creating The Mary Tyler Moore Show; Klynn had worked in various production capacities on Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing-Boing, amongst many other cartoons.

The premiere episode introduces Skip Tarkenton (Carrey), a somewhat naive and optimistic young man who has come to Hollywood looking for a job as a cartoonist. When he arrives at a low-budget animation company called Buddy Winkler Productions, he finds out Buddy Winkler has just died, and the company desperately needs new blood. So Skip gets an animation job at the firm, which is nicknamed "The Duck Factory" as their main cartoon is "The Dippy Duck Show".

Other Duck Factory employees seen regularly on the show were man-of-a-thousand-cartoon voices Wally Wooster (played by real-life cartoon voice artist Don Messick); cynical, sometimes lazy comedy writer Marty Fenneman (played by real-life comedy writer Jay Tarses); veteran artist and animator Brooks Carmichael (Jack Gilford); younger storyboard artist Roland Culp (Clarence Gilyard); sarcastic editor Andrea Lewin; and hard-nosed, penny-pinching business manager Aggie Aylesworth. Buddy Winkler Productions was now owned by Buddy's young, ditzy but good-hearted widow, Mrs. Sheree Winkler (Teresa Ganzel), a former topless ice dancer who had been married to Buddy for all of three weeks before his death.

Seen in some episodes were clips from various "Dippy Duck" cartoons the Buddy Winkler crew were working on—sometimes fully animated, sometimes in pencil sketch or animatic form. The opening and closing credits were also animated. Series co-creator Klynn was also credited as the show's "creative animation consultant", while production of the actual animated material was done by Ted and Gerry Woolery for which each won an Emmy.^[2][3]

The Duck Factory lasted thirteen episodes; it premiered April 12, 1984. It was directed primarily by Gene Reynolds, Rod Daniel, and Victor Lobel, who each did three episodes.^[4] The show initially aired at 9:30 on Thursday nights, directly after Cheers (at the time, not yet a top ten hit; Cheers finished the 1983/84 television season in 34th place). The show replaced Buffalo Bill on NBC's schedule. Jay Tarses, an actor on The Duck Factory, had been the co-creator and executive producer of Buffalo Bill, which had its final network telecast on Thursday, April 5, 1984.

NBC broadcast The Duck Factory episodes out of the producers' intended order. This led to significant continuity issues with the series, rendering certain plot developments almost incomprehensible.

Most notably, episode 1 ended on a series of cliffhangers that were then apparently left unresolved, as the intended episode that would have resolved them wasn't shown. Instead, the eighth episode in the intended order (in which Skip is promoted to being the producer of "The Dippy Duck Show", much to the resentment of the show's staff) was shown as episode 2.

Later episodes were also shown wildly out of order, meaning that as broadcast, succeeding episodes ping-ponged between Skip being the show's producer, and Skip being the show's low-ranking apprentice animator, with no explanation as to the reason for his constant change of status. As well, amongst other baffling developments, Mrs. Winkler was the company's receptionist in second episode as broadcast—but then in the fourth episode she becomes the receptionist. Finally, what the producers had intended to air as the second episode (and which set up the continuing premise of the series) was shown as the thirteenth and final episode. Unfortunately, the plot developments of this episode and the character relationships made absolutely no sense in the context of what had already transpired in episodes 2-12 (as broadcast).

The show changed timeslots in June, moving to Wednesdays at 9:30. The last original episode of The Duck Factory was broadcast on July 11, 1984.

• Jim Carrey as Skip Tarkenton
• Jack Gilford as Brooks Carmichael
• Nancy Lane as Andrea Lewin
• Jay Tarses as Marty Fenneman
• Don Messick as Wally Wooster
  • Messick also voiced Dippy Duck
• Julie Payne as Aggie Aylesworth
• Clarence Gilyard Jr as Roland Culp
• Teresa Ganzel as Mrs. Sheree Winkler

In 1995, at the height of Carrey's career, some episodes of the series were released in the United States on two VHS videocassettes by MTM Home Video. One tape contained the first three episodes, and the other, the final three.^[6][7] These two volumes were released in the United Kingdom in 1997, slightly expanded so that the first four episodes were on one tape and the last four (which had never been broadcast in the UK) were on the other.^{[citation needed]}

• The Duck Factory at IMDb
• First episode posted by The Museum of Classic Chicago Television on YouTube
• All episodes on Internet Archive