Can Queer Duck fly to feature length?

By Joseph S. Amster

Producing a three-minute cartoon is one thing, but can the outrageous cartoon Queer Duck make the transition to a feature length 75-minute movie? “We’ve had two public screenings of Queer Duck: The Movie, and it sold out both places, including a 1,200-seat theater in San Francisco,” says creator Mike Reiss, a four-time Emmy winner. “I’m biased, and my own worst critic, but it plays like no comedy I’ve ever seen before,” he says. “There’s a 20-minute chunk where the laughs don’t stop—people miss many of the jokes because they are laughing through them. It gets laughs all the way through and cheers at moments—people genuinely affected by the happier plot twists. It plays like gangbusters.”

With its over-the-top characters, the movie skewers nearly every gay cliché and icon. Reiss, an open heterosexual, says his gay sensibility comes from his writing experiences, which includes such animated classics as The Simpsons, The Critic, and The PJs. “I study and observe,” he says. “The job I had right before Queer Duck was writing for a show called The PJs, which was an animated show about life in a housing project. Here I am writing about poverty-stricken black people in Chicago, and it was very easy, because all you did was learn a few references, some slang terms, and the rest of it is basic humanity. You’re just writing jokes about people, and that’s what Queer Duck was too. Strip away a few of the references, and it’s just funny characters, funny people doing funny things. The fact that you’re doing things like making fun of Rosie O’Donnell’s big head isn’t really a gay joke. The biggest laugh in the movie is this Linda Blair pepper mill—that just jumped out of nowhere, it was completely free-floating and had no sensibility of any kind.”

Reiss says Queer Duck isn’t done yet, and there’s plenty more gay culture and politics to skewer. A continuing subplot in Queer Duck: The Movie is using religion to “cure” homosexuality. “If I get to do Queer Duck 2, I go after politics and its oppression of gays, specifically the Republicans, more specifically George Bush,” he reveals.

Reiss is pleased and surprised that people identify with his characters. “People will call me and say, ‘Oh, I’m Bi-Polar Bear,’ or ‘I have a friend that is so Oscar Wilde Cat.’ They have to identify with them, and I think I hit on things that people go, ‘This happened to me.’”

In the end, Queer Duck: The Movie is a musical love story of a duck and a alligator with a message everyone can identify with (between the laughs). “The theme of the movie is be who you are and be proud of who you are, which is such an After School Special message. But, if the movie has a message, that’s really what it is.”

Queer Duck: The Movie will be released on DVD on July 18.