Duck in the Dark

The first episode I'm going to look at is, Duck in the Dark. The episode starts with Plucky watching horror movies staring Eddy Cougar, his favorite monster movie star. He's obviously enjoying himself despite being scared silly. The "camera" then moves backwards to focus on an obviously frustrated Buster Bunny lying in his bed. He puts a pillow over his head saying, "That's the last time I invite that duck over to spend the night." So obviously we have a sleepover going on.

Buster's Cordial Friendship Skills

Now, maybe I grew up in the wrong part of town, or maybe I'm just crazy, but I cannot recall a single sleep over I ever had where sleeping was actually a priority. I would play games, watch movies, tell scary stories, jokes, eat snacks and goof off until me and my friends couldn't take it any longer. Maybe we'd get a total of about three hours of sleep but it was always well worth it because of the fun we had. The simple fact that Buster actually wishes to sleep doing this sleep over proves to me that it's a bad idea for Buster to have anyone spend the night. Especially if they, god forbid, want to watch movies all night.

Another thing to point out about my childhood. In first grade, I was sent to a Christian school about 30 miles from my actual home. I made friends at school but the distance made it hard for them to visit. I was very much a loner early on. There was an incident where I had one of my friends over, and after a few hours of playing outside, I went inside and said to my mom, "Okay I'm done playing now, when is she going to go home?" Of course now that I'm grown up, I understand how incredibly rude I was being in this situation. In fact it was after this incident that my mom was hesitant to ever let me have a friend over. When you have a friend over, you spend time with them. You do things together, and more important than that, if they are a guest in your home, as Plucky was to Buster, you do what they want. They are the guest.

A nightmare?  Or the real Buster?  You decide.

Buster's lack of hospitality absolutely amazes me. This is Buster who's supposed to be the "good" character in the series, whining and moaning like I did when I was six. Buster should definitely know better. If that's not bad enough, he then gets angry because it's 3 AM and enough is enough. He forcefully turns the TV off and lectures Plucky for watching horror flicks for ten hours.

Here's my question, why was Plucky watching horror films for ten hours? Given Buster's complete and total lack of knowledge on how to take care of a guest, it was probably what Plucky was doing to pass the time. I highly doubt at any moment Buster would say to Plucky, "Hey Plucky, let's go for a walk." Or "Hey Plucky, let's play a video game." Or anything like that. And if he did say those things and Plucky said, "No I want to watch more movies," that's just tough nuggets for Buster. Plucky is the guest and he chooses the activities. If that means Buster has hang out in the same room but read a book or play a handheld during this time, so be it.

After literally throwing Plucky into his bed for the night, the episode focuses on the nightmares that Plucky has throughout the night. Buster ends up waking him up, and Plucky realizes something. He runs to the TV to start watching the movies again and says, "We still have twelve hours before we have to returns these tapes. [lol tapes] We can watch them all over again." Now I want to point something out about this sentence, Plucky doesn't say "I want to watch them again," he says "WE can watch them all over again." He's including Buster in his activity. He WANTS Buster to join because he's having fun and wants Buster to have fun with him. SO what does Buster do? In all his wonderful benevolence, he literally kicks Plucky out along with all the tapes.

Granted we don't know exactly what time he kicked Plucky out, when Plucky lands along with the tapes, it's clearly day time. The sun has all ready risen. Let's assume the earliest sunrise that we see once a year. It's around 5:30 AM unless you live in Alaska. Now the sun doesn't rise right away, usually it takes a couple hours for it to reach the point where it is in the cartoon. So let's say 7:30. That's about four and a half hours of sleep. As far as my sleepovers were concerned, I'd say Buster was lucky to get that much sleep. I know everyone does sleepovers differently but the ones I truly enjoyed, were the ones I got the least amount of sleep in and felt tired the next day.

So in this episode we've seen Buster show complete incompetence when it came to hospitality, act like a six year old and even have the gall to throw his guest out of his home for wanting to spend time with him. Yet, we are lead to believe that Plucky was the awful one for selfishly wanting to watch movies with his friend, and wanting to do the unthinkable of staying up all night during a sleepover. All I have to say is, if I acted like Buster did when I was his age, I would never have been able to have another sleepover again in my life.

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