Michael Maltese

The story man

Michael Maltese started at the bottom of the cartoon business and in the most literal way: a cel painter at Fleischer Studios in 1935, painting other men’s drawings one sheet at a time. After a stretch at the Jam Handy studio he was hired in April 1937 by Leon Schlesinger Productions, the shop that made the Warner Bros. cartoons, as an in-betweener, and rose to story man, the writer who boards a cartoon joke by joke before a frame is animated.

He is even in one of the films, in the flesh: the studio guard in You Ought to Be in Pictures (1940), chasing Porky Pig around the lot. His voice turns up in small parts too, among them Wackiki Wabbit (1943) and The Ducktators (1942). He wrote in partnership with Tedd Pierce through the mid-1940s; from the end of that decade his stories went almost entirely to one director, Chuck Jones, and the pairing became the famous one.

The first appearances carry his credit more often than chance allows: he wrote the first Pepé Le Pew cartoon (1945) and the first Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote cartoon, Fast and Furry-ous (1949).

Duck Amuck

Released February 28, 1953, as a Merrie Melodies short. Chuck Jones directed; Michael Maltese wrote the story. It runs about seven minutes and asks one question the whole way through: who is Daffy Duck, if everything about him can be redrawn?

It opens as a musketeer picture, until the scenery runs out. From there an unseen animator’s hand torments its star: backgrounds swapped mid-scene, his body erased and redrawn in shape after shape, his voice replaced, his costume changed under him, the film frame itself misbehaving. Daffy rages, pleads, and adapts, and through every redraw he stays entirely, furiously himself. At the end the camera pulls back and shows the hand at the drawing board, and it is Bugs Bunny’s: “Ain’t I a stinker?”

The great run

Through the 1950s the Jones and Maltese names ran together on the credits of cartoon after cartoon that has not dated since: The Rabbit of Seville (1950), Rabbit Seasoning (1952), Feed the Kitty (1952), Duck Amuck and Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century (1953), Bewitched Bunny (1954), One Froggy Evening (1955), the first appearance of Michigan J. Frog, Ali Baba Bunny and What’s Opera, Doc? (1957), and Robin Hood Daffy (1958). He wrote for the other Warner directors as well, Friz Freleng and Robert McKimson among them.

When the theatrical shorts wound down he carried the trade into television: a season at Walter Lantz’s studio in the mid-1950s, where he wrote Tex Avery’s The Legend of Rockabye Point; years of writing for Hanna-Barbera’s television shows; a stretch with Jay Ward’s studio; and, from 1972 until his death, back at Chuck Jones’s own company, the story man beside the director again.

The honours

For Scent-imental Reasons (1949), Jones directing and Maltese writing, won the Academy Award for the year’s best animated short. The same year, So Much for So Little, the animated public-health documentary he wrote with the Jones unit, won the Academy Award for best documentary short subject.

The profession’s own verdict came in 1994, when a thousand animation professionals voted The 50 Greatest Cartoons: What’s Opera, Doc? stands first on that list and Duck Amuck second, both of them Maltese stories for Jones, and One Froggy Evening fifth. The Library of Congress has taken all three into the National Film Registry: What’s Opera, Doc? in 1992, the first animated short so honored, Duck Amuck in 1999, and One Froggy Evening in 2003.

Why this door

Chad Kovac saw Duck Amuck as a child. Watching it again in November 2026, he said, in his words, that he remembers it from childhood and thinks it is one of the things that led to his particular patternistic bent, and that he feels the influence that cartoon had on him.

The reason is not hard to see. Everything the cartoon does to its duck, body, voice, scenery, and story, it does in the open, and none of it touches the thing that makes him himself. The pattern is the person, not the props. That is close to a working doctrine of this house: Chad’s own work keeps changing costumes, settings, and shapes, and the signature holds underneath. A seven-minute cartoon planted it early. This door is kept so the debt stands somewhere on the record.

The record

• February 6, 1908
  Born in New York.
• 1935
  Starts in animation as a cel painter at Fleischer Studios.
• April 1937
  Hired by Leon Schlesinger Productions, the Warner Bros. cartoon shop; rises from in-betweener to story man.
• 1940
  Appears on camera as the studio guard in You Ought to Be in Pictures.
• 1949
  For Scent-imental Reasons wins the Academy Award for best animated short. Fast and Furry-ous introduces the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote.
• February 28, 1953
  Duck Amuck released. Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century follows the same year.
• 1955
  One Froggy Evening: Michigan J. Frog’s first appearance.
• 1957
  What’s Opera, Doc?
• 1958 onward
  Television years, chiefly at Hanna-Barbera; later with Jay Ward’s studio; from 1972, Chuck Jones Productions.
• February 22, 1981
  Died, sixteen days past his seventy-third birthday.