Quasi at the Quackadero is a 1975 animated cartoon by Sally Cruikshank.
The short revolves around a pair of "ducks" named Quasi and Anita (the latter played by Cruikshank herself), and their pet robot Rollo as they visit the Quackadero, a strange place where the amusements revolve around time travel. Among the mad things that happen are an apparently fabricated "shining moment", five actors faking being past lives of Quasi, and the trio having their thoughts painted.
Yeah, it's that kind of cartoon.
There is also a sequel called Make Me Psychic
, where Anita buys a device that can make matter obey her will. It's just as deranged.
Sally Cruikshank has uploaded the whole thing to YouTube, so you can catch the madness here.
Tropes found in this short:
- Abhorrent Admirer: Snozzy grows into this for Anita. While she's initially attracted to him, his wandering hands quickly cause her to find him repulsive.
- Affectionate Pickpocket: Anita uses dancing with Snozzy as an opportunity to swipe his wallet with her newfound powers in Make Me Psychic.
- Annoying Laugh: Anita has a particularly loud and screechy one.
- Badass Cape: Averted with Quasi. He wears a cape at all times, but this is done more as a visual indicator of his Manchild status than it is for anything else.
- Big Eater: Quasi is often seen stuffing his face with sweets.
- Big, Thin, Short Trio: From Make Me Psychic onwards, Snozzy is the big, Anita is the thin and Quasi is the short.
- Blackface-Style Caricature: Anita's unnamed rival for Snozzy's affections in Make Me Psychic has a look that evokes this. Notably, her actor is a man doing a stereotypical Sassy Black Woman voice. Like the rest of the cast, though, she's ostensibly supposed to be a duck.
- Butt-Monkey: Quasi, Anita and Snozzy all fall victim to slapstick throughout the shorts.
- Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Rollo is nowhere to be seen in Make Me Psychic.
- Cloudcuckooland: The world that the shorts take place in is bizarre to say the least, with talking houses that float in the sky likely being the least strange thing shown. In contrast, the characters themselves are surprisingly coherent.
- The Dark Age of Animation: One of the bright spots of that era.
- A Day in the Limelight: Anita is the main character of Make Me Psychic, with Quasi demoted to a supporting player.
- Decoy Protagonist: Despite being the title character of the first short, Quasi isn't particularly more prominent than Anita is in it. He's also rather noticeably Out of Focus in Make Me Psychic, which,
from what we see of it, would have continued into the canceled Quasi's Cabaret movie. - Deranged Animation: Characters squash and stretch into different shapes and surreal visuals show up constantly.
- Dodgy Toupee: Snozzy is revealed to wear one.
- Drives Like Crazy: Snozzy in Make Me Psychic, though he has the excuse of being blinded by a traffic cone stuck to his head.
- Elmer Fudd Syndrome: Anita seems to have a mild case of this.
- The Fashionista: Anita wears several bizarre and rather snazzy-looking outfits across the shorts.
- Fat and Skinny: Quasi and Anita.
- The Fool: Snozzy is described as such. He's carefree and confident, but ignorant and completely lacking in foresight. Quasi and Anita aren't too far off from this, either.
- Gainax Ending: Make Me Psychic ends with Anita's psychic powers accidentally flooding Snozzy's house, causing her to toss the machine responsible for giving them to her out the window. The bizarre crow in a suit that had appeared throughout the short catches it and then walks off into outer space.
- Gold Digger: It's made clear that a big part of the reason why Anita is attracted to Snozzy is that he's filthy rich. When they dance together during Make Me Psychic she uses her psychic powers to stealthily levitate his wallet out of his back pocket without him noticing. And this is before she becomes disgusted with his behavior.
- Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal: Quasi doesn't wear a shirt, perhaps as an intentional inversion of Donald Duck.
- Handsome Lech: Snozzy is shown flirting with several women and is so handsy with Anita that he gets an entire musical number about wanting to grope her. Anita, who was initially smitten with him, is understandably put off by this.
- Humanoid Female Animal: Anita is considerably more humanoid than Quasi is. Interestingly, Snozzy, a male character introduced in the second short, is also rather humanoid.
- Informed Species: You wouldn't know the characters were ducks if you weren't told so. The cartoon's aversion of Four-Fingered Hands and use of Feather Fingers doesn't help, either.
- Jerkass: Quasi, Anita and Snozzy are all shown to be rather selfish, shallow and unpleasant people.
- Lazy Bum: Quasi, who spends his days in bed eating sweets and laughing at footage of other people working on TV.Quasi: I love to look at pictures of people working!
- Manchild: Quasi dresses in swimming trunks and a cape, spends most of his time laying in bed watching TV and eating sweets, and is half the size of Anita and Snozzy. Despite this, he is actually around the same age as both of them.
- Man of Wealth and Taste: Snozzy appears to be suave and wealthy, but is also shown to be a vain Handsome Lech.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The Quackadero's time traveling amusements all seem to be real, but the "Past Lives" showcase is explicitly shown to be a scam that uses actors and the "Shining Moment" machine is also suggested to display a fake memory, as the man who it ostensibly belonged to claimed that it never happened, calling the legitimacy of the entire park into question.
- Mind Screw: Every single frame of both shorts is filled with surreal imagery.
- Nipple and Dimed: Averted in the part of the "Shining Moment" scene, where a male duck
walks into a room with a naked female duck in bed with her nipples in plain view. - Noble Male, Roguish Male: Snozzy and Quasi, respectively. They're both jerks, but Snozzy at least puts on airs of being a gentleman.
- Obsession Song: Snozzy's "If I Could Get My Hands on You" from Make Me Psychic has pretty obvious undertones.
- Odd Friendship: Quasi's friendships with Anita and Snozzy are pretty much inexplicable. He and Anita in particular are constantly pulling cruel pranks on each other.
- Offstage Villainy: Quasi is described at various points across Quasi at the Quackadero as being "evil", but there is no evidence to back this up beyond him being lazy and a bit of a Jerkass.
- Platonic Life-Partners: Quasi and Anita are best friends, but aren't in any way attracted to each other. In fact, they both find the other rather insufferable.
- Random Events Plot: Quasi at the Quackadero is essentially a collection of vignettes showcasing the park's various attractions. Quasi, Anita and Rollo don't even appear during a few of them. In comparison, Make Me Psychic actually has a fairly straightforward (but no less surreal) plot.
- Reality Warper: Anita becomes this in Make Me Psychic, being able to do such things as bring inanimate objects to life and make things levitate.
- Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense: Snozzy is wealthy and charming, but also careless and slow-witted.
- Robot Buddy: Rollo the robot. The "buddy" part doesn't really apply to his relationship with Quasi.
- Second Episode Introduction: The character of Snozzy isn't introduced until Make Me Psychic.
- Serial Escalation: Inverted. Make Me Pysychic is noticeably less surreal than Quasi at the Quackadero. It's still very weird, but there isn't quite as much Mind Screw and the plot is relatively easy to follow.
- Sharp-Dressed Man: In contrast to Quasi, Snozzy is always dressed in a white tuxedo.
- Shout-Out: The ending of Make Me Psychic, in which Anita uses her newfound psychic powers to torment everyone at a party for playing a prank on her, is a direct homage to Carrie.
- Small Name, Big Ego: Anita seems to believe herself to be a classy and sophisticated Uptown Girl when in reality she's a clumsy and selfish nobody who is best friends with the likes of Quasi.
- Spear Counterpart: Snozzy, introduced in the second short, is essentially the male equivalent of Anita.
- Surreal Humor: The shorts' primary source of laughs. The world is nonsensical and the characters can seemingly bend reality at will.
- Sweet Tooth: Quasi is introduced in Quasi at the Quackadero snacking on chocolate cake in bed, and is shown guzzling down ice cream and brownies at various points throughout Make Me Psychic.
- Theme Naming: Snozzy's name is clearly derived from Quasi's.
- Tiny Guy, Huge Girl: Quasi and Anita. Also Anita and Rollo, to an extent.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Quasi loves chocolate cake.
- Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: None of the three main "ducks" are particularly good people, so it isn't hard to laugh at the slapstick that they're all constantly subjected to.
- The Voiceless: Rollo never utters a word.
- Walking Swimsuit Scene: Quasi's only article of clothing besides his cape and hat are a pair of swim trunks.
- What the Hell Is That Accent?: Anita speaks in what seems to be exaggerated baby talk. Snozzy also sounds completely different in basically every line of dialogue that he speaks, making it hard to pinpoint exactly what his accent is supposed to be.
- Whole-Plot Reference: Make Me Psychic is essentially an extended Carrie parody.
- With Friends Like These...: Quasi and Anita are ostensibly best friends, but are constantly at each other's throats, with Anita even admitting that she can't wait until she "sees the last" of Quasi at the beginning of Quasi at the Quackadero. She goes so far as to trick Quasi into becoming permanently trapped in prehistoric times with no means of escape at the end of the short for the sake of being rid of him for good.
