The Impatient Patient

The Impatient Patient is a Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoon released in theatres in 1942, directed by Norman McCabe and features Daffy Duck as a telegram deliverer. The film is set in a mad scientist's laboratory.

Plot Summary
While trapsing through a swamp, Daffy Duck seeks to deliver a telegram to "Chloe." He finds the home of "Dr. Jerkyl" and hopes that the physician can cure his hiccups. Daffy's hiccups are so severe that they cause him to damage or destroy everything around him.

Dr. Jerkyl captures Daffy and restrains him to a doctor's chair. Hoping to scare Daffy in order to cure his hiccups, Dr. Jerkyl drinks a potion that turns him into an ogre. Terrified, Daffy asks him who he is, and he responds: "I'm Chloe." Daffy then reads him the telegram, which is a cheerful Happy Birthday message from apparently Frankenstein.

Chloe chases Daffy around the laboratory until the radio is accidentally switched on, prompting him to dance. Once the music ends, the chase resumes. Daffy scrambles to the lab table and mixes a potion, which turns Chloe into an infant. Off camera, Daffy hits the infant with a hammer, but only from self defense and perhaps to teach him a lesson since the infant Chloe intended to hit him with a hammer("He don't know me very well, do he?").

Cultural References

 * The initial soft chanting of the name Chloe, and the opening swampland setting, are a reference to the 1927 song "Chloe (Song of the Swamp)", written by Gus Kahn and Neil Moret, and performed by artists like Eva Taylor, Bessie Brown, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Spike Jones.


 * Dr. Jerkyl and his alterego Chloe are a reference to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a story by Robert Louis Stevenson about a man with a severe split personality.


 * Chloe's birthday message comes from a Frank N. Stein, a reference to Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, a novel by Mary Shelley.


 * The Scene where Dr. Jerkyl mixes the potion is similar to a scene from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Mouse, a Tom & Jerry cartoon