Daffy Duck was originally, well, Daffy. Madcap; looney; an agent of chaos. But by the Chuck Jones era he was completely different: Now he was a vainglorious narcissist who existed to be the butt-monkey of whichever feature he was in. Can someone pinpoint for me about when the switchover occurred?
Looks like around 1950ish
On his wiki page, the “Evolving “Earlier” Daffy 1946–1950” section ends with “Daffy’s personality evolved to be less loony and more greedy” and the next section “Experimenting with Daffy 1951–1964” begins with “While Daffy’s looney days were over, McKimson continued to make him as bad or good as his various roles required him to be.”
I’m no authority, but my feeling is that wacko Daffy was a Tex Avery thing. Avery left Warners for MGM in 1941, so I think that might be a good target date. Daffy certainly seems more like the evolved Daffy in most of the WWII cartoons I’ve seen him in.
There’s a video (at least one, in fact) about the men in Termite Terrace, which was what the people who worked there called the Warner Bros. cartoon building. Many of the cartoon greats were there at one time or another, and the video talks a lot about how the different personalities, especially the directors, affected the characters and plots. Highly recommended.
When I was a teenager smoking pot the “hoo-hoo hoo-hoo” Daffy Duck would keep me in tears from laughing so hard.
(Not implying you had to be stoned to enjoy it. It just made it so much more intense to my teenage brain)
This may be close. Daffy was in several cartoons with Porky Pig, originally Porky being the victim of Daffy’s insanity and later Porky being the straight man who stands back while Daffy gets himself into trouble. The Loony Tunes Fandom wiki, lists “The Ducksters” (Sept 1950) which was in the former category, while “Drip-Along Daffy” (Nov 1951) is the latter.
According to Chuck Jones’ autobiography — which, like all autobiographies, should be taken with copious amounts of salt — Daffy was originally a total nutcase with a voice that was “sort of a cross between a stuttering ‘hoo-hoo’ and a spluttering laugh.” But Tex avery thought that the "hoo-hoo"s would go stale fast, and sought a new personality. Somewhere along the line it was decided to combine (Looney Tunes producer) Leon Schlesinger’s acquisitiveness with Leon Schlesinger’s lisp.
They were well into production when they realized that Leon himself would be previewing the results, which could be fatal to everyone’s career. So they watched the screening with trepidation, resignations already in hand; but Leon’s first reaction was:
“Jeethus Christh, that’s a funny voithe! Where’d you get that voithe?”
A theory just pulled out of my ass: Someone at WB repurposed a few Donald Duck scripts rejected by Disney, and the negative attributes stuck.
Rabbit Fire [1951] is probably where all of his newer personality traits got fully codified.
An interesting note to this thread, the recent Looney Tunes Movie, The Day the Earth Blew Up, is a reversion to the earlier style of Daffy. He’s a goof with self control issues, while Porky once again plays the straight man as in one of the examples @Lumpy cited above. Per reporting, this was apparently a deliberate choice to reflect the dynamic of the earlier era.
So, who knows if the future Daffy’s personality is going to follow this reversion to the 1950 and earlier version, the later version, or something entirely different!
May 1951 according to the wiki, so earlier than my Nov '51 cite.