Queer Duck: The Movie was born when Viacom’s Paramount Home Video came along after the corporation’s other arm, Showtime, cancelled the series. Unless otherwise noted, all images © Paramount Home Video 2006.

When the Flash cartoon Queer Duck premiered on icebox.com in 1999, Mike Reiss had no idea what was in store for his fey feathered friend. A confluence of factors drove the veteran Simpsons scribe to create Adam Seymour Duckstein, not the least of which was the chance to write without the heavy hands of TV executives leaving fingerprints all over his scripts.

“Icebox came along at a time when I was extremely jaded with TV,” Reiss recalls. “I sort of quit for a few years. What they offered was, ‘whatever you write we will produce.’ There was no money involved, but the idea of seeing something rendered exactly as I’d written it just grabbed me. That’s why all the writers got involved with Icebox: Larry David, a lot of big names jumped at it. It seemed like part of the dotcom gold rush, but in TV your work is compromised so often that if someone says ‘if you want to work for free we won’t fuck it up,’ that’s the greatest offer you’ve ever gotten.”

Queer Duck creator Mike Reiss sensed that gay men constituted a strong TV core audience, but were nearly invisible on the airwaves. When Dr. Laura declared war on gays, Reiss decided, “to do a gay Bugs Bunny.”

Reiss created and wrote Icebox’s first series, Hard Drinkin’ Lincoln, episodes that were animated by New York City Flash artist Xeth Feinberg. Meanwhile, Reiss had come across a magazine article stating that the core audience for HBO’s Sex and the City consisted of gay men, and realized to a great extent that viewership was a result of the near-total invisibility of gays on TV. Then came the icing on the cake.

“At the same time Dr. Laura Schlesinger sort of declared war on gay people. Right there I said ‘I’m going to do a gay Bugs Bunny — and Dr. Laura will be my Elmer Fudd. That was it — Queer Duck came out of a double sense of outrage. It was a comedy act of conscience, of which I’ve only had one in my career.”

While Bugs’ sexual orientation has long been a matter of speculation in some quarters (largely as a result of his penchant for cross-dressing), Queer Duck is a loudly out and proud male nurse. In his very first outing, as a matter of fact, he tells a waiting room full of patients “attention everyone, I have an announcement: I… am a homosexual!” to which a bored moose replies, “so what’s the announcement?” A few episodes later, a shotgun-toting Dr. Laura pursued Queer Duck, Elmer Fudd-style through a gay disco.

Queer Duck was another cross-country Reiss and Feinberg collaboration. As with Lincoln, Reiss handled voice-over recording chores in Los Angeles, while Feinberg animated the episodes in his sprawling production facility — actually, the spare bedroom of his Lower East Side walk-up apartment. “I couldn’t believe how funny, how great he made my work,” Reiss says of his partner. “Usually my dream in animation is that the animator can render what I have in my head — I hope he gets the jokes and makes the most of the humor. With Xeth you always get something new back. It’s like watching somebody else’s work because he adds so much. It’s a pleasure, it’s so much fun to work with him”