Henry Kissinger died earlier tonight, at the age of 100; the former secretary of state/Nobel Peace Prize winner/accused war criminal was more properly the subject of pop culture, rather than a participant in it, and so he’d normally be outside our typical milieu for obituaries. (As much as we would love to fill an obit of Kissinger with video clips of The Venture Bros.’ Mary Poppins-esque “Dr. Henry Killinger, and his Magic Murder Bag.”) Even so, like most major American figures who did a lot of TV, Kissinger did have an IMDB page, mostly logging his various talk show appearances, and in perusing said page this evening, we came across a very strange question:
To wit: Why the hell did Henry Kissinger play a cartoon duck on a 1999 episode of HBO’s Happily Ever After, an animated series reimagining classic fairy tales for (then-) modern kids?
It’s one of only three credited appearances the man ever made as an actor, with the other two both as a version of himself—on Dynasty in 1983, and then in 1999 on single-season sitcom Brother’s Keeper, where he played himself as a guest on Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect. (Kissinger had one of his several memoirs out in 1999, so we imagine he was feeling stage-friendly at the time.) For Happily Ever After, though, he played an actual character, bumbling police chief “Ducky Daddles,” one of several avian characters who ends up convinced the sky is falling after local political reporter Henny Penny (Sharon Stone!) makes such a report as part of the show’s version of hard-hitting political satire.
For those who don’t remember, Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales For Every Child was a bit like HBO’s more multicultural answer to Animaniacs, telling updated version of familiar fairy tale stories with snappy animation (recognizably the product of Bebe’s Kids and The Proud Family’s Bruce W. Smith), charming Robert Guillaume narration, and a whole lot of famous people doing guest roles. (Denzel Washington, Jay Leno, and Whoopi Goldberg all appeared at various points during its three-season run, just to name a few.) Most of the episodes attempted to give kids a version of these old stories where characters weren’t just white and European, and the series is fondly, if lightly, remembered to this day.
“Henny Penny” is weird even by the show’s standards, though, going heavily into the political for both its picks and its subject matter, and featuring not just Kissinger and Stone, but also Jessie Jackson, Rudy Giuliani, Geraldine Ferraro, and not just one, but two members of O.J. Simpson’s “Dream Team” in its ranks—with Johnnie Cochran clearly having some irony-laden fun taking a starring role as the manipulative fox who lures the fear-stricken birds into his trap. (Alan Dershowitz is less fun as a gullible turkey; we can only assume F. Lee Bailey was too busy to play an unctuous quail.)
Watching it on Max—whole show’s on Max, by the way, it’s a trip—though, and nothing is stranger than Kissinger, who issues a stilted, stumbling voice performance that gets laughs only by accident. (We wondered for a moment if it was an impersonator, but someone doing a good Kissinger impression would presumably have given a better turn.) Most of the appeal is just in the audacity of having Kissinger doing this kind of role, presumably to the delight (?) of ’90s parents—who would then, like us, get to watch in open-mouthed shock as the episode ends with the Henry Kissinger duck ordering a bombing raid on the hapless fox, his “deputies” dutifully pelting Cochrane’s character with weapons from the sky. Shit you not.
Tragically, there’s not a lot of scholarship left online about Happily Ever After, and so there’s no immediate answer to the question of why the hell Kissinger decided to take this singular foray into the world of voicing animated fowl. (We suspect that Stone, a vocal Kissinger fan and the most famous actor in the episode’s cast list, might have pulled some strings.) Nevertheless, the point stands: Henry Kissinger is many things; his legacy will be fought over from now until probably forever. And one time, he played a cartoon duck.