At Snazelle, Cruikshank began developing her best-known work, Quasi at the Quackadero(1975), working titles of which included I Walked with a Duck, Hold That Quasi, and Quasi Quacks Up. The 10-minute, 35mm short, with 100 watercolor backgrounds and approximately 5,000 cels, took two years for Cruikshank to draw, followed by four months for photography and post-production. Cruikshank independently financed the $6,000 budget, which went primarily for cel painting, sound recording and lab and camera work. Underground cartoonist Kim Deitch, then Cruikshank’s boyfriend, did some of the inking, using dip pen and rapidograph, with Kathryn Lenihan doing most of the cel painting. The short starred Quasi, voiced by Deitch; Anita, which one writer described as “Betty Boop with a New Wave wardrobe” and whose Mae West-like voice was supplied by Cruikshank; and robot Rollo, also voiced by Cruikshank. They progress through the Quackadero, a Coney Island-esque sideshow with such attractions as the Hall of Time Mirrors, which depict the viewer as he or she will look in “old age” or “100 years from now”, and the Time Holes, in which one can lean on a railing and see a live slice of three million years B.C. unfold. The music, by the Berkeley, California band the Cheap Suit Serenaders, used slide flute, xylophone, ukulele, duck call, boat whistle and bagpipe to create what Cruikshank called the “strange, gallopy feeling” of 1920s/1930s dance-band music, of which she is a devotee.
