Alpine Antics (1936, dir: Jack King) is a Looney Tune more-so in title than in spirit. It opens with a musical number that establishes the premise: wild antics at a skiing resort. It has one brief sequence of ingenuity during this opening, wherein three snowmen walk on screen singing a sing, then unknowingly walk in front of a fire and melt as their cue comes to an end. It doesn't cut away and shows us the gradual melting frame-by-frame, a bit that is very well drawn. It also subverts the Disney aesthetic, if only slightly. To take the wholesome image of jolly snowmen singing a song, and then place them by a fire and watch as their bodies die. It's morbid for a G-rated audience. Jack King struggled - and largely proved unable - to shed his Disney sensibilities. After all, it was the studio that gave him work on an Academy Award winning film (the 1933 short
The Three Little Pigs won Best Animated Short).
There is a montage of a variety of animal-based folk engaging in various snow activities. Beans and Little Kitty sign up for a ski race, which sets up the cartoon's focus from here on out. Also competing is a big bully who looks and acts a lot like regular Disney antagonist Pete. Also present on the sidelines in several sequences is a character which a striking resemblance to Goofy. Warner Bros ripped off Micky for years in trying to establish their own flagship character (Bosko, Buddy, Foxy, Beans), but this an obvious case of Looney Tunes now mimicking
other known Disney characters. Another Goofy lookalike appears in
Westward Whoa (1936, dir: Jack King). This one also gets a musical opening to establish the setting: a group of pioneers traveling the western frontier. This cartoon's about as unfunny as
Alpine Antics, and also hurt severely by its depiction of Native Americans, which today makes it an uncomfortable watch. Ham and Ex are the trouble making boys who cry wolf, but instead of wolf, it's "indian". They shout "indian" over and over to get the adults all worked up, but then they actually do get chased by the natives later on, who are portrayed as mindless barbarians who presumably want to murder the children. This stinker of a cartoon marks the final appearance of the Ham and Ex puppies, and is Beans the Cat's last starring role. Tex Avery's Porky shorts were proving to be a lot more successful than King's Beans efforts, so Schlesinger started pivoting towards Porky as the next potential Looney Tunes star. By mid-1936 Porky is the last remaining
I Haven't Got A Hat (1935) character. Everyone else is phased out in favour of Porky-solo vehicles, which Schlesinger Studios would lean heavy on throughout the rest of the '30s. This move could be seen as an indirect push of support on Avery from Leon Schlesinger, and maybe also an intent to phase out King, who now had two characters taken away and retired (Buddy and Beans)
In contrast to King's recent musical-number-opening shorts,
The Blow Out (1936, dir: Tex Avery) immediately creates a conflict: a cloaked bomber is slithering across town, blowing up banks, and stealing their money. We see him execute the crime, which is then followed with a
Citizen Kane-like sequence of newspaper headlines atop newspaper headlines, explaining that there is a $2000 reward to anyone who helps capture the bomber. The next scene reveals the bomber's Universal horror-esque secret lair, as he creates his next explosive: a bomb inside of a clock. One of the most notable images is one of the earliest instances instances of Looney Tunes animating a deliberately ugly character, with unflattering human features. A close-up of his hands piecing the device together is used. His forearms are bony and hairy, his hands and fingers long and just slightly misshapen. He has large arching eyebrows and his shadow gives him what looks like devil's horns. So much of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies up to this point is continuing the cute-animals tradition laid out by Walt Disney and Ub Iweks, but this character stands out. While most Looney Tunes characters will continue to be animals, the creative manner in which they'll be animated will break further away from the Disney mold.
Porky Pig, meanwhile, is five pennies short of buying an ice cream soda. The unfortunate sad sack is ready to give up and go home, but after he helps a stranger pick up a fallen cane, he is awarded one penny. The ingenious Porky now aggressively chases old men on the brink of dropping canes or old women dropping purses, in hopes of getting four more pennies to buy his ice cream. The bomber leaves the ticking clock bomb at the side of a bank and flees, but Porky sees this and now tries everything he can to return the clock to its owner. A chase ensues, with the two running from point a to b in every location we see them; city streets, on top of buildings, manhole covers, and finally back to the bomber's lair. Porky gives the bomb back in the nick of time, for the bomber to be on the receiving end of the blast, and soon after getting arrested. Porky is given a bag of $2000 and buys
all the ice cream sodas he can handle.
In
Plane Dippy (1936, dir: Tex Avery), Porky joins the Air Corps. His first obstacle occurs in the enrollment office when his stutter blocks his speech. "I wanna learn to", he begins, and then after a few stalled attempts at continuing, he makes an airplane flying motion with his arms. When he is asked for his name, all he can get out is a series of "P-"s. Even when he is given a chalkboard, he spells in stutters too. As someone with a speech impediment of sorts, myself, Porky Pig makes me feel seen. He finally manages to blurt out his full name, which is Porky Cornelius Washington Otis Lincoln Abner Aloysius Casper Jefferson Philbert Horatius Narcissus Pig. What follows is a montage of Porky messing up every part of his Air Corps training. For the safety of everyone around him Porky is then kept away from further action, and is instructed to clean and act as assistant to a robot plane scientist, who has just invented a voice operated one-person aircraft. Later, while Porky is dusting the robot plane, two children (one played by Little Kitty in one of her final roles) are showing a pet dog tricks, but unbeknownst to all, the voice operated controller has been laid on an open windowsill, and every command the kids yell to the dog are also instructing the robot plane. Porky falls into the plane's seat, and the cartoon's centerpiece gag plays out. It's a three minute sequence, as Porky is helpless to the plane's whims, as it zig zags across the sky, nearly hits other airplanes, dives underwater, chases cloud people. This scene has a similar energy and purpose to the chase in
The Blow Out, but doesn't have as much visual spontaneity. It is a charming gag but too long and repetitive given the lack of ordeals it can actually put Porky through. When Porky finally lands, he quits the Air Corps and joins the Army.
Porky goes fishing in
Fish Tales (1936, dir: Jack King) and has a truly bizarre dream. This is King's first Porky-centric short and it does feel closer in energy and plotting to Avery's previous Porky films than it does to the Beans cartoons King had just finished making. I do wonder if King was encouraged or told to follow Avery's example, or if it was King's idea to play along and help create a uniform Porky formula. Keeping music out of the Looney Tunes is smart. There is no need to double down on the already hit-and-miss formula of the Merrie Melodies. When Porky falls asleep in his boat, surrealism takes over. A fish at the bottom of the lake hooks a line up in Porky and drags him down underwater. The remaining cartoon is mostly set underwater, with thick water lines drawn on the frames to create the off effect of being someplace
strange. The lines aren't entirely successful at depicting under-water goggle vision but they're good enough at illustrating that at the very least, we're in an unusual place. The fish drags his catch (Porky) back home, where he is greeted by his fish wife and fish kids. This fish dad, as he is revealed, throws Porky up on a table and "skins" him with a large knife, by slicing off his clothes. Porky is spiced, placed on a cooking pan and slid into a burning oven. Luckily, he manages to escape pretty easily by pushing the top of the oven off which kills the flame (it's probably really difficult to work ovens underwater). He's now on the run, and gets into fights with various animals, but is stopped by an octopus, who spanks and chokes Porky, waking him from his dream.
Fish Tales isn't an especially funny cartoon, but its weirdness works to its advantage; it's a creative take on living-a-day-in-another-person's-shoes, which can be construed in this context as a pro-vegetarian angle, whether or not that's what the animators intended.
Porky faces off against a tyrannical ship captain in
Shanghaied Shipmates (1936, dir: Jack King). The establishing shots of the tavern filled with patrons and the quiet ship are really well drawn. There is a thick foggy haze drowning the night. It utilizes the same technique as the underwater-lines in
Fish Tales but better executed; the fog lines flowing gently across the frame. The abusive captain makes life on his ship a living hell, forcing Porky to eat a bar of of soap, and torturing another sailor by clamping his limbs and having a kitten lick his milk-soaked toes. In a particularly cruel dinner-table scene, the captain proceeds to eat chicken, one leg at a time, and feeding his crew only the bones of what he's already eaten first. Porky rallies up the crew to confront their abuser, concluding in a scrappy fight where the villain gets his comeuppance, even though it feels a little too much as him getting off easy. The cartoon is lite on gags and unmemorable.
Porky's Pet (1936, dir: Jack King) is an ostrich named Lulu, who he tries to get to an animal show where he is promised a payment of $75 per day. Lulu speaks in nonsensical jibber jabber frequently throughout, often sounding like an inebriated Daffy Duck who lost the ability to form words. Porky is having a tough time traveling with Lulu as the train conductor will not allow animals on board. He later sneaks her on, where she causes a scene eating many things in sight (a wig, a toy plane, an accordion). There's a decent visual later where Porky stuffs Lulu into a guitar case, and the pet's body molds into the shape of the case, later sprouting its legs out of the case to run around. My favourite sight gag in the short is at the beginning, though, when Lulu is first shown: she rests her head inside a bird cage, while the remainder of her big ostrich body sits in a rocking chair. This is an oddly laid out film, though, because the opening part with the telegram and Porky's job offer never gets a pay off. What would expectedly be the middle-part of the cartoon (Porky and Lulu trying to get to their destination against many obstacles) in fact makes up most of this short. It gives
Porky's Pet a static feel; it's stuck in one mode for too long, with nowhere to go, and the entire film feels like a series of variations on one joke: look at this goofy bird.
I Love to Singa (1936, dir: Tex Avery) has peculiarly become a classic of sorts and is perhaps the most culturally recognizable Warner Bros cartoon up to this point. With animation by Chuck Jones, Virgil Ross and Bob Clampett, and composed by Norman Spencer, this is a warm and cozy film, descriptors not often associated with Tex Avery. And while it is Avery's most iconic early cartoon (even more-so than
Page Miss Glory), it doesn't have his obvious style. Like
Page Miss Glory, this one is a Merrie Melodies. While that one existed mostly as an excuse to show off some exquisite art deco drawings and animation,
I Love to Singa is a musical through-and-through. This parody retelling of
The Jazz Singer opens at the home of Prof. Fritz Owl, "Teacher of Voice, Piano & Violin, BUT- NO JAZZ!", as the signs outside his house kindly inform the viewer. Fritz's wife has given birth to four eggs which have just hatched, and upon opening their eyes to the world for the first time, spring to life with a song. The first owlet sings bars from an opera, the second plays a violin, the third a flute, all three performing classical pieces of music. The fourth owlet hatches, this little guy dressed in a red jacket as opposed to his siblings in black suits, and immediately springs into a cheery jazz song to the horror of his music-snob parents. The little owlet is Owl Jolson (a not-so-subtle riff of
The Jazz Singer's Al Jolson) and all he wants to sing is "I Love to Singa", a song which originated from
The Singing Kid, another Al Jolson film. The song was performed multiple times in its original musical, and that carries over here, where its infectious opening lines are sung many times throughout. Even in scenes where "I Love to Singa" is not sung, an instrumental of the song occasionally scores the film.
Owl Jolson's parents give him singing lessons which threaten to crush his spirit; his voice here is strained, off-key, and monotone. When he has enough, he returns to singing his favourite song, which prompts Fritz Owl to kick his crooning jazz-singer of a son out of his house. Refusing to let homelessness and parental abandonment get him down, Jolson puts on a smile and jaunts his way to the local radio station and enters in an amateur music contest, "Jack Bunny and his Amateur Hour". Hard-to-please Jack gongs contestant after contestant. A country bird who struggles his way through the nursery rhyme "Simple Simon" is voiced by Joe Dougherty, the voice of Porky Pig. While his voice was sped up for Porky, here we hear his natural stutter. After painfully reciting "Simple Simon", this bird chooses to gong himself.
I Love to Singa's biggest laugh occurs when Mother Owl is home crying listening to the radio, and asks out loud, "I wonder if they found my little boy". Without missing a beat, the radio broadcaster breaks his routine and responds, "No we didn't, lady", inciting a hilarious double take reaction out of both parents. When Mother hears her son sing on the radio, she grabs Fritz and the three kids and they dash to the radio station. Owl Jolson is awarded Jack Bunny's first-place trophy and is welcomed back by his family, who now accept their son's differences.
Owl Jolson is perhaps Looney Tunes' and Merrie Melodies' first truly sympathetic character, and that may be partly why
I Love to Singa has endured like it has over the years. Bosko, Buddy, Foxy, Piggy and Beans barely have a personality between the lot of them, their cartoons are generally as two-dimensional as they are, but that isn't the case with Owl Jolson. Porky, in his early days, has the makings of an interesting character, but up to now we don't feel for his plights. His cartoons are adventures, just like his predecessor Looney Tunes stars. There is a relatable story in
I Love to Singa. It is fundamentally about a young person who is ridiculed and later ostracized from their immediate family for being different, and for refusing to follow in the rigid footsteps laid out by their parents. The young person is passionate about their identity, to compromise that part of their character is to destroy one's self. So rather than let their external situation roadblock their life, they leave home and forge their own path. The story is real. And in the case of
I Love to Singa, the owls are cute and the music is fun too. This is the most purely enjoyable Warner Bros cartoon the studio had then released. It's not the funniest, or the most subversive, or visually groundbreaking, but it's got a lot of heart and it's
fun.
Porky the Rain-maker (1936, dir: Tex Avery) features a father Porky and a son Porky so perhaps it incidentally explains the inconsistencies of Porky's age in his formative era (being a child in
I Haven't Got A Hat and an adult in
Gold Diggers of '49, for example). The later, classic version of Porky that is universally recognized closer resembles the child from these years, so the older, adult Porky seems the odder incarnation of the character, today. Father Porky gives Porky some money to go buy some feed for their farm animals (who are currently on strike because everyone is suffering in this time of drought and the animals are all malnourished). Before he goes to the market, his attention is taken by a man on the street selling magic pills, including one that advertises the power to make it rain. Porky buys them, infuriating his father for wasting the money. Father tosses the pills, some of which are eaten by the farm animals, which causes some shenanigans. A duck swallows a lightning pill and is then shocked by multiple bolts of lightning. Another animal nearly eats the rain pill but Porky saves it just in time, to cause a rainfall and save the day.
Porky the Rain-maker is enjoyable if a little basic, but its most iconic Tex moment happens at the very end. As Porky and father and the animals celebrate in the rain, they suddenly begin moving uncontrollably with a weather symptom (lightning, fog, hurricane) controlling the motion of each body. The screen pans to black through a circular ring coming from all sides of the frame moving towards the centre. A duck "pops out" of the scene and lands in the black void for a moment, and immediately freaks out and quacks and stomps his fists against the backdrop to be let back in. Father Porky's arm extends out and grabs the duck back in. The inspired lunacy will become commonplace, the chaotic fourth-wall breakers a staple of the Looney Tunes.
Frank Tashlin began working in animation in 1930 when he was in his late teens, first for Paul Terry's studio, and later for the Van Beuren Studios. He was hired by Leon Schlesinger in 1933 during the tumultuous period when Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising were leaving, and Schlesinger had to start up his own cartoon studio with Tom Palmer and Earl Duvall. Tashlin's first credited work as an animator may have been on
Buddy's Beer Garden (1933). In 1934 he freelanced his own comic strip in his free time and Schlesinger demanded to get a cut of the profits. Tashlin refused, and was fired from Schlesinger Studios. He went on to work briefly under Ub Iweks, and then as a gag writer for Hal Roach Studios, where he came up with jokes for
Our Gang and Laurel and Hardy films. Schlesinger, who wasn't one to hold a grudge, wanted to hire Tashlin back in 1936, with the promise that he would direct cartoons. In a 1971 interview with animation historian Michael Barrier, Tashlin said that Schlesinger wanted him to lead a new animator unit that was opening up. This implies that Leon either had plans to fire Jack King, or King made his intentions known to Schlesinger that he would be very soon leaving. Either way, King was on his way out, with Tashlin taking over. Frank Tashlin, in his second Warner Bros tenure, now brings with him experience with working on live-action films. This is not commonplace in the 1930s, where animators for the most part only worked in animation (and comic strips). The medium was still young and impressionable. Tash returns with a fresh new perspective, and some (not a lot, but more than most) knowledge and hands-on experience on the technical components of film. More-so than any of the Warner Bros animators before him, Tash tackles animation as a cinematic art, and directs cartoons as if they were live-action.
Porky's Poultry Plant (1936, dir: Frank Tashlin) marks Tash's directing debut for Warner Bros, using the adult Porky character design often used by Jack King (Avery preferred the younger version; there are exceptions to both, as there were no rules or off-limit Porky designs to animation units). Porky takes care of a poultry farm, and the first half of this cartoon is similar in style and pacing to earlier Merrie Melodies and Disney's Silly Symphonies. It's essentially a cute montage of daily farm activities, such as Porky feeding the various animals, sometimes with dubious consequences. In a nicely directed sequence, Porky throws bird feed directly at the camera, which cuts to a reverse perspective shot of the feed's trajectory now falling away from the camera and onto the ground in the middle of the frame. Three chickens (each from a different end of the scenery, off-frame) run on frame toward the feed, hitting each other all at once, and after a puff of smoke clears, their necks have become tangled.
Porky sorrowfully walks past a memorial wall of all the chickens who have been kidnapped or killed by the fiendish hawk, or Public Chicken Enemy No. 1, as a sign conveniently labels him. In a match cut, we segue from the sign of a hawk to the actual hawk flying high above the farm. He launches an all-out attack on the chickens which takes up the entirety of the cartoon's second half. It too, follows a similar formula to the earlier Merrie Melodies previously discussed: the cute group of protagonists band together to defend themselves against a common villain. This is formulaic only in idea; in its execution, it's the fastest moving most quick cutting animation we've seen from a 'Tune or 'Melodie. The hawk (and later, hawks, once he calls in reinforcements) swoops down and around many times in an attempt at capturing the fleeing chickens and chicks, as Porky jumps in a helicopter to chase the foe and shoot at him. There are many shots which last for one or two seconds before cutting away. A shot of the hawk swooping down, a shot of chicks frantically running around, a shot back at the hawk, another shot of chickens elsewhere trying to hide. This manic energy lasts for the better part of four minutes. There are even birds-eye-view camera angles from the viewpoint of the hawk's eyes as he dives down towards the farm. Where the plane flying sequences in
Plane Dippy were often static and lacked energy, the cutting in
Porky's Poultry's Plant creates a suspenseful exciting climax where Porky's helicopter is nosediving out of control. It cuts quickly many times between shots of Porky going down, to various reactions from the animals watching, which only last one second or a little less. Speed and urgency are conveyed very effectively in this cartoon's closing minutes.
Porky's Poultry Plant is a step forward for American animation. Tashlin approaches cartoon film making with an eye for camera angles, perspective shifts, and cutting techniques not so heavily utilized by his predecessors or contemporaries before him. In a relatively short time span, Tex Avery and Frank Tashlin have saved Warner Bros animation from potentially falling into obscurity as a second rate Disney imitation, and given Looney Tunes a creative urgency. With a lot of artistic freedom allotted to them by Leon Schlesinger, Tex and Tash bring their personal comic and cinematic sensibilities to cartoons, and form styles that haven't been seen before. This is still a formative period for the company, but even some of their earliest shorts display a lot of ingenuity, while still hinting at daffy qualities that would soon emerge.
Note: I will not be watching every single Looney Tunes and Merrie
Melodies film, only the ones made easily available across the essential
DVD and Blu-ray video compilations (Golden Collection, Looney Tunes
Super Stars, Chuck Jones Mouse Chronicles, Platinum Collection, Warner
Archive's Porky Pig 101)
Historical information in this and other installments come from three invaluable sources:
Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, by Leonard Maltin
Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in its Golden Age, by Michael Barrier
Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons, by Jerry Beck & Will Friedwald
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