Milk and Money (1936, dir: Tex Avery) brings back the father-and-son dynamic last seen in
Porky the Rain-maker (the father clearly tells us that his son is Porky in this one) and introduces mischievous little Hank Horsefly. Hank has a liking to the Porkys, and when he uses his stinger it causes either a little trouble or helps the characters along. Porky plows the field with his slow-horse, and one sting from Hank on the horse's bottom, causes the horse to run, which helps them finish the job in seconds. Their cruel landlord, Mr. Viper, who slithers across the ground and might as well be twirling his mustache to further exude his villainy, wants to evict Father Porky and Little Porky unless they can pay up a large sum of money which they obviously do not have. After Viper leaves, Father explains to Porky that their outlook is looking "pretty dark, son. pretty dark". The screen literally dims as this is said, with heavy shades of grey clouding everything in frame. Porky responds "lighten up, pa", with his hands outstretched, and motioning upward, as the screen lightens back to its previous state. Porky's got an idea: he's going to get a job in The City to pay that rent.
Porky and his horse get a job delivering milk, but Hank Horsefly tracks their scent and follows them. Hank, the trouble-maker that he is, stings the horse again, causing him to run frantically, and crash into a light poll, which has been permanently indented to the specific shape of the horse's head. With all the bottles smashed, Porky is out of a job, but accidentally signs up for a horse race, which they win only after the help from one of Hank's stings. The horse race is a nicely animated climax, utilizing Avery's love of speed lines, cutting from overhead shots of the racetrack, to side view close ups of amusing race hijinks (such as blasts of wind causing the opposing horses and their riders to switch places mid-running). In a closing curtain call which recalls
Porky the Rain-maker, Porky hauls down the black credit page, but Mr. Viper is left in the foreground and thus is pushed out of the scene, now sitting alone on the black screen besides "That's All, Folks!" This ending gag of a character being squeezed out of the cartoon is a Tex Avery staple, but will evolve and play out in different ways.
Milk and Money is fairly routine, and not a standout Tex cartoon from this era, but enjoyable with a few creative gags.
Carl W. Stalling makes his debut scoring for Warner Bros animation in this time period (
Porky's Poultry Plant being his first), having previously worked for Disney and Ub Iwerks. Norman Spencer, the previous composer, was appropriately of his time, and made fine sounding cartoons but his music rarely elevated the film (
I Love to Singa is one of the exceptions). Stalling was more adept at orchestrating music that consistently synced with the images on the film, had a more diverse palette of genre and often succeeded at putting in music cues that would complement the visual gags. Stalling would be the music director for Warner Bros. Cartoons for 22 years, and worked on nearly every Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies made in that time.
In
Porky's Moving Day (1936, dir: Jack King), a woman who looks suspiciously like Disney's Clarabelle Cow is panicking because her house is about to fall into the sea. When the house is shown, it was clearly built atop this cliff with ill-advised wooden supports to give it some semblance of balance and structure, but didn't factor in strong waves potentially crashing in, from underneath. That's what's happening now, and a cut to the house's interior shows the rooms going topsy-turvy, tilting violently back and forth, making sudden sharp movements, causing everything in the house to be thrown around, while the worried cow lady tries to best to hold furniture in place. It's refreshing to see a Jack King Looney Tune start off with such urgency. The constant tilting of the frame throughout maintains the threat, keeping its characters always on their toes (or in this case, fighting to stand on their own two feet). The cow lady makes an urgent phone call to Porky's Moving Van, because calling a moving company as your house is beginning to fall off a cliff into the ocean is a logical decision to make during such an emergency. Porky, his sleepy boxing-obsessed ape employee named Dopey, and the horrible ostrich Lulu, race at top speed to the house. The sidekick is useless at his job, sinking into a boxing stance and punching the air around him at any whim, and only a knock to the head or a bell can shake him out of it. Porky meanwhile, is throwing furniture out the window with a manic glee.
In a splendidly animated scene later, Porky is rolling up carpet with his feet as he essentially rides it throughout the house. It cuts to a perspective in which Porky is at the end of the hall, in the deep background, running forward, moving closer towards the camera. There are open doorways on both the left and right. From the left doorway closest to the camera out struts an oblivious Lulu, who is immediately trampled by the carpet and sucked inside, as it cuts to Porky now riding the fabric down a flight of stairs. It's an unexpectedly funny scene because Lulu doesn't enter the frame until the final second of the shot. There aren't a lot of quick-paced visual punch-lines in this era of Warner Bros animation, and
Porky's Moving Day is shot with hyper, manic glee. The chaotic nature of the plot and the shakiness of the rooms instill a need for constant action, and Jack King and his team (animators Paul Smith and Joe D'Igalo) prove capable. This is undoubtedly one of the best King directed Looney Tunes shorts. Since joining the Schlesinger studio in 1933, he directed 9 Buddy cartoons, 7 for the Beans-and-friends-era, and 4 starring Porky.
A Cartoonist's Nightmare (1935) and
Porky's Moving Day are probably his finest works among these.
This is Jack King's final work for Warner Bros and Leon Schlesinger. Perhaps he was feeling more out of place with the recent success and creative direction of Tex Avery and Frank Tashlin, but ultimately he left of his own volition, wooed back by Disney under the promise that he could direct colour cartoons. This decision proved beneficial to everyone. Warner Bros lost its last vestige of hardcore Disney sensibilities and continued to develop their own Looney Tune style, and King got to flourish as well, as one of the leading directors of Donald Duck shorts. He debuted with the classic
Modern Inventions (1937), immediately establishing Disney as a more suitable home for his talents, and went on to direct over 40 Donald cartoons over 11 years, retiring in 1948. He died on October 4, 1958, at the age of 62.
Porky is a member of the French Foreign Legion located in the Middle East in
Little Beau Porky (1936, dir: Frank Tashlin), which is enough to let you know this cartoon is going to feature some bizarre or uncomfortable cultural and racial stereotypes. Tashlin patiently sets up this short, with roughly a minute long intro first establishing the setting, progressing into a montage of shadows cast against brick walls of the French military marching the street accompanied by trumpets. The commanding officer is a burly man with every inch of his uniform taken up by medals which all clang together whenever he walks. He looks over at his troops in a line, the camera passing from one end to the other. Porky is shown last, slouching on a fellow soldier. He doesn't appear until 1 minute 30 seconds in, and this cartoon is 8 minutes, slightly longer than the norm. The Commandant yells, "Porky Pig", and when Porky jumps into an upright position he slips a little as his heels click, tipping over every other soldier like bowling pins, panning left to right. He yells again, "Attention!", and the action is now reversed, with every soldier now falling back to their original upright positions, the same bowling pin sound effect cuing, panning right to left. A third yell, "Porky Pig!", and Porky finally acknowledges his superior. Tashlin has a bizarre sense of slapstick humour; in this instance a gag is completed upon seeing a scene that just played out, now play in reverse, to revert all characters to their starting positions.
Due to his screw ups, Porky is demoted to camel washer, which he isn't very adept at, either. Word gets to the Commandant that Ali Mode and his gang of desert Riff Raffs are on their way to attack the Foreign Legion's base. In a rallying-the-troops montage, obviously a reworking of D.W. Griffith's earlier established cross-cutting techniques, the troops prepare for battle. Brief sequences of soldiers marching, running out of the base, arming themselves and mounting camels, are cross-dissolved against one continuous close-up of a man blowing into a bugle, which is also the sound that scores the scene. Every soldier marches towards the enemies - except Porky, who is forced to stay back because he's a lowly "camel-scrubber". Porky is nailing boards against the doors while Ali Mode and his men are right outside the base, having evaded the French military. Now having to defend the entire base by himself (and one camel), Porky holds the door shut, refusing to give in to Ali Mode's demands. The filmmaking in the final minute and a half to
Little Beau Porky is fantastic. We saw in his debut
Porky's Poultry Plant how Tashlin pushed the Looney Tunes to a level of speed conveyed through editing and cutting previously unseen from their studio; well he tries - and may have succeeded - at topping himself here. A handful of Mode's henchmen dig under the base and up through the ground inside, right in front of Porky. Without hesitation he chops down a tree conveniently at his side which crashes down and smacks the Riff Raffs. Cut back to outside the base and the same henchmen fly out of the holes they just dug. This scene is four seconds. An enemy with a gun blasts at Porky as he runs up the spiral stairs of the base to the top tower where he gets behind his own gun and shoots the supporting floor from under the first shooter, who falls down a well, smacking another Riff Raff on the way. As Porky continues firing to keep the enemies away, Ali Mode climbs up a ladder underneath, and just before pushing his way in, Porky is seen shooting an enemy, and then kicks the trap door down, pushing Mode down through the ladder breaking every rung. A second later, Porky fires at someone else, Mode repeating his plan with a new ladder, befalling the same fate, and as Porky shoots yet another enemy, Mode goes for a third attempt with a third ladder, and when Porky kicks down on the trap, this time, he crashes, and falls along with Mode. The villain lands on the camel, who beats him up by somehow smashing his bumps back and forth into him, until Porky throws him into a barrel of Cairo Syrup. Porky and the camel end the cartoon with as many clanging medals as the Commandant did at the beginning.
The Village Smithy (1936, dir: Tex Avery) opens with a dissection of cartoon set-up. It is introduced through narration (by Earle Hodgins) of lines from the poem which shares a title with this short. The narrator is effectively creating the scene, as a tree falls from the sky and plops on the ground on his cue, followed then by the titular village smithy (blacksmith). The smithy apparently doesn't hear or pay attention to the narrator's initial proclamation that he is supposed to be standing. The narrator angrily repeats himself and calls the smithy a "lug", who then does what he is told. This is a repeating gag throughout; the omniscient narrator - or perhaps God, seeing as how his very words are able to conjure up the physical objects which occupy this world - interacts with his characters and tries stubbornly to get them to obey. The narrator is trying to tell a quaint picturesque story, unfortunately, he's in a Looney Tune.
The remainder of this film is a little more conventional, as Porky clumsily works in the Blacksmith for his boss (the aforementioned smithy). Porky tries whacking a horseshoe with a hammer, and for some reason it ricochets off and smacks him in the face. He examines the horseshoe, and strategically lowers his body away from the horseshoe as he whacks it again; this time, his hammer ricochets and hits him on the head. He puts a helmet on, and hits it again, this time without any repercussions. With a big grin, he takes the helmet off, and clumsily smacks himself in the cheek with his hammer. The final bit of action is set off when Porky slips and drops a burning hot horseshoe on a horse's bottom, which causes him to run frantically out of the shop, tumbling into the smithy along the way, as he falls over into the horse's carriage as they barrel through the town and country side. They trample through a house, knock down a bank (which reveals a masked robber trying to open the vault). leap over a chasm, and then pause to reflect on recent events. They are frozen in time, as the smithy and the horse look into the camera. The smithy exhales and says, "Whew, what a buggy ride!". They resume racing at top speed, until they are stopped by a fence. The fence then hurls them back at top speed in the opposite direction, as they reverse their path facing the wrong way. The scene plays in reverse, and the horse stops again as the smithy says the same line but this time backwards. We see everything become undone, except the first (now last) part of the joyride plays out differently. The house they destroyed is now being rebuilt and is nearly complete. The carpenters see smithy and the horse, and push the house to the side to avoid it getting damaged again, and then slide it back into place. The joyride is reversed to the point where they're back in the Blacksmith shop, and a confused smithy asks Porky what just happened. Porky is reluctant to answer, because surely cartoon logic dictates that he can't simply say what happened, he has to show it, and by doing so, may cause the same chain of events to occur. Porky grabs a horseshoe, scorches it in the fire, drops it on the horse, who then barrels through the shop's walls with smithy in carriage as we just saw. They trample through and destroy the newly reconstructed house from moments ago, and speed through the same chain of events, as the cartoon comes to a close.
The Village Smithy's basic plot has no particularly distinct qualities, but through Avery's incorporated elements of the angry narrator/god constructing a cartoon of his own conventional image, and the cyclical loop of hell Porky inadvertently spawns at the end, it functions beyond the normal narrative-based cartoon. Avery is stripping down the cartoon's socially accepted format and building it up in
his own image. Walt Disney was progressively polishing the animated short medium over the course of the 1930s. While Fleischer Studios had a great appreciation for the surreal and didn't play along, which in turn influenced others such as the Van Burern Studio, for the most part, the increasingly popular Disney was seen as the norm. Those that bucked animation conventions were not given as much acclaim (in this regard, times really haven't changed all that much). Disney won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for the category's first eight years in existence - 1932-1939. Tex Avery didn't receive a nomination under 1939. Max and Dave Fleischer were never nominated in the 1930s, for their incredible ground breaking work for Betty Boop and Popeye. Many decades hence, it's easy to look back on a cartoon like
The Village Smithy and take it for granted, but it must have looked especially weird for its day.
"No Trespassing". "No Shooting". "No Trapping". "No Fishing". "No Fires". Read the many signs that open
Porky in the North Woods (1936, dir: Frank Tashlin), then cutting to a series of many signs uttering "NO", "A Thousand Times NO". Porky and his animal friends applaud the hard work they put into posting their signs to help keep themselves safe. A menacing off-screen threat is established, pointing a gun on-screen and shooting the "No Shooting" sign, throwing a bear trap under "No Trapping", tossing a line into the water under "No Fishing", and most menacingly, throwing a flaming log under the "No Fire" sign. He manically laughs at each of his disobedience acts. The unseen menace then enacts his evil on Porky's furry friends, trapping a beaver in a bear trap who screams at their beaver friend to "go get Porky!". Porky soon finds many of his furry friends wounded from animal traps and frees them all, taking them back to his cabin for first aid. The still-unseen but now-named (as he conveniently speaks in the first-person) Jean Baptiste scowls and mopes that his trapped animals have all been let go, his shadow walking across the frame in multiple shots. The heavily accented man plans to tear Porky "limb from limb". Back at the first aid cabin, Porky is able to mend his friends simply by ironing straight their crooked tails and limbs; cartoon logic which looks pretty funny in practice. As Porky is then getting beat up by the mean poacher, finally revealed now to be some large hulking animal-thing himself, a well edited montage plays of the cute animal cavalry regrouping and charging towards the cabin. The animations in these clips are noteworthy because of the sheer volume of animals being drawn on frame. It's quite a lot, especially in this era of cartooning. A wide open shot of a beaver-occupied horizon shows many beavers in the deep background racing towards the camera. The final minute shows all the animals - separated by species - beat up Jean Baptiste and scare him away, one group at a time. Snowballs are flung, tails are smacked in his face, and the music here is especially noteworthy because each smack, thud and whack is accentuated in the increasingly climatic music, playing off as their own musical notes. It's a triumphant feel-good finale for a cute short that basically sticks to formula, but not to its detriment.
Porky in the North Woods has well executed suspense and rising action, fun gags and a finely timed climax like the ones seen in
Porky's Poultry Plant and
Little Beau Porky.
Porky the Wrestler (1937, dir: Tex Avery) opens with the news bulletin of a big wrestling match and seemingly everyone is trying to go. Every few meters we see a different person on the side of the road trying to hitch a ride. In a funny gag, a limo stops for Porky, as the person sitting in the back opens his door and asks Porky where he's going. "Why, I'm going to the wrestling match.". The limo rider's response: "So am I!". And as Porky walks towards the limo to get in, the passenger slams his door shut and the limo drives on. He then gets a lift from the actual Challenger, a burly man with a foreign name that's never pronounced the same way twice in this film. When they arrive at the arena, the Challenger steps out of the limo and falls through a trap door that is never explained or mentioned again (never look to Tex Avery cartoons for any sense of sensible narrative storytelling). Porky steps out second (the trap door is now closed) and is mistaken for the Challenger and escorted away (even though we already saw the Challenger on the event poster so the people waiting for him should know what it looks like, along with the entire audience in the building). The wrestling match makes up the short's second half, and it mostly features the Champion bouncing and throwing Porky like a ball, attempting to grapple him on the floor, with Porky trying to evader every attack as best he can. When the Champion inhales his manager's cigarette, he blows out smoke and runs around the ring imitating a choo choo train, while Porky and the referee try and stay out of the way. Porky and the ref then link onto the Champion and we have a three-car train moving with an even greater speed. Somehow the train imitations the three men are doing inside a wrestling ring is causing the entire arena to move as if on a train, because when an audience member lifts up a window curtain, he discovers the outside moving past at a great speed. It's all an inspiring bit of nonsense. When the train is broken, the Champion spins Porky around so fast he becomes an airplane and flies up and crashes Porky down to the mat. Porky lands the win after he gets torpedoed into one turnbuckle and shoots out from another smacking the Champion from behind, knocking him out.
Porky the Wrestler is basically plotless and uses its backdrop to effectively come with some superbly bizarre gags.
Porky's Road Race (1937, dir: Frank Tashlin) opens with this following card: "FOREWORD: - All the characters in this picture are strictly phony! Any fancied resemblance to any living person is the bunk! Any incident portrayed is pure fiction!". It opens at an auto track garage where Porky is oiling automobiles and whistling. This is a standard Looney Tunes opening: take a character, throw them into a new setting, have them performing a new job. What follows is a little more unusual and clever, with scenes depicting Hollywood caricatures also helping out at the garage. Laurel and Hardy inflating tires by hooking up with a pump to a see-saw, so they're helping out simply by playing on a see-saw. Charlie Chapin as The Tramp accidentally squeezes W.C. Fields' nose with a wrench, as Fields then sweet talks Edna Mae Oliver. At this point it becomes clear that some of the stars have their own car with a number on it, so the upcoming titular road race will be a competition of stars.
Porky's Road Race is a unique mishmash of previously existing Warner Bros Cartoon elements: a Porky Looney Tune that has a lot of isolated gags (akin to a Tex Avery), with a narrative that builds up to a fast paced action finale (a Tashlin regular) and is sprinkled throughout with silly Hollywood actor caricatures (which has more of a Merrie Melodies flavour). While all the celebrities are depicted generally as their most well-known public persona, the villain of the cartoon, Borax Karoff, does have Boris Karloff's large frame, but is also depicted as a hybrid between Frankenstein (prepares his car in a dimly lit laboratory, wears a white jacket and gloves) and the Monster (flat head, sunken eyes, visible stitches across his face). His long-ride has a skull hood ornament, and he cheats by throwing thumbtacks and torpedoes out his window at the racers behind. He and his car are shown from sharp angles emphasizing their size and dominance over everyone else, but ultimately he is thwarted by Porky (although it's Edna Mae who steals the crown and races off). This cartoon would lay the groundwork for future animated television shows like Hannah Barbera's
Wacky Races and the Japanese anime classic,
Speed Racer.
Yet another title card opening gag, this one for
Picador Porky (1937, dir: Tex Avery). It describes a pleasant low-key, quiet, peaceful Spanish town. The card is then blown off by the blast of a gun. It reveals the actual town below, which looks like the final action set-piece in a spaghetti western dialed up to 11. Cultural sensitivity is not an objective in this cartoon. The town does not appear phased by random people running up and down streets shooting, as everyone else appears to be enjoying themselves outside. It's the day of the town's annual bullfight, which is cause for a fiesta. Porky and his two friends are crooks who think they can win the bull fight contest for cash reward by having Porky's two skinny friends dress up as a bull while he pretends to be a matador. The two friends - while in costume - find a bottle of alcohol and get drunk, and they are voiced by Mel Blanc, making his Warner Bros debut. They get wasted so never make their cue. Outside in the arena, the real bull runs out to challenge Porky. There's a wonderful moment where the bull runs into Porky's handkerchief and disappears. Porky then smugly looks around all sides of the handkerchief and shakes it, the bull falling out and onto the ground. Porky has fun tormenting the bull, but when his drunk buddies stumble outside, singing and burping, he realizes he's been fighting a real bull the entire time and fear washes over him. The bull chases Porky, and in a great blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment, Porky runs up the side of the left frame then continues across the top of the frame as he's now upside down - with the bull now following - and drops down when he hits the top right corner, treating the cinematic corners of the camera's frame as a physical barrier extension of ground. The slapstick shenanigans continue, as the two drunks dress back up, pretend to be a lady bull to woo the real bull's attention, and when he walks over they both pummel him with baseball bats, shove him off-screen, and then run out next to Porky, and play dead so their pig friend can collect the cash reward. The real bull wakes up, angry, chases off the two bozos, and huffing and panting now at Porky, Porky realizes to call it quits for his own safety so hands the bull the bag of cash and runs away.
Picador Porky doesn't hit the bizarre heights of
Porky the Wrestler or experiment with form as much as
The Village Smithy but it doesn't need to; it's funny, irrelevant, and its gags succeed more often than not. What works so well to the advantage of Avery and Tashlin is their great understanding of cartoon pacing and comic timing. With Avery especially, his shorts have a sustained rollout of gags, and even when one or two failed, it wouldn't linger with the viewer because something funny or inspiring was only moments away.
Porky's Romance (1937, dir: Frank Tashlin) introduces Petunia Pig in a self-referential pre-title card opening where she's hyped up as the new Looney Tunes star on behalf of Leon Schlesinger. Upon giving her speech, she's stricken with nervousness and stammers, but when the off-screen announcer tells her not to get excited, she furiously snaps back, "Excited?! Who's excited!? I'm not excited!" The character she plays in
Porky's Romance is a more put-together woman of high class. Porky, decked out in a suit is looking nicer than we've ever seen him before. He's at a jewelry store and buys a diamond engagement ring for Petunia. This is Tashlin's fifth directed film but the first one to show off his appreciation and fascination with the later art deco period movement: streamline moderne. It was a response to and evolution of the earlier art deco style (think of Tex Avery's earlier film
Page Miss Glory) in an attempt to make more practical architectural designs that were feasible in the Great Depression. Streamline moderne emphasizes horizontal shapes, rounded edges, flat roofs, glass and chrome materials. The settings in the previous Tashlin shorts have been a chicken farm, a Middle East military base, the forest lands, and a racetrack.
Porky's Romance is his first one to take place in an urban modern setting, and time again, he'll often come back to this architectural style when the premise allows it. The buildings - and particularly, building interiors - seen throughout this short (the diamond store, Petunia's home, the imagined future-home of Porky and Petunia) look like nothing else we have seen from a Looney Tune. Tashlin pays attention to interior decorating and gives rooms themselves an aesthetically pleasing and lived-in quality. Think back to the
Porky's Moving Day and the tilting house where rooms consisted of a rug and a lamp and maybe a dresser placed at different points in an otherwise open barren space. That is traditionally the norm; Tashlin is going beyond.
There is a classic sequence in
Porky's Romance that is highlighted often as an illustration of Tashlin's abilities as a film director and editor early in his career. Petunia refuses to let Porky in her house, and as he glumly leaves and walks away, she looks out through the eye hole of her door and sees he has a box of chocolate behind his back. She runs out the door, down the street, grabs Porky, hauls him back into her house, slams the door, sits him down on the couch with her, and politely accepts his gift. Leonard Maltin comprehensively details this scene in in his book
Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, including a breakdown of every shot in this sequence and how many frames each shot is. He writes, "The total number of frames is 157--with ten cuts--representing six and a half seconds of screen time! No one had ever tampered with speed this way before, at Warners' or anywhere else." It's not just a strong scene because of cutting and speed, of course, but also for its narrative cohesion. Petunia's sense of direction - her trajectory - is always clear, and our eyes can easily comprehend what she's doing, and where she's going, shot by shot, from point A to point B. It is superbly directed animation.
The cartoon takes a dark turn when Petunia refuses Porky's proposal. In a gag which would later be popularized by frequent Tashlin collaborator, Jerry Lewis, we see a failed suicide attempt played for laughs. Porky ties a noose on a tree and hangs himself. The branch snaps, but the impact of hitting the ground - visually accompanied by a neat disorienting effect where the images in the frame blur out of focus - causes Porky to pass out and he enters a dream. He imagines a future where he and Petunia wed, she abuses him regularly, and they have a room full of crying babies. Calling back to the attention to interior design, the kitchen where Porky is trying to comfort crying babies while also handle dishes and cooking is attractively drawn. Porky's freaking out as he dashes back and forth across his many chores, each one from a different corner of the frame, and it literally feels like his life is caving in on him from all directions.
Porky's Romance breaks the trend of Tashlin's action-heavy finales and is the better for it. This cartoon treads new territory for him.
Joe Dougherty, the voice of Porky Pig from
I Haven't Got a Hat (1935) until
Porky's Romance, was fired because animating around his stutter was proving to be too challenging, so Schlesinger decided to hire someone without a real-stutter and who could perform a controlled one with ease. Mel Blanc got the job, debuting with
Porky's Duck Hunt (1937, dir: Tex Avery), wherein he voices two characters. The other being Daffy Duck in his very first appearance. Porky does have a more naturally younger sounding voice but Blanc's characterization isn't identical to the classic voice he would use later. Still trying to find a rhythm, and perhaps also imitating Dougherty to some extent so as to not confuse audiences with a brand new voice so he eased in a gradual change. Mel Blanc pulls off a somewhat realistic stutter (though it does already sound more controlled than Dougherty), whereas Porky's stutter would later lose that awkward realness and be utilized for deliberate comedic effect.
Porky and his dog are at a lake trying to hunt duck. One flies overhead and is immediately shot at by a hundred hunters who reveal themselves all at the same time. Every shot misses and the duck flies away. Another hunter in a different location is cross-eyed and has two crooked guns intertwined. He shoots, and hits two planes, which fall down in a blaze of fire into the water. Amid all this chaos, Porky comes up with a plan to outsmart the duck, by placing several decoy float-able duck toys in the lake to catch his attention. They do, but the duck then confuses Porky by blending in with the decoys and quacking only when he looks in other directions. Porky has identified the real duck, and straps another decoy to his head as he walks underwater with the decoy blending in as another duck on the water surface. Porky rises up and shoots only for water to have jammed his gun. Most of the film plays out like this, and it has since become a classic cartoon staple; a life-or-death game of wits between two opposing characters, usually just one trying to kill the other. Tom and Jerry. Sylvester the Cat and Tweetie Bird. Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. Chuck Jones would cleverly execute a three-way version later with his Hunting Season trilogy (between Bugs, Daffy and Elmer Fudd).
Porky shoots the duck out of the sky and it falls on the lake, its body floating on the surface. Porky has won, and he ecstatically commands his dog to go swim over and fetch the seemingly wounded animal. The dog obeys, but when the two floating black bodies swim back to land, it's actually the duck in control as he slams the weakened dog onto the ground and smugly swims away. Bewildered, Porky grabs a notepad out of his pocket and reads it over, and says, "Hey! Th-a-a-a-t wasn't in the sc-sc-script!". The duck talks for the first time, "Oh, don't let it worry you skipper. I'm just a crazy, darn fool duck!" He stands up on the water on his feet, dances and jumps and skips around the frame, hopping and skipping as he goes further and further into the background until he's just a black blip on the screen, hooting and hollering and laughing with a crazed fever pitch the entire time. This is the scene that births Daffy Duck. Versus Porky's slow transformation over several years into the iconic character mostly known today (which at this point in the time line, we still haven't seen), Daffy starts out remarkably close to "classic Daffy Duck". Visually, he's still got a long way to go. In
Porky's Duck Hunt, he is drawn like a fairly normal duck. His personality, though, is already on point. This kicks off what's sometimes known as the "crazy Daffy" years, when he was under the wing of Tex Avery and Bob Clampett. Clampett is an uncredited animator on
Porky's Duck Hunt and considered the Daffy co-creator with Avery. Clampett would soon after direct Porky and Daffy films, and his and Avery's Daffy is a wild and zany force of anarchy. Even as the Looney Tunes progressively earns its Looney title over the mid '30s, Daffy still stands out as being far more unpredictable than anyone else he interacts with. He is the agent of chaos that breaks the rules even among a crew of rule-breakers. Sure, Porky breaks the fourth-wall, but Daffy will refuse to follow the script and do whatever the hell he wants, much to the chagrin of other characters. Throughout the 1950s, Robert McKimson and Chuck Jones would tame Daffy significantly and discover new avenues for the character, but in 1937 Looney Tunes, he is unbridled, shocking, uncontrollable, and electric to watch. Daffy Duck is a rock star.
Daffy now becomes the aggressor and torments Porky for his own amusement, even calling in other ducks to squawk at and fluster the pig. Porky tries for a couple more attacks, but all prove useless. Porky angrily throws his duck bill call onto the ground which ricochet's into his poor dog's throat. The dog is then stricken with a case of the hiccups, forcing a duck call to lurch out of his throat every few seconds. It's time for Porky to go home. He raises the white flag and runs away with his pet as they are fired at from many off-screen blasts confusing his dog for prey. The film's final few seconds are absolutely surreal and also deserve a mention. Porky glumly returns home, and walks into his living room. It cuts from Porky entering from outside to him now being inside. The door he entered is on the wall to the left. Right next to the door is an open window with the sun shining in. He peers out the window and sees Daffy and many other ducks flying around in the sky above his yard tormenting him. Porky accidentally lets his gun goes off and it shoots through his ceiling. We hear stomping from above, and a neighbor from upstairs goes down to Porky's door. He opens it, revealing a hallway, and a disgruntled neighbor punches Porky in the face. The stairs are shown in the hallway, and they lead up towards a part of the building that would need to overlap with where this window is. The house or apartment clearly makes no physical sense, and it seems too obvious to be an oversight by the animators. It is more likely an intentional dose of nonsense and further illustrates the direction in which Warner Bros animation is heading. Cut to a "That's All Folks!" title card as Daffy appears one more time and jumps and dances around the letters while screaming "whoop! whoop! whoop! whoop! whoop!" Things are about to get even loonier from here.
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
A look back at previous installments:
Looney Revue, Part 4 1936
Looney Revue, Part 3 1934-1936
Looney Revue, Part 2 1932-1933
Looney Revue, Part 1 1929-1931
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