Porky in Wackyland

Porky in Wackyland is a 1938 Warner Bros. Looney Tunes animated short film, directed by Robert Clampett.[1] The short was released on September 24, 1938, and stars Porky Pig.[2]

Porky in Wackyland
Lobby card
Directed byRobert Clampett
Produced byLeon Schlesinger
Ray Katz
Story byWarren Foster
StarringMel Blanc
Billy Bletcher
Music byCarl Stalling
Animation byIzzy Ellis
Norman McCabe
Layouts byBob Clampett
Backgrounds byElmer Plummer
Production
company
Distributed byWarner Bros. Pictures
The Vitaphone Corporation
Release date
  • September 24, 1938 (1938-09-24) (U.S.)
Running time
7:23
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish

In 1994, Porky in Wackyland was voted No. 8 of The 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members of the animation field.[3] In 2000, it was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected the short for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Plot
Porky in Wackyland was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2000, deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

A newspaper shows Porky Pig traveling to Africa to hunt the rare dodo bird, worth $4,000,000,000,000 p.s. 000,000,000 dollars. Porky uses his airplane to go to Dark Africa, then Darker Africa, and finally lands in Darkest Africa. When Porky lands, a sign tells him that he's in Wackyland ("Population: 100 nuts and a squirrel"), while a voice booms out "It can happen here!" Porky tiptoes along the ground in his airplane and he is greeted by a roaring beast, who suddenly becomes effeminate and dances away into the forest.

He watches as the sun is lifted above the horizon by a tower of stacked creatures. Nearby, another creature rises out of a tall flower, playing "The William Tell Overture", using his nose as a flute. The creature launches into a wild drum solo, plays a tiny piano, and plays its nose like a horn, which brings out a group of odd creatures, including a rabbit dangling in midair from a swing that seems to be threaded through its own ears, a small creature wearing large female mannequin legs who encourages the rabbit to swing faster, a peacock with a fantail of cards, an upside-down creature walking with giant bare feet in his arms (replacing his hands) while wearing a hat on his legless rear end, a goofy-looking creature wearing large glasses in a small pot, a scooter-like creature, a creature with two steamboat pipes on his back, a four-legged creature with a waffle iron-like mouth, three fish swimming in midair (the first holding an umbrella, the second wearing an anchor, and the third with a periscope on its back), a round creature with long legs on its sides, and an angry criminal imprisoned behind a free-floating barred window that he holds in his hands while a small policeman on a wheel appears and hits him on the head with a large stick. As Porky tries to find the do-do, he comes across a duck singing "Mammy!", a horn-headed creature, a conjoined cat and dog hybrid creature spinning around like a tornado while they fight, and a 3 headed stooge whose heads argue and fight amongst themselves, but temporally stop their fight to tell the viewers that their mother was scared by a pawnbreaker's sign, while a small creature with a light bulb on its head translates their gibberish speech.

Finally, the Dodo appears. Porky tries to catch it, but it plays tricks on him. The dodo pulls out a pencil and draws a door in mid-air, and instead of opening it and running through, reaches down and lifts up the bottom edge of the door like a curtain, darts underneath and lets it snap back into place for Porky to bump into. At another point, the do-do appears on the Warner Bros. shield logo and slingshots Porky into the ground. Afterwards, the dodo pulls a wall of bricks in the picture and lets him crash into it. Eventually, Porky triumphs when he disguises himself as a bearded paperboy, shouting "Extra! Extra! Porky captures Dodo!", before hitting the bird with a mallet. Porky loudly proclaims to the audience that he has captured the last dodo. The dodo mockingly replies, "Yes, I'm really the last of the dodos. Ain't I, fellas?". A multitude of dodos appear, all yelling out, "Yeah, man!". They and the Dodo all howl, which allows him to escape and stand on Porky's head.

Reception

Steve Schneider's 1998 That's All Folks! The Art of Warner Bros. Animation writes that with this short, "the lord of cartoon misrule, Clampett established conclusively that in animation, realism is irrelevant."[4]

In the 2001 Masters of Animation, John Grant writes that "this short, in its cumulative effect, is more wildly inventive than anything even [Tex] Avery had produced for Warners."[5]

Follow-ups and derivative works
Identical moments from Porky in Wackyland and its color remake, Dough for the Do-Do.

Much of the Wackyland sequence was adapted and reused by Clampett for inclusion in his 1943 short Tin Pan Alley Cats. A color remake of Porky in Wackyland was supervised by Friz Freleng in 1948. Re-titled as Dough for the Do-Do, the remake was released in 1949. The films were nearly identical, in many cases appearing to match frame-by-frame in certain details, albeit with Porky's appearance updated (by redoing most of the animation of the character), the voices having evolved (with less use of speeding-up) and all of the backgrounds being different. The following differences include:

    • The backgrounds are more desert-like with different objects, including melting pocket watches inspired by Salvador Dalí's The Persistence of Memory.
    • During the beginning of Porky in Wackyland, a newspaper man arrives behind the title card, yelling "Extra! Extra! Porky off on dodo hunt!" before showing the paper to the camera ("Paper, mister?") In Dough for the Do-Do, this does not happen. The title card just fades to the newspaper already shown.
    • In Porky in Wackyland, Porky shows a picture of the dodo in his airplane, after the newspaper is shown, but before cutting to his flight path across the globe and into "Darkest Africa". In Dough for the Do-Do, the newspaper is shown, then the scene cuts to Porky's flight path.
    • In Porky in Wackyland, once in "Darkest Africa," there is a dotted circular area labeled "?", which Porky circles clockwise before flying into. In Dough for the Do-Do, there is no such area, and once Porky crosses into "Darkest Africa," he is shown landing.
    • In Dough for the Do-Do, after the sun is risen (with the "Ranz des Vaches" part of the William Tell Overture playing in the background), it cuts straight to the scene with the black duck passing by Porky and saying "Mammy!" (an allusion to Al Jolson's blackface performances). When the horn-head passes by, the drum solo starts, then cuts straight to the creature rising out of the flower and playing a jazz tune on his nose. In Porky in Wackyland, we see the creature playing that part of the William Tell Overture on his nose, then starting the jazz tune. After the shot with the horn-head and Cat-Dog, we see the flower-creature bang the drums some more and ends it with banging a cymbal on his head, which makes him and his flower sink into the ground. This and Cat-Dog are cut from Dough for the Do-Do.
    • In Porky in Wackyland, the flower-creature plays his nose like a horn. In Dough for the Do-Do, the horn-nose is colored differently from the rest of creature's body, making it seem like the horn is separate from the creature.
    • There are a lot more jungle sound effects in Dough for the Do-Do.
    • In Dough for the Do-Do, the long pan through Wackyland was used from Tin Pan Alley Cats.
    • In Porky in Wackyland, the creature with large glasses had a pot, that showed the words "Treg's a Foo". In Dough for the Do-Do, the words were replaced with "ZOOT" in capital letters. The giant, three-dimensional "FOO" in the background is also replaced with "ZOOT". Also, in the remake, there are hardly any creatures that appear around the big words.
    • In Porky in Wackyland, after the angry criminal yells for a while, a short policeman on a wheel appears and clangs the criminal on the head with an oversized nightstick. In Dough for the Do-Do, this does not happen. Instead, it cuts to a new scene, featuring a reanimated version of Rubber Band marching by (i.e. marching instruments made out of rubber bands) from Tin Pan Alley Cats, before cutting straight to the Three Stooges scene.
    • In Porky in Wackyland, the three-headed Stooge creature arrives from behind an igloo. In Dough for the Do-Do, it arrives behind a large broken guitar.
    • In Dough for the Do-Do, Moe has blond hair. In Porky in Wackyland, he has his original black hair.
    • In Dough for the Do-Do, Porky is led by a wacky candle-stick-headed creature to the dodo. He falls through a hole, and is seen falling from the sky. However, the camera zooms out to reveal that the sky is a "special-effects" projector, rolled by the creature with the candle stick on his head. When he stops rolling, Porky lands on the ground, and he "toot-toots" like a train, before running away. In Porky in Wackyland, this does not happen; Porky just lands in a dish, after tumbling through a path in a black background then coming out of a large faucet like a drop of water.
    • In Dough for the Do-Do, the dodo has a green neck and yellow legs. In Porky in Wackyland, the dodo's neck and legs are black.
    • In Porky in Wackyland, the dodo screams twice: after he draws the imaginary door and before he pulls the wall of bricks. In Dough for the Do-Do, his screams are muted.
    • In one scene before the ending of Dough for the Do-Do, Porky crashes into a wall of bricks. He pokes his head out of the pile, and the Do-Do drops an extra brick from above the clouds. Porky covers his head, panicked, until a parachute appears on the brick. Porky laughs in relief, until the brick opens up and releases a double, landing on Porky's head with a clang. In Porky in Wackyland, when Porky pokes his head out of the brick pile, another brick drops on his head from offscreen, causing him to cry in frustration.
    • The major difference in storyline is the ending, starting at the scene of the dodo walking just after the brick wall scene. In Porky in Wackyland, the dodo finds Porky, disguised as a newspaper man, and the ending continues as described above in the plot section. In Dough for the Do-Do, Porky instead disguises himself as a dodo and tells the real dodo that he's the last dodo and is worth $6 trillion. The dodo handcuffs Porky and runs off with Porky to the left, saying that he has the last dodo and is rich, then Porky stops him, saying, "Oh n-n-no, you haven't! I'm rich! I got the last d-d-dodo!" as he removes his disguise and, still handcuffed to the dodo, runs off to the right and into the background. Once Porky and the dodo have left the scene, several other dodos emerge onto the scene, all together proclaiming, "Yes sir, he's got the last dodo!" Thus, unlike in Porky in Wackyland, Porky leaves completely unaware of any other dodos.
    • In Porky in Wackyland, there is a sign that says "HELLO" upside-down above the creature with mannequin legs. In Dough for the Do-do, this doesn't happen. Instead it repeatedly says "Oh boy!"
    • Dough for the Do-do is approximately 23 seconds shorter.

Dough for the Do-Do was produced in Technicolor, but was originally released in Cinecolor due to a dispute with the Technicolor corporation. Later reissues were printed by Technicolor.

There were at least two Terrytoons plagiarizations of Porky in Wackyland in the 1940s or 50's. Dingbat Land (1949)[6] starred Gandy Goose and Sourpuss. The role of the Do-Do was taken by a minor Terrytoons character, Dingbat.[7] The second film, a more direct plagiarization of the Porky Pig/Do-Do cartoons, starred a British hunter and a Do-Do stand-in. The creature didn't talk, but made strange hooting noises, and flung flames from a tuft of hair on top of its head.

Tex Avery, for whom Clampett worked as an animator in the mid-1930s, borrowed strongly from this cartoon for his 1948 MGM cartoons Half-Pint Pygmy (in which the characters, George and Junior, travel to Africa in search of the world's smallest pygmy, only to discover that he has an uncle who's even smaller) and The Cat That Hated People (where the cat travels to the moon and encounters an array of characters similar to those in Clampett's Wackyland, e.g., a pair of gloves and lips that keep saying "Mammy, mammy", just like the Al Jolson duck in Porky in Wackyland). Clampett would again use the Three Stooges parody when a later creation of his, Beany and Cecil, faced the "Dreaded Three-Headed Threep".

According to writer Paul Dini, the Do-Do Bird is the father of Gogo Dodo, a character on the 1990s animated TV series Tiny Toon Adventures. A small clip from the film was used in a Slappy Squirrel segment on another Warners animated TV series of the 1990s, Animaniacs. The segment, titled "Critical Condition", featured Porky in Wackyland as part of a fake LaserDisc release. The Do-Do Bird has made occasional guest spots in the DC Comics Looney Tunes comic book, being colored in grayscale as opposed to the rest of the art being in color. The character makes an appearance in the Wii game Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal as an unplayable character. He is given a first name, Yoyo the Dodo. Yoyo can also be seen as a brief cameo in the beginning of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

The "dodo bird" in this cartoon bears more than a passing resemblance to the metal eating bird that appears in "It's A Bird", a stop-motion animation short by Charles Bowers.[8]

Animator Jeff Hale may have borrowed Wackyland and Dodo's concept of the main character in a strange world surrounded by strange creatures for a Sesame Street cartoon segment featuring a boy on a bicycle suddenly riding into a Wackyland-esque neighborhood filled with very odd creatures and things, making him think he's lost, until a strange man with a magic yoyo appears and gives him a clue how to find his way back home: "Try to remember all the things you passed/But when you go back, make the first thing the last."

The cat-dog hybrid seen in the cartoon might have been the basis for the Nicktoons character CatDog.

See also

References
  1. Beck, Jerry; Friedwald, Will (1989). Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons. Henry Holt and Co. p. 77. ISBN 0-8050-0894-2.
  2. Lenburg, Jeff (1999). The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons. Checkmark Books. pp. 124–126. ISBN 0-8160-3831-7. Retrieved 6 June 2020.
  3. Beck, Jerry (1994). The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals. Turner Publishing. ISBN 978-1878685490.
  4. Schneider, Steve (1988). That's All, Folks! : The Art of Warner Bros. Animation. Henry Holt and Co. p. 60. ISBN 0-8050-0889-6.
  5. Grant, John (2001). Masters of Animation. Watson-Guptill. p. 55. ISBN 978-0823030415. Retrieved 23 July 2020.
  6. "Classic Cartoons". classiccartoons.blogspot.com.
  7. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2007-03-11. Retrieved 2006-08-19.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  8. "The DVD Journal - Quick Reviews: Charley Bowers: The Rediscovery of an American Comic Genius". dvdjournal.com.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.