188. Porky's Poppa (1938)

Release date: January 15th, 1938

Series: Looney Tunes

Director: Bob Clampett

Starring: Mel Blanc (Porky, Porky’s Poppa, Narrator), Bob Clampett (Hen), Harry Lang (Duck), The Sportsmen Quartet (Chorus)

It’s safe to say that 1938 was Porky’s best year. Speaking in terms of solo cartoons, that is. His cartoons were genuinely funny, stimulating, and he looked great appearance wise. 1939, the Porky burnout started, and he was slowly reduced to a smiling stock character whose adversaries and costars were much more alive than he was.

As Daffy (and later Bugs) rose to popularity, Porky slipped into the sidekick role, paired primarily with the duck. With that said, the Porky/Daffy cartoons are some of the funniest around, and I firmly believe the best cartoons for the both of them are the ones where they’re paired together—with a few exceptions, of course.

However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves: a great year of pig stardom awaits. Porky’s father, who made a few appearances during the Joe Dougherty era, makes a return. In a story that has loose similarities to the premise of Porky’s Railroad, Porky struggles to convince his father that their cow, Bessie, is a much better fit for the farm than the newfangled mechanical cow his father has his eyes on.

The introduction is one of the funniest aspects of the cartoon itself. A hand erases the title credits, scrawled on a blackboard, and fills in “PORKY’S POPPA… HAS A FARM”, mirroring the underscore of “Old MacDonald” (with substitute lyrics) below it.

A layout of the farm cuts to our pint-sized hero, grinning at the camera as the vocals sing “…and on this farm he had a pig: Porky Pig, you know.” 

Bobe Cannon animates Porky struggling to sing along with the lyrics, his “Oh buh-beh-boy!”s lagging with the beat. The music halts just in time for Porky to pump his fists in frustration, not stuttering once as he grumbles “Oh, skip it!” 

Repeatedly cutting back to the layout of the farm in conjunction with the lyrics is practically a gag within itself. The song grows increasingly absurd, with a goose honking horns, a cow showing off her legs as the vocals sing “With a little calf here, with a little calf there…”, struggling to keep up with the rapid pace of the song. 

A random duck follows a hand pointing at certain areas of the farm and quacking (”With a little quack here, with a little quack there…”). Finally, the duck in his psuedo-Donald Duck voice instructs “EVERYBODY SING!”, complete with some fun and unique typography.

The entire song falls to pieces--before, the cutting back to the farm’s layout added an incongruous feeling of calm to balance out the wacky antics of the animals and the song. Now, everything happens at once. The duck zips across the screen in a quacking frenzy, the mother cow shows off her baby calves, thrusting them to the beat of the music, the goose is a one man band of assorted horns, etc. Blissful chaos.

Things slow down as we cut back to Porky, who smugly whips out a phonograph behind his back. The record is just him saying “Oh boy!”, playing correctly to the beat of the music. He’s got this song number figured out… or does he? 

Even technology can’t conceal his stutter. The record begins to skip, mimicking the sound of his stutter, and Porky smashes the phonograph to pieces as he slams it against the ground. The wordless yet furious stare he gives the audience as the dying record croaks out a distorted “Oooooooh….. Boooooooooy….” is nothing short of priceless. Though he didn’t say a word himself during this scene, his motives, thoughts, and emotions are clearly visible. You can FEEL his pride at his solution, as well of the subsequent fury of his solution blowing up in his face. A wonderful end to a hilarious song sequence. 

“But on his farm, he has a mortgage… woe, oh woe, oh woe!” The score turns in to a mournful, minor key dirge, with anthropomorphic mortgage papers posing proudly on the farm. Some very clever posing and metaphorical play as we fade to Porky’s dad, moping around on the farm, the mortgage aligning with his silhouette and becoming a physical weight on his back. More playing with typography as the narrator reads aloud the words on the screen: 

This is a parody of the march of time, a radio program who would often announce the death of a notorious person by declaring “And so, today, as it must to all men, death came to [name], [age].” Even without the context, the gag is rather amusing, bringing a different change of pace to the cartoon with the addition of a narrator and the typography. Knowing the source of the gag makes it hit just the right spot.

Porky’s dad mutters about ruination, how he has no milk and no money, etc. Mel Blanc does a fine job of mimicking Joe Dougherty, maintaining the stutter and the low voice--in the Dougherty cartoons, Porky’s father was just Dougherty’s natural speaking voice, whereas Porky was sped up considerably. You can hear both at once here for comparison. 

We pan over to the cause of one of these stresses: their cow, Bessie, has been quarantined (how timely!) for “hoof ‘n mouth trouble”, a play on hand-foot-and-mouth disease. Clampett opts to take things just a step further--we truck inside the stall to see Bessie posing for the camera, grinning with her foot INSIDE her mouth, batting her eyelashes and all. The “Bull Bontana” (Bull Montana) poster plastered inside of her stall is a clever touch. 

After seeing that Bessie’s production chart has dipped overwhelmingly into the negatives–a roll of paper unfurling at Porky’s father’s feet, indicating just how poor the farm is doing--he places an “out of order” sign on the stall door.

Suddenly, Porky’s father grows aggravated. “I need to send you to the hamburger factory!” Cue a close-up of Bessie tearfully picturing her fate--a pile of burgers and hotdogs make up her figure. Clampett would reprise this gag (albeit in a much more cruel manner) in Porky’s Last Stand 2 years later, where Daffy eagerly envisions a steaming hot hamburger in place of an innocent little calf. 

This is the second cartoon to make an ACME reference, the first being Buddy’s Bug Hunt back in 1935. Porky’s father phones up ACME mail order company, asking for “One cow--airmail”. 

Context clues are just as important to the gag than the reveal itself: Porky, his father, and Bessie all become alert to the sounds of an airplane making a cacophony overhead. Suddenly, a package bursts through the barn ceiling, floating to the ground with a neatly tied parachute. The animation appears to be the work of John Carey, from the tall, pill-shaped eyes to the slow, drawn out way that Porky blinks.

Norm McCabe takes over to animate the grand reveal. Lots of wonderful little subtleties: Porky and his father are timed slightly differently, giving them both a natural sense of interaction and movement. There’s a lovely little accent on Porky’s father opening the package by pulling a string--he jerks his head up slightly as he plucks the string, allowing the audience to feel the physical impact and snap of the pluck. It’s subtle, but very well done. 

Instead of a flesh and blood cow, a mechanical hunk of metal slowly unfurls to life as the package opens. As Porky’s father reads the label (The New 1938 CREAMLINED COW), Porky himself objects to the new addition. “Aww, eh-the-there ain’t no such animal!” 

Indeed there is: Porky’s father loads a pile of hay into a chute, pressing down on the cow’s paintbrush tail. The cow pumps along to a mechanical score of “Old MacDonald”, churning out milk from its metal udders, the milk pouring straight into an assembly line of bottles below. Bob Clampett’s puns are plentiful in this cartoon (notice how there’s no writer’s credit--he often said that he would write some of his earliest cartoons himself. I wonder how much input Chuck Jones had in the story?), but delivered nonchalantly, so they can actually be enjoyed. The cow caps the milk bottles by putting literal newsboy caps on top of the bottles, the paintbrush tail painting “cream paint” to the outside of the bottles and forming the illusion of cream. Interesting business practices! 

Bobe Cannon animates a delightful scene with Porky. Fun animation and fun dialogue make for a great combo. Some very fluid, light, and fun animation of Porky giving his pep talk as he hops around, swinging his arms, nonchalantly pushing his hat out of his face after getting so excited. 

“C’mon, eh-beh-beh-beh-Bessie! We won’t let that old eh-neh-nuh-new fangled eh-ceh-co--heifer beat us. You just eat your uh-wuh-wee-weh-whea--eh-ha-hay, and show that eh-teh-eeh-eh-tin-can cow who can make the most…” Porky lowers Bessie’s foot from her mouth by climbing on it, preparing to shovel a forkful of hay into her mouth, however, she shoves her foot right back in it, much to Porky’s annoyance. “Aww, every time you open your muh-mee-muh-me-eh-mou--kisser, ya put your eh-feh-eh-foot in it! Eh-bee-Bessie, you gotta eat! You eh-deh-dee-eh-don’t wanna be eh-seh-seeah-seeah-smothered in onions, eh-do ya?” 

Treg Brown’s sound effects of doors creaking as her leg is lowered is the perfect touch to the gag. Porky struggles to feed Bessie, eventually getting stuck in her mouth himself as he attempts to hold both legs down to no avail. He frees himself, just in time to hatch an ingenious idea.

His plan works: Porky places the entire pile of hay onto Bessie’s legs, who swallows it up whole, her mouth comically huge as she attempts to swallow it. Porky is overjoyed, clapping at her efforts before rushing off to give her some privacy.

Instead of Porky just milking her like a regular farmer, Clampett pushes the entire scenario further. Porky paces around in the manner of an expectant father, accompanied by a soft score of “Lullaby on Broadway”. The sound of a baby crying prompts Porky to do a gorgeously animated head shake of surprise--Bessie hands him a milk bottle, which Porky carefully swaddles and places in a basket. 

The charade continues, with Clampett lulling us into a false sense of security with an already absurd gag. Cue a gag that would have been incredibly risque in 1938: at about the fifth bottle, Porky reaches out and finds that Bessie hands him a bottle labeled “CHOC. MALT”, accompanied by an underscore of “I Wish I Was in Dixie”. Porky and Bessie both grow bashful, but Porky’s nonchalant whistling is cut to a half as Bessie delivers yet another bottle. “Gosh--eh-ceh-ceh-quin-eh-qui-eh–quart-tuplets!” 

Porky rushes over to his farther to share the good news. However, dad is too preoccupied with the fancy mechanics of the cow to pay Bessie any mind. He shows Porky a barrage of dairy-related puns churned out by the creamlined cow: cottage cheese (cheese in the shapes of houses--and an outhouse for good measure--don the conveyer belt), limburger cheese (cheese slices with clothes pins pinned to their “noses” to ward off the stench), and Swiss cheese (a cuckoo bird pops out of the cow’s mechanical side and sprays the cheese wheels with bullets, which turn into yodeling mouths). Interestingly, Mel’s voice for Porky’s father changes in this scene--it’s still him, but the nasally undertones are absent. I wonder if he did this on a different day? 

Nevertheless, the staging of the next gag is genius. The majority of the screen is black, save for a small window revealing Porky holding onto Bessie’s udders. “C’mon, eh-beh-Bessie! Hurry eh… hurry eh… step on it!” 

The window expands to reveal Bessie pouring a bucket of milk into a line of funnels (rather than udders), which are then evenly distributed to the bottles. “’ats a guh-geh-gee-eh-girl!” 

Mechanical cow seems to be doing just fine, plopping cherries on top of elaborate ice cream sundaes and milk shakes. The only fault in the system is the cow’s own personal whiskey bottle rolling down the assembly line, which it confiscates promptly. 

Porky, on the other hand, is making do. With an ice block on her head, Bessie churns out ice cream cones to the best of her ability. As the cones grow smaller and smaller in size, Porky orders her to eat more hay, which she happily does so.

Now, it’s Cow vs. Cow. The mechanical cow opts to play some dirty tricks on Bessie, pouring a jar of vanishing cream it produced onto the hay Bessie is eating. And, thanks to the law of cartoon physics, the milk bottles she hands Porky disappear by the minute. Though the effect of the bottles disappearing may not seem like much today, for 1938 the ink and paint department did a wonderful job of demonstrating the illusion that the bottles suddenly disappeared.

With the rest of the hay now gone thanks to a hefty glob of vanishing cream, Porky and Bessie engage in a wild goose (cow?) chase to find more hay. The mechanical cow gobbles up every square inch of hay in sight–at one point, Bessie heaves a dubious shrug to the audience. I love how they made her hooves look like hands, but still remain identifiable hooves. The scramble animation she does as she dashes out of frame (with Porky clinging to her like a horse) is wonderfully done as well.

Both Porky and Bessie and the creamlined cow exit the barn, chasing each other around the farm. The mechanical cow physically turns into a vacuum cleaner, threatening to suck up the last remaining pile of hay. In a gag that’s reminiscent of the Harman-Ising days (is it the inclusion of the outhouse?), the cow-turned-vacuum rushes into a shed filled to the brim with hay. The audience merely watches the shed itself shrink in size as the cow gobbles up all of the hay, the final result a puny little outhouse. 

At last, the enemies reach a face-off. The last pile of hay–or, as Porky puts it in his punny little way, “Eh-thee-the-thee-that’s the last straw.” In a relatively Tashlin-esque maneuver, Clampett makes some fast cuts to heighten the suspense of the action. Cut between Porky and Bessie to the mechanical cow to the pile of straw (facetiously labeled “MILK WEED”). The cuts grow quicker and quicker, the music crescendo-ing… until BLAM! 

In a loose parallel to the finale of Rover’s Rival, everything explodes at once. Nuts and bolts rain in the sky, as do neat little bundles of hay. However, Clampett doesn’t allow the audience to rest just yet--with Bessie nowhere in sight, the mechanical cow continues to charge forth, seeking refuge in a hay to release a humongous pile of milk bottles. So high, in fact, that the shed (and cow) are elevated several feet into the air. Porky’s a goner.

Porky’s father, who had been absent for the past few minutes, reappears to declare the tin-can cow a winner, much to Porky’s visible dissatisfaction.

Yet it’s not a Clampett cartoon without a twist! Bessie pokes her head out of the mechanical cow’s mouth, mooing the ever popular catchphrase from The Ken Murray Show: “Mmmmwooooooooooah, yeeeeaaaaaah!” 

Porky gives a celebratory “Oh, boy!” as we iris out--the goose and duck from earlier poke their heads into the scene just before the iris fully closes.

This is an early Porky cartoon that’s just plain fun. Bobe Cannon’s animation of Porky serves as one of the many highlights, from Porky getting aggravated with his phonograph to his excited pep talk towards Bessie. Corny as the opening number is, it’s a lot of fun at the same time--the intensity in increasing chaos is a prevalent theme to Clampett’s cartoons.

I don’t have many complaints towards this cartoon, if any at all. It’s not my favorite Porky entry, sure, but it’s most certainly an enjoyable watch and one of his better cartoons of the ‘30s. The visual puns aren’t nearly as ham-fisted as Ben Hardaway’s (as we’ll soon discover), making them more enjoyable than some of the jokes present in, say, Daffy Duck & Egghead. Regardless, there are a lot of unique gags, fun animation, and amusing dialogue to constitute a watch.

The cartoon is up on HBO Max, but you can also watch it here!