Release date: February 26th, 1938
Series: Looney Tunes
Director: Bob Clampett
Starring: Mel Blanc (Porky, Daffy, Ducks, Chickens), Harry Lang (Duck), Bob Clampett (Chicken, Ducks)
Yet another cartoon parodying The Great War, following in the footsteps of Bosko the Doughboy and Boom Boom. In a few years, there'd be another war full of cartoon parody potential--for better or worse.
The title serving as a reference to the 1926 film What Price Glory?, What Price Porky chronicles the life of farmer Porky and his chickens. Or, more specifically, how the neighboring ducks (led by Daffy, of course) incite a war against the chickens after stealing their corn on the cob. A simple premise at first glance that is wrung with cartooning greatness: explosions, trench warfare, punny army tanks, ducks posing as Easter bunnies, kicklines, the works.
As the typography on the title card fades away, the screen brightens up and we truck into a gorgeous painting of Porky's farm. The flowers, vines, and trees in the foreground do wonders to frame the scene and tie everything together.
In a scene that loosely beckons memories of Porky’s Poultry Plant, farmer Porky sleepily emerges from his humble abode, ready to feed his chicky chick chick eh-chick chicks.
“Eh-eh-come eat your eh-ceh-corn. Here Henrietta, eh-ce-eh-ce-eh-come on Priscilla, Violet, eh-peh-Patricia...” Porky tosses the corn kernels to his hungry gaggle of chickens. Parroting a similar scene in Porky’s Poppa, right down to Bobe Cannon’s animation, our hero inevitably gets tongue tied, stuttering “Come eat your eh-ce-eh-ce-eh-ceh-uh-ceh... aww, come an’ get it.”
Carl Stalling’s score of “Chicken Reel” is wonderfully jaunty and nicely accentuates the animation of Porky‘s chickens sucking up the corn kernels, bobbing their heads to the beat of the music. Ken Harris’ variation of the gag in September in the Rain is slightly stronger, but comparing the two is a moot point. There’s no reason for the hens to display such urgency here—merely food for thought. In all, a very fun little scene.
Porky feeds his chickens some nice “uh-ce-eh-ce-eh-cob on the corn” for dessert, and looks on like the proud farm owner he is... until a swarm of ducks swoop in from stage right, grab the corn, and exit back stage right in a flash.
The speed in which the ducks enter and exit is to be commended—snappy and fast. but not incomprehensible so. Compare this scene to the one in Porky’s Poultry Plant, where feeding gags take up nearly 2 minutes of the short (no doubt prolonged by Joe Dougherty’s stutter.)
Not only that, but the scene is staged well, and continues to be as we pan across the screen to a pond next to Porky’s house where a flock of smug ducks enjoy their pilfered corn. Carl Stalling’s “laughing” score of "Bob White (Whatcha Gonna Swing Tonight?)" in addition to one of the ducks adding salt to their corn serve as the perfect way to rub the ducks’ victory in the hens’ faces.
Kind hearted Porky attempts to bargain with the ducks, which, as you can imagine, goes poorly. While Porky’s voice was still being explored in its potential, Mel Blanc’s deliveries are packed with charm and charisma. The dialogue is just as fun to listen to as the sardonic music score in the background.
“Hey, mister eh-eh-de-dee-deh-dee-ducks, eh-peh-please don’t steal my hens’ eh-ce-eh-corn. They’ll get awful hungry.”
As Porky babbles on, we pan even further into the pond. Hidden in the reeds is Ducktator Daffy (don’t let the absence of his white ring fool you, his vocals are unmistakably his), gnawing on his own corn cob. Though he hasn’t said a word, we know he means business—the tin can hat, the unwelcome posture, the guard before him carrying a harpoon, and makeshift desk made with an upside down tin pan all establish a sense of authority, even if it is a comedic one.
All the while, Porky drones on, digging himself into a metaphorical hole. “Nuh-ne-neh-now you just eh-eh-beh-be-bre-bring back the eh-cobs like nice eh-duh-de-duckies, and someday I’ll have you all over for a eh-deh-dee-eh-duck dinner.” Porky’s self-satisfied little “ha!” at his own joke is contagious. He continues to flounder, adding “you bring the duh-dee-deh-de-eh-ducks" as an afterthought.
There’s some gorgeously rubbery animation as Daffy discards his corn cob, plucking the tailfeather off of his all-too-obedient guard and using it as a literal feather pen. He scrawls out something on a piece of paper we can’t see. Porky’s vocals underscore the scene, growing desperate as he pleads “Aww, come on, eh-beh-b-be a sport! If my hens eh-deh-de-don’t get no corn, no eggs! Ne-no eggs, no chicks! No chicks, nuh-neh-no hens! Nuh-ne-no hens, nuh-ne-no eggs!"
No momentum is broken as Daffy folds his letter into a paper airplane, tossing it over to Porky who’s still tongue-tied in his battle over the ch-eh-cheh-chi-eh-chicken and the egg. Eventually, he too gives up, giving a resigned “Aww, don’tcha understand?”
A paper airplane to the snout prevents Porky from uttering any more extraneous dialogue. This entire scene is staged beautifully. No flow is broken whatsoever, and the decision to have Porky talking while Daffy performs his own actions is smart—that way, we’re not having an arbitrary close-up on Porky talking so the audience knows he’s talking. Two birds with one stone. The animation flows beautifully and is full of rubbery, snappy goodness. Certainly a scene worth perusing.
The hens crowd around Porky to read whatever note that Daffy has left them:
Elsewhere, Ducktator Daffy gives a Nazi salute in an imitation of Benito Mussolini (whose Ethiopia invasion was still fresh in everyone's minds by the time of this cartoon's release), while his duck army goose-step by and echo the salute. This is interesting, to say the least, on multiple levels—for one, Daffy has been alluded to being Jewish on multiple occasions (described as a non-Aryan duck in Scrap Happy Daffy, Mel Blanc giving his voice a “Jewish lilt”, and so on). Not only that, but in a moment of cartoon greatness he’s walloped Hitler on the head with a mallet in Daffy, the Commando.
And, even more so, these cartoon characters have imitated such historical figures on multiple occasions (Bugs dressing up as Hitler in Herr Meets Hare comes to mind), but established in a way that is mocking and shows that they’re the hero.
Here, we have none of that established lightheartedness. Daffy and his army are the bad guys. This isn't Daffy making fun of fascists, ready to bonk them on the head with a mallet. He is the fascist. It’s slightly disconcerting, tying such a well-known and beloved voice to that of a fascist dictator in a semi-serious manner. Regardless, it goes to show how ahead of the times Bob Clampett was--the only other cartoons to lampoon Nazis (or, rather, Hitler) have been Bosko's Picture Show and She Was an Acrobat's Daughter.
This is an early case of Porky being sidelined for greater gags to take precedence--he can only look on as the awkward mediator, standing between the two trenches filled with chicks and ducks respectively. One of the ducks ambles into the median and slams a "NO HENS LAND" sign into the ground, running off before he gets his tailfeathers shot off.
The scene is quite short, fading away into a montage of Navy gags. Duck shaped ships (say that 5 times fast) bob against the waves--presumably of the pond--while a triumphant score of "Song of the Marines" blares on. Ducks-turned-planes take off of one of the ships (the S.S. Saratoga), and we cut to a shot of baby ducklings using said ducks as bomber planes, complete with goggles and built in windshields.
Back to Porky who tries to keep the peace, but to no avail. Norm McCabe animates our mediator diving into a hole as both sides of the trenches relentlessly shoot at each other. The scene is short, but serves as an amusing bridge. The ferocity at which the ducks and chicks fire is quite funny.
Meanwhile, a hen nervously crawls low to the ground, approaching NO HENS LAND. Harry Lang puts his psuedo-Donald Duck voice to use as a duck soldier approaches the nervous hen, demanding "Who goes there!?"
Great timing in the next scene as an entire swarm of chicks lift up their mother's feathers. Looks can be deceiving as they coo in high, sweet voices "Nobody, boss, but us chickens!" A pause...
...and then they blow the duck to smithereens with their rifles, a smoke cloud concealing whatever gruesome horrors lie beneath it. Wonderful comedic timing--the quiet music score adds the right amount of suspense, and the cuteness of the chicks add an extra punch to an already funny gag.
The next gag is rather incomprehensible, but more amusingly so than not. One of the dive-bombing duck planes passes a chick, who is somehow suspended in the sky with a hotdog in place of a hot air balloon, giggling at the carnage below. The duck bomber approaches the chick, who jumps ship as the duck wedges two clouds (one above and below) together, eating the hotdog.
Out of place, confusing, and incomprehensible, but the whimsical and fun nature of the gag add some points. Had the gag been taken too seriously, it really would have dragged, but Clampett seemed to realize how absurd it was and reveled in it. Conviction is key.
Back to our ducktator, who darts into the scene decked head to toe in heavy artillery--wielding guns, bullets, even carrying a knife in his teeth. His lisp is no mistake as Daffy asks a duck soldier "Which way is the front?" Bob Clampett's Donald voice strikes again as the duck points left. "That way!"
"Thanks." With that, Daffy prepares to take off running... and in a classic twist, darts away into the horizon at the right of the screen, much to the befuddlement of the soldier. The drumroll as Daffy gears up to run is a very nice touch, as is the plume of smoke forming a question mark above the duck's head.
Back in NO HENS LAND, a line of chickens whisper variations of "at twelve o'clock!" to each other, giving their plan of when to run straight into battle. The "leading" chicken looks at a wristwatch, and the hands crawl in agonizing suspense (once more, a drumroll score adding nicely to the anticipation, as do the ticking sounds).
The clock strikes twelve, and the chicken blows into his whistle, leading his army into battle. A triumphant music score as the chickens march into battle...
...and nonchalantly lay out a picnic and enjoy themselves. The mocking music score is a great touch, and the aloof mannerisms of the chickens (one of them kicking their legs while indulging in a slice of cake) are great. The gag is almost delivered too nonchalantly, but works nevertheless.
Carl Stalling's flighty, bubbly score of "Boy Meets Girl" serves as as a divine accompaniment to Daffy painstakingly painting a batch of Easter eggs. His precision and prudence as he oh so carefully dabs painted flowers onto the eggs is hilarious--with the way he squints and tilts his head, flicking his wrist and using a paint palette, you'd think he was preparing a piece to be hung in the Louvre.
Satisfied with his artistry, Daffy discards his palette and swaps his tin can hat in favor of a white ribbon that he carefully ties around his head, mimicking the shape of bunny ears. If you look closely, one of the cels gets misaligned, his bottom half flicking down and making a jittery effect on the screen. Just another reminder of the labor and humanity that went into these shorts.
After gingerly placing a cotton ball (attached with a suction cup) to his tailfeathers, Daffy gathers up his eggs and sneaks furtively across the battlefield. We're met with a gorgeously moody shot of Daffy's silhouette tinkering along--the music accompanying his footsteps and the dark values of the background painting make for a rather striking effect.
Porky reminds the audience that his name is in the title by popping out of his little foxhole, watching as Daffy scatters his eggs on the field. "Who eh-ge-eh-ge-gee-eh-goes there?" Daffy's voice (and looks, for that matter) is hardly convincing as he answers in a spitty "It's me, the Easter Bunny!"
Nevertheless, Porky is easily fooled (which, to be fair, is something that comes rather naturally to him.) Daffy can hardly suppress his glee as he puts a hand over his mouth, observing Porky who eagerly gathers the eggs, exclaiming "Oh, eh-beh-eh-beh-beh-boy oh joy, Easter eggs!"
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| The '60s redrawn colorized version of the cartoon inexplicably turned Porky into a human. Frightening and fascinating. |
Happily eyeing his stash, Porky's joy quickly fades as the eggs hatch, unleashing a swarm of helmet-clad ducklings who assault him in various ways. A chorus of hilariously subdued "hoohoo"s accompany their torture--pulling on Porky's snout, cheeks, and ears, as well as hitting him over the head with a mallet and club. Porky seems relatively unharmed, merely staring on in befuddlement as his assaulters pile into Daffy's basket.
If there was any doubt that this dictator slash Easter Bunny is our beloved duck, the chorus of "HOOHOO!"s and the hysterical ballet that follows assert that this is indeed a Daffy (with a capital D) Duck. Daffy's laugh is particularly shrill and energetic, tying the whole scene together. Certainly one of my favorite aspects of the scene, but seeing as Daffy and Porky are my favorite characters, I have my biases.
Transition to night (as a title card declaring "Night Must Fall", a reference to the 1937 MGM film , tells us), as carnage has only gotten worse. There are multiple parallels to Jack King's Boom Boom in the latter half of this cartoon, but this scene especially mirrors the opening of the aforementioned cartoon, with bombs shrieking and exploding in the air, lighting up the night sky.
One of the duck-bomber-airplane hybrids drops a smoke screen between the opposing trenches, and a closer look reveals that the smoke screen is made by the aid of a cigar. That is to say, a duck smoking a cigar while riding on another duck.
The duck army use the smokescreen to advance on the befuddled line of hens. However, the smoke screen lifts up, revealing their presence.
Enter another highlight of the cartoon: a kickline. The ducks ever so nonchalantly put on a show for the hens, the smokescreen serving as a curtain as they dance to a floaty rendition of "We're Working Our Way Through College". The animation is very funny, especially upon realizing that the duck on the end in the tin can hat is supposed to be Daffy, besides being 5x too small.
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| Animators acting out the scene above. |
Speaking of Daffy, he's unable to keep time. The rest of the chorus line marches off screen, whereas Daffy continues dancing in place. He realizes his mistake, hurrying along to join his comrades with a sly grin. The "curtain" lowers, and the hens applaud the performance... only to be attacked by the same ducks seconds after, who lunge out of the smoke screen. A catchy music score, fun animation, and a fun premise all together. The timing is very well executed.
Cue more war gags as the dive-bombers prepare to strike (take note of the drybrush streaks/trails, an early usage of a technique that would dominate the later cartoons), one "pilot" pulling a duck's tailfeather and unloading one dozen eggs--packed in a carton, though I can imagine Clampett going the rectal route had this been made a few years later--onto the battlefield below.
Duck soldiers hatch from the eggs, the eggshells serving as makeshift parachutes as they all wield mallets. They float above a line of chickens below, and bop the mallets onto the helmets. Thus, an xylophone sound recites a few ending snatches of "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down", much to the befuddlement of the assailed chickens.
Elsewhere, Norm McCabe animates a great scene that parallels another from Boom Boom--Porky can only whip his head around and stare from his foxhole, some great animation of him swinging his arms in front of his face as bombs roar and thunder all around him. He grabs his foxhole and physically pushes it into the foreground, narrowly avoiding a bomb that decimates the spot he was just at.
Repeat the charade as another bomb explodes in the foreground, Porky dragging his foxhole to the background. The gag is executed much better here--it has the benefit of McCabe's smooth animation and fun expressions, and is very matter of fact, not dragging in pace. A fun gag indeed.
Pertaining to the duck side of things, one duck soldier, rather morbidly, gets blown up by a bomb. We see that he's okay--the flag he was carrying wedges itself between two tree branches, where he lands safely on top of. However, his good fortune doesn't last. He takes another hit from a bomb. Once the smoke dissipates, we find a roast (or, rather, rotisserie) duck in its place.
Clampett returns to the puns in a gag that hits much stronger than Daffy's punny declaration of war:
More Norm McCabe animation of Porky, who hops out of his foxhole when a bombshell rolls into it. A similar gag that would be furthered to more squash and stretch extremes in Porky's Five & Ten, Porky zips up the foxhole, the bomb exploding and creating a stretchy, rubbery bulge in the ground as Porky runs for the hills. While a little slow in delivery, the gag is, once more, a fun one, and Porky's scramble out of frame is particularly nice.
Speaking of nice animation, the flow of the next scene is wonderful as Porky darts away from the bombs. No momentum is broken as he slides to a stop, spinning 180 degrees as the pan comes to a halt near his house. With some clever thinking, Porky is able to turn a laundry wringer into a machine gun as he stuffs a corncob into it, cranking the handle and spitting out corn kernel bullets. Treg Brown's machine gun sound effects add wonders to the scene.
Porky's bullets graze strike a fallen and standing tree respectively, forming holes in the wood. The holes are perfectly outfitted to the army of charging ducks--the tree falls on them as they approach, locking them each into makeshift stocks. The wonders of corn!
There's an impressive, almost Tashlin-esque maneuver as Porky shoots entire corn cobs into the sky. One of the cobs snags on a duck's parachute, launching it back into the divebomber duck's egg carton cargo from earlier. Instead of cutting away, there's an intricate move as the duck leaves the foreground, spiraling in a nose dive and clipping the foreground once again as the audience is submerged in a trail of flames and smoke. The illusion is very fun and effective today--one can only imagine how it looked on a big screen in a theater, full of people who had never seen anything like this before.
If you can't kill the hens, you may as well target their owner. In a precursor to a similar scene in The Daffy Doc a handful of months later, Daffy stalks Porky with a comically enlarged mallet, ready to strike. Porky, however, wastes no time in turning his wringer around and launching a corn cob right into Daffy's gut.
As to be expected, the force of the projectile is so strong that it sends Daffy rocketing backwards. He's launched into a wire fence, which breaks and wraps itself around the ducktator, creating an informal little "jail" for him. The war has been won at last.
Porky settles the dispute in a mature manner, by tossing his corncobs to his hens and sticking his tongue out at Daffy with a celebratory "Nyehhh!"
Daffy, however, isn't too slighted. As the hens gobble up the corn, he unleashes his basket of (unpainted) eggs, who roll through the fence and hatch right at Porky's feet. With that, a gaggle of "hoohoo"ing ducks snatch up the corn cobs, and we pan back to Daffy and his minions indulging on their meal, a wonderfully sardonic, laughing underscore tying everything together. Iris out on a very satisfied ducktator Daffy.
Watching this, I am reminded of why I love this period of cartoons and cartoons in general. This is hardly a short I frequent--I've only seen it a handful of times in full, but I recall it making a great impression on me when I first watched it, and I can see why.
The energy in this cartoon is impressive. While some parts of the cartoon don't hit as strongly as other departments (some parts feel more like "this is just a string of cutaway gags" than others), the overall sense of lightheartedness, whimsy, and fun make it a hard cartoon to dislike. It doesn't take itself too seriously, and that's where it's successful.
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| Storyboards of the kickline scene. |
Not only that, but this is a semi-rare anomaly in the Looney Tunes universe--a cartoon that takes place in multiple points of the day. Clampett would repeat this in A Tale of Two Kitties (which works to its advantage), but for the most part, these cartoons are typically limited to whatever time they take place in. Not here.
Porky and Daffy both are emerging out of their shells, displaying recognizable attributes that signify change and growth is coming. Daffy now has a lisp and a voice that sounds recognizably his, and Porky's bumbling nature and gullibility will be a reoccurring theme for decades to come.
This is hardly Bob Clampett's greatest entry, as we'll learn, but it's cartoons like this that you want more of. Compare this to the Porky cartoons he'd be churning out in the next year or two, when the burn-out finally caught up to him--the energy here is blinding in comparison.
So, with that, I'd recommend it. I have my biases, but I genuinely believe this makes for a very fun watch. Not to mention, it's the first time that someone else besides Tex Avery is handling Daffy. Watch it for historic firsts like these, or watch it for plain fun. Either way, enjoy!
Link! (It's also available on HBO Max!)
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