Porky Pig Gets Very Surreal

The surrealist 1938 Porky in Wackyland, with its Dali-esque landscapes and opium dream inspired humor and storyline, has become my new favorite cartoon of all time. Porky Pig flies to darkest Africa in pursuit of a four sextillion dollar bounty on the last dodo bird and encounters along the way a black duck doing an Al Jolson impersonation, a freakish Three Stooges monster, and a dodo — who sounds remarkably like Daffy Duck — that bounces in from the vanishing point from behind a Warner Brothers shield to bop Porky on the head. All of these scenes were removed in the Cartoon Network version of the 1949 Merrie Melodies re-release, a cinecolor version entitled Dough for the Do-Do. In 1994, animators voted Porky in Wackyland #8 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of All-time. The film is richly representative of that early period of animation when the rules of the medium were still up for grabs, and cartoonists were drunk with possibility.

Bugs Bunny Does The South

The girls have broadened their tastes from Chilly Willy and Roadrunner to Tom and Jerry (161 episodes between 1940 and 1967) and the Merrie Melodies ouvre, which includes Bugs Bunny. I'm finding myself seriously getting into these. Tonight we hit on a few that were notable in their disdain for the South. Not exactly PC, but pretty damn funny nonetheless. There's a bit a few minutes into the 1950 Hillbilly Hare where Tuck & Punkinhead look for all the world like ZZ Top. The routine with Bugs calling squaredance steps is wonderfully cruel. In the second video,the 1953 Southern Fried Rabbit, he goes south of the Mason-Dixon line to mess with an unreconciled Civil War holdout. There's a scene where Bugs does blackface that's often removed, but I didn't find it nearly as offensive as some of the stuff I've seen in Tom and Jerry. In the next scene, he appears as Abraham Lincoln. and then later as Stonewall Jackson and Scarlet O'Hara. Awesome.

One Froggy Evening

Every once in a while, watching cartoons on YouTube with my kids, I'll stumble on something really special. Steven Spielberg calls this Warner Brothers Merrie Melodies short from 1955 "the Citizen Kane of animated film." Actually, I like this better.