Porky's Picnic (Plain as the Black on Your Face/In a Detroit Minute)

 

Director(s): Bob Clampett (credited as “Robert Clampett”)

Summary: Porky and his girlfriend, Petunia (the one that’s actually nice to Porky instead of the one from “Porky’s Romance,” who only likes Porky because he had chocolates and flowers for her) go on a picnic near the zoo, and Porky must keep an eye on Pinky, Porky’s mischievious nephew, who keeps trying to cut off a squirrel’s head with a pair of scissors (yeah, that’s beyond mischievous and straight up “sign you’re raising a future serial killer.” At least by today’s standards. Back then, no one really cared).

Fun Facts: 

• This short is the first time since “Porky’s Romance” that Petunia Pig (Porky’s love interest in the same vein as Minnie Mouse or even Honey from the Bosko and Honey cartoons) was shown, though she was seen in “Scalp Trouble” as a picture on Porky’s wall and she would have been in “Porky’s Party,” but Bob Clampett uninvited her.
• Unlike Frank Tashlin’s version, this version of Petunia Pig is actually likeable, but incredibly bland (much like Porky himself in these shorts where he’s not paired up with someone crazy like Daffy).

• The 515 train in this short is the same one from “Porky’s Railroad” and this Tex Avery color cartoon called “Streamlined Greta Green.”

Letterboxd Says The Darndest Things: Feelings about this cartoon range from “It sucks” to “It’s fairly standard, but has its moments.” Tim Brayton combines those two sentiments into one somewhat verbose review with a two-and-a-half-star review tacked on:

Not without its compensations: there are some interesting staging choices, including the needlessly complex and artful use of translucent foreground elements at one point, and the short has exceptionally clear designs on the comic possibilities of Porky's stutter leading him to words that are, by all apparent logic, more complicated than the one he couldn't spit out. But more than any of Bob Clampett's sleepy, disposable "I grow weary of this guileless pig" 1939 Porky cartoons, this feels like we're actually watching the animation, storytelling, and gagwork regress in real time: this feels just so extremely much like a cartoon from the first half of the '30s (it feels like multiple specific cartoons, in fact), from the scenario to the languid pace of the gags to the way that the cruel and selfish Petunia Pig, whose torment of Porky was funny because it was mean, has been rebooted as a nice cartoon girlfriend who is way too close to Cookie, paramour of the dreaded Buddy, for comfort. Anyway, I know where this is all going because it's 84 years later and the Looney Tunes would spend the decade after this transitioning from "the funny animal cartoon series put out by Warner Bros." into "an American institution and one of the greatest bodies of work in the history of comic cinema", but if I were a cartoon fan watching this as they came out in '39 (if indeed such beings existed in '39), I strongly feel that this is the point I'd be bailing out on Porky.

Sc8lo’s review focuses more on Pinky Pig’s unsettling penchant for comic animal abuse, brings up a strange choice in story beat that most wouldn’t notice immediately, and steals my bit on revealing where the cartoon is available uncut (if it’s available on home media at all):

What starts out as a cutesy short winds up being a bit maniacal thanks to the inclusion of Pinky Pig in his second and final appearance. His inclusion does throw up a lot of questions. What is his relationship to Porky here and why is he going around trying to decapitate squirrels like Cropsey from The Burning?

Why does Porky offer to take Petunia on a picnic only to go straight for a nap as soon as they arrive?

This short is available on Porky 101.

Finally, we have Horse Man Jack, who expresses his dislike for the short and brings up a good reason (one of many, actually) why I don’t consider the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons child-friendly:

I’ll always find it funny how much the Looney Tunes shorts hate children considering that they’re, you know, popular with children. Unfortunately this one isn’t funny and the classic Ye Olde Cartoon “throw in a blackface gag for no reason” moment sours the mood.

To be absolutely fair to Horse Man Jack, the Looney Tunes shorts weren’t “meant for children” when they were in theaters. That only started to happen thanks to television reruns and being put on Saturday morning, weekday afternoon syndication, and cable, where they were edited to make them child-friendly. At least the home media releases had them uncut and, later, they were made for both family viewing and for collectors who want the shorts uncut, uncensored, and with a warning about how some of the jokes and scenes haven’t aged well, but will be shown as a reminder of our less-enlightened past so we can make a more enlightened future (I don’t know how that’s going to work, but I admire their optimism).

The Channel(s): Nickelodeon and syndication (WKBD in Detroit, Michigan during the 1980s)

Part(s) Edited: 

• The WKBD version that aired back in the 1980s took a chunk out of the first two and a half minutes of this short — definitely for time reasons/more commercials, but the scene of Pinky detaching the side car from the motorcycle and him and Petunia racing dangerously down the road and nearly getting hit by a train could be seen as a content cut for dangerous, imitable behavior (if that were true, then why weren’t the running gag of Pinky trying to cut a squirrel’s head off with scissors and scenes of Pinky wandering off to harass the animals at the zoo cut?) and scenes of peril and threat (even though the peril and threat has a reassuring outcome). WKBD also shortened Petunia kissing Porky as a reward for rescuing Pinky, not because it may be seen as sexual, but because Porky had mud on his face and when Petunia kissed him, it transferred onto her and put her in blackface because her lips weren’t covered in mud.

• Nickelodeon’s version left in the beginning, but also aired two versions where the blackface kiss was edited: the computer-colorized version where the kiss was shortened (so, same version as WKBD) and a redrawn-colorized version where the scene in question was left in, but the lips were also colored brown so the blackface just turns into a face covered in mud, though, if you look at the scene closely, you’ll see that there’s one frame when Petunia pulls back where the lips are still white. In fact, here's that frame now:

What Grinds My Gears About the Edit(s): Not much for the “blackface kiss” part, since that’s justified. However, I would like to add that, despite Cartoon Network’s and Boomerang’s histories of editing out outdated depictions of African-Americans and black people in general (which includes blackface), that scene wasn’t edited or altered in any way. I understand The Bob Clampett Show version not doing it, since that show had most of their shorts unedited (or close to it), but “Porky’s Picnic” was shown outside of that series on installment shows like The Looney Tunes Show (2003 edition), Bugs and Daffy, and The ACME Hour. What’s that about?

WKBD cutting the first two and a half minutes of it — yeah, there’s no excuse for that, except for wanting more time for commercials. The first two and a half minutes do lay out a lot of exposition for this short (however thin it might be) and cutting it just ruins it.

Video Comparison: 

Availability Uncut: As of this writing, the only place you can find this uncut, uncensored, but not restored/remastered on physical media is on the Porky Pig 101 DVD set, which came out in 2017.

Is/Was It on Streaming or Digital Download: It was on streaming from 2021 to 2023 on Warner MediaRIDE (which was only available as a streaming service in Honda cars). After that, it was gone. It’s not even on Tubi, which I don’t understand. The blackface kiss could have squeaked by unnoticed and there are a lot of cartoons besides this that have kids behaving badly, so what makes this one so special that it’s not allowed to be shown? Maybe it’s because it’s not that well-liked.

‘Til next time, Stay Looney and Be Merrie

Scalp Trouble (Cannonball Blast from the Past, or "I Will Celebrate Meaningless Milestones")

🥳🥳Happy 100th blog post! 🥳🥳

After a month off to reflect and deal with outside obligations, I’m back. Yeah, the cartoon we’re going over today kinda stinks, but it’s great to reach 100.

Director(s): Bob Clampett (credited as “Robert Clampett”)

Summary: Commander of an incompetent troop, Daffy rallies his sorriest member (Porky Pig) to help him fight back against a savage Native American tribe attacking their fort.

Fun Facts: 

• Friz Freleng (ever the environmentally-conscious director by recycling jokes, animation, and story premises — sometimes from his own shorts) remade this short three times: once in 1944 (“Slightly Daffy”), again in 1953 (“Tom Tom Tomcat”) and for a third time in 1960 (“Horse Hare”). The last two aren’t direct copies of this, but they do have some of the same scenes and gags in it.

• Porky has a picture of Petunia Pig above his bunk in the scene of Daffy trying to wake him up.

Letterboxd Says The Darndest Things: The cartoon itself isn’t all that impressive (even with the fact that it’s one of the many that doesn’t air much these days due to outdated racial and ethnic stereotyping played for comedy), and the reviews on Letterboxd reflect that. You can read them all here, but, if you don’t have time for that, I’ll pick the three that stand out to me:

Tim Brayton (whom I’ve covered before when I first started this segment) gave this two-and-a-half stars and said:

Tragic to see that Bob Clampett’s boredom with Porky is severe enough to extend to Daffy, though in defense of this one, the gags are a bit more creatively weird and mildly surreal than they have been in a while. This is counterbalanced by somewhat lifeless animation of some awfully unappealing character designs: one expects a certain portion of racism in a film with a title like Scalp Trouble, but the sullen, sour dislike of people present in this one and its ugly-as-fuck humans still surprised me. It’s trying to be at least enjoyable in its silliness, but this still has a kind of perfunctory feeling that the generic-as-hell Western setting isn’t helping with, and Daffy’s just not the jolting alien force that he needs to be to freshen it up, no matter how it seems at first when he parades around with his massive, unambiguously phallic scabbard.

Also, it hurts this film more than a little bit that by far its best joke was basically stolen intact from an extremely memorable bit in Disney's generationally popular and beloved Three Little Pigs.

I...really don’t have a counterpoint to it, since he pretty much hit the nail on the head as to why most WB cartoon fans don’t like this one. The part at the end about a gag being stolen wholesale from a Disney cartoon is a surprise, only because I don’t normally watch Disney shorts (yeah, I did watch the one where Donald Duck dreams he’s in Nazi Germany [“Der Fuerher’s Face”] and that really tragic one about a sweet German boy being indoctrinated into Nazism’s ideals and beliefs [“Education for Death,” though, in hindsight, that sounds like that movie Jojo Rabbit if it were played for drama instead of dark comedy with drama sprinkled in], but not much beyond that) and wouldn’t know what he’s talking about.

Scrade Cottontail adds why this cartoon wasn’t as good as it should have been with this:

Daffy as a hard-knock general is a dreadful miscasting.

Agreed. It would have been better if Porky was the hard-knock general and Daffy was the incompetent troop member who ends up saving the day. It’s a bit predictable, but sometimes, predictability helps.

And finally, Lowbacca gives this three stars, identifies the stolen joke that I couldn’t find, and does give his honest take on the short:

Not for nothing, but the “Here’s my porcine uncle, he’s a football” background gag was done at least 6 years earlier by Disney in Three Little Pigs.

Well, with this one’s title, you certainly know part of what you’re getting, so there’s a lot that comes with that. Beyond that, though, I’m particularly concerned (about either me or it, I’m not sure which) that there’s an entire line of dialogue here that I got right verbatim before it even started and I’m not sure what to take away from that. This also did what I think is key in a cartoon, and it manage to find a take I wasn't expecting on something and do it in a funny enough way that even on repetition I couldn't help but laugh. This thing earns itself half a star, easy, just on what Daffy goes through after swallowing ammunition.

The Channel(s): Nickelodeon

Part(s) Edited: Despite this being one of those WB shorts that doesn’t air much on television or get released on physical media or streaming due to outdated racial and ethnic caricatures that can’t easily be edited out, Nickelodeon did air this with a minor cut. When Daffy is being used as a rifle to shoot down the American Indians (after Daffy swallows bullets from the boxes he looted from the powder house), one of the gags, where a tall American Indian gets cut down to a short American Indian as he’s running from the gunfire, was cut.

What Grinds My Gears About the Edit(s): Take your pick:

• The fact that “Bosko the Doughboy” had a similar scene and was never edited for it on the same network that aired “Scalp Trouble”.

• The fact that the other scenes of the American Indians getting shot in comical ways weren’t edited.

• The fact that it doesn’t really matter in the end since, as I’ve said before, this is one of those WB cartoons that doesn’t air on American TV or get released on home media much due to outdated racial and ethnic stereotyping. It’s like how the Cow and Chicken episode “Buffalo Gals” originally had a line from Mom (voiced by Candi Milo) telling Dad (voiced by Dee Bradley Baker) that he shouldn’t worry about Cow (voiced by Charlie Adler) that she’s riding with The Buffalo Gals because Mom did the same thing when she was in college, but was cut as the censors felt it was too sexually suggestive (the way it was worded, it was an innuendo on the old “experimenting in college” trope, where an otherwise heterosexual person has a one-time same-sex affair with someone), but, in the end, the entire episode was banned because of one viewer complaint about the sexually suggestive content that managed to slip by regardless.

Video Comparison: 

Availability Uncut: As of this writing, the only legal way you can find this is on the Porky Pig 101 DVD. Yes, it’s unrestored, but if you’re that much of a completist for WB cartoon collecting (or actually like the short), then you won’t care that it’s not restored and remastered.

For comparison, “Slightly Daffy” (which wasn’t edited on any American or international TV channel that I know of, but is one of those WB cartoons that didn’t air often because airing a version where most, if not all, of the scenes with the Native Americans are cut would make it a choppy, incoherent mess) is only available on two VHSes (Cartoon Moviestars: Daffy! from 1988 and 1996’s Further Adventures of Daffy Duck, the latter of which was available in the United Kingdom) and a laser disc (1992’s The Golden Age of Looney Tunes, volume 3, side 9). As of this writing, there haven’t been any DVD or Blu-ray releases, and, like “Scalp Trouble,” it’s not on streaming or digital download.

Is/Was It on Streaming or Digital Download: Nope (for either “Scalp Trouble” and “Slightly Daffy”). No Boomerang, No WarnerMedia RIDE, no Apple iTunes, no Amazon Prime Video, no HBO Max (domestic and international), and especially no Tubi, which is a shame, because I can picture either one of those shorts being on there.

‘Til next time, Stay Looney, Be Merrie, and Here’s to Another 100 of These!