The Village Smithy (or They Shoot Horseshoes, Don't They?)

Director: Tex Avery

Summary: In a spoof of the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem “The Village Blacksmith,” Porky Pig is an apprentice to the titular Village Blacksmith, and screws up in getting his master a horseshoe.

The Channel(s): Nickelodeon

Part(s) Edited: Ah, the first Nickelodeon edit done because of violence and not outdated racial stereotypes or to trim the runtime for commercials (“Gold Diggers of ‘49” is a gray area. Yes, the shooting scene with the metal tub does count as a violence cut, but it also counts as dangerous behavior if you think that viewers are dumb enough to think that a metal tub will protect them from gunfire and most of the censorship attention in that short belongs to the scenes with the Chinese laundrymen, including the brief scene of them in blackface from car exhaust).

Anyway, the Nickelodeon version of “The Village Smithy” cut the part where the village blacksmith guns down the rubber horseshoe after he puts it in a vice and the pressure causes the scene to shake.

How It Plays Edited/Video Comparison: The way I cut it, where I deleted the shaking part as well as the shooting part and the blacksmith putting away his gun after using it, is probably what Nickelodeon did (I originally had the shaking part, then jumped to Porky coming in with the horse, but there was a typo on one of the title cards, so I deleted the file). If you ignore the minor continuity error of the horseshoe suddenly going limp after getting tightened and the skip in audio, then it’s not a big deal, as this video will attest:

What Grinds My Gears About the Edit: Not much. I mentioned the slight audio cut and continuity error as being potential tells that something was cut, but I remember seeing this when I was younger on Nickelodeon, and it didn’t stand out through my seven- to eight-year-old eyes and ears (and believe me, I do remember a lot of censorship cuts to Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons).

Availability Uncut: Not many places to find this uncut, even though it’s relatively harmless by modern standards. Its only physical media release is on the Porky Pig 101 DVD, and it was on HBO Max (n.k.a Max), but the collection of Looney Tunes shorts has been taken down as of 2025. Maybe they’ll bring it back with a new assortment of shorts, but that won’t be for a while.