Speaking of the Weather (An Old Buddy [Cartoon] of Mine)

Director: Frank Tashlin

Summary: A “midnight in the store” cartoon (the first of three that Tashlin did and his first color cartoon), featuring celebrity caricatures and spoofs of popular reading material of the day all set to the title track of the short. This one takes place at a drugstore after midnight, and the reading material shown are magazines of all types. Like all “midnight at the store” shorts, this one has a rather thin story to break up the monotony of the gags and music. This one has a yegg from The Gang Magazine trying to break into a safe shown on the cover of The Magazine of Wall Street and Business, only to have everyone from Boy Scouts from Boy’s Life magazine to Greta Garbo on the cover of Photoplay stopping him when the crook inevitably escapes from the prison cell on the cover of LIFE.

The Channel(s): Cartoon Network and Boomerang

Part(s) Edited: A light edit on this one. When the prisoner makes his escape and all the magazine characters go after him, all that was cut were two shots of the African natives running towards the camera, which, if you can believe it, is recycled footage from “Buddy of the Apes” (which definitely didn’t air on Cartoon Network due to the stereotypical depictions of African natives/non-white indigenous peoples) and “Buddy’s Theatre” (which also didn’t air on Cartoon Network for the same reason, though, now that I think of it, I don’t think Cartoon Network aired any Buddy cartoons because…they just weren’t that good. Not even Late Night Black and White showed them, to my knowledge, and they showed the few shorts that had Goopy Geer as a character).

What Grinds My Gears About the Edit: Not much, unless you count the second edit where you can clearly hear the angry natives over the shot of the thug bouncing on the spears thrown at him. Even then, I give that a pass, because audio cue mistakes happen a lot in editing and that mistake can easily be dismissed as the walla of off-screen magazine characters that somehow got spears from other magazine covers (possibly one about primitive weapons or touring African jungles).

Video Comparison:

Availability Uncut: “Speaking of the Weather” hit the home media release trifecta of the 1990s going into the early-to-mid 2000s: it was on the laser disc and VHS versions of the Golden Age of Looney Tunes series (volume 1, “1930s Musicals”). Fourteen years later, it appeared on the third volume of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection (the volume where the concentric circles are black, Bugs is holding one of the singing girls from that short, and it comes with a warning about politically-incorrect content courtesy of Whoopi Goldberg) on the second disc, featuring Hollywood spoofs of the 1930s, ‘40s, and 50s. Three years after that, it appeared as a special feature on the DVD version of the movie, Gold Diggers of 1937, starring Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, Victor Moore, and Glenda Farrell, and that’s where it’s been ever since. As of this writing, it hasn’t been re-remastered for Blu-ray or put on streaming, which is a shame, because this feels like it could have been on HBO Max when that service first launched in 2020, only to be pulled because it had outdated racial and ethnic stereotypes in it.

‘Til next time…

 

Porky's Railroad (Re-Drawn Together)

Director: Frank Tashlin

Summary: Porky’s clunky, yet reliable train engine, Toots the 15th Century Unlimited (a 2-2-2 engine --two leading wheels, two driving wheels, and two trailing wheels -- popularly called a “Jenny Lind”)  squares off against Dirty Digg’s streamlined train, Silver Fish (no word on what kind of wheel alignment it’s supposed to have) in this battle between old tech vs. new tech.

The Channel(s): Unnamed syndication, Nickelodeon, and MeTV

Part(s) Edited: A very quick sight gag. During the race between Toots and the Silver Fish, a brief scene showing the Silver Fish racing by a woodpile that flies up revealing a black man (one that kind of looks humanoid, the way Bosko did) in tattered clothes was cut. Surprisingly, neither Cartoon Network nor Boomerang cut that part, and I actually found proof of it (see the “Video Comparison” section below).

The redrawn-colorized version also cut a short scene where Dirty Digg’s Silver Fish turns a tunnel inside out, and the end where Porky is crowned the new engineer of the Silver Fish, but those cuts were because redrawn-colorized versions had a hard time replicating the frenetic and fast-paced animation of these black-and-white shorts (mostly Bob Clampett’s work, but Frank Tashlin did a lot of what Clampett would be known for) and would often drop scenes because they weren’t usable (if you think that’s bad, wait ‘til we get to “The Daffy Doc” and “Wholly Smoke”).

What Grinds My Gears About the Edit: This probably doesn’t grind my gears as much as it should. The “black man in the woodpile” edit goes by so fast that you don’t even notice. However, the Looney Tunes Fandom wiki says that it was cut because it’s a visual pun on a racially offensive saying. We have enough racist sentiment in this world; we don’t need any more unless it’s backed by historical context or someone challenging and condemning it, so I don’t know or want to know what that saying is.

As for the two other cuts…those were cut due to shoddy workmanship, not censorship. I’m not running a “Shoddy Workmanship” blog, though I do like pointing out how redrawn-colorized cartoons look like complete and utter crap, since I remember seeing those a lot on Nickelodeon (and occasionally, Cartoon Network).

Video Comparison: In a return to the style of the pilot blog post about Bosko, The Talk-Ink Kid, I’m going to show the full, uncut black and white version versus the redrawn-colorized edited version:

Uncut (black and white version):

Uncut (computer-colorized version as seen on Cartoon Network):

Edited (redrawn-colorized, as seen on Nickelodeon, MeTV, and unnamed syndication):

Availability Uncut: It is available on the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 4 DVD (on the second disc centered on Frank Tashlin cartoons), the Porky Pig 101 DVD set, and the Porky Pig volume of a UK-based DVD set called “The Looney Tunes Big Faces Box Set” (a.k.a “The Kids WB Bumper Box of Toons”). It’s not on streaming as of yet, but it doesn’t matter, as this cartoon has been in the public domain since 1965, so you can watch it wherever fine public domain films (live-action and animated) are uploaded.

For more information on trains and how they’re depicted in the media, visit https://obscuretrainmovies.wordpress.com

‘Til next time…