Porky's Poppa (Chocolate Milk Baby)

 

Director(s): Robert (“Bob”) Clampett and Charles (“Chuck”) Jones, even though Clampett is credited for direction while Jones is credited for animation.

Summary: It’s beast vs. machine when Porky’s poppa’s cow stops producing milk and forces him to order an ACME Creamlined Cow in order to save the farm from being mortgaged (as mentioned in the “Old McDonald” intro).

Fun Fact(s): This is Chuck Jones’ final short as Bob Clampett’s assistant director (though, as I said before, Bob Clampett is credited as director while Chuck Jones is credited for animation). Jones would become a director later in 1938 (starting with “The Night Watchman”) after Frank Tashlin took a break from animating Warner Bros cartoons (Tashlin would come back in the 1940s to make more WB shorts until he gave that up to do live-action comedies that starred people like Bob Hope, Jayne Mansfield, and Jerry Lewis).

The Channel(s): Nickelodeon

Part(s) Edited: Bessie is “birthing” bottles of milk in order to compete with the ACME Creamlined Cow. One of them turns out to be a bottle of chocolate milk. “I Wish I Was in Dixie” plays in the background as Bessie and Porky bashfully look away and pretend that that didn’t happen. For those who don’t “get it,” the joke here is that Bessie “birthed” a black child and, back when this cartoon was made, a white woman birthing a black child was considered extremely socially taboo (and it might still be in some places, but, mostly, where I live, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone these days who’s not even a little mixed-race, whether or not being black/African-American is part of their heritage).

Anyway, that’s what Nickelodeon cut, which surprises me, as I didn’t think the censors would be smart enough to pick up on the unfortunate implications of that joke. Cartoon Network and Boomerang, on the other hand…well...

What Grinds My Gears About the Edit: Yeah, Cartoon Network and Boomerang didn’t cut squat from that part. They have a pretty good track record of editing racially insensitive content involving African-Americans, from white characters in blackface to actual caricatures of black celebrities of the day, like Cab Calloway and Stepin Fetchit (especially the latter), but this is one of those times where they slipped up so bad. I can understand if they left it uncut for The Bob Clampett Show, as that show had a lot of the shorts uncut and uncensored for historical reasons…but I remember seeing this uncut on shows like The Acme Hour and The Looney Tunes Show (2003-2004 edition), and those weren’t the “historical context” animation shows. And don’t think this is the first or last time they’ve done something like this…because it isn’t.

Video Comparison: The edited version is seamless enough. It’s one of those cuts that says, “You can only kind of tell that something’s missing, but you’ll chalk it up to a film splice or scene that was edited before being released to theaters.”

Availability Uncut: Not much in the VHS or laser disc department, but it is on two DVDs: the fifth volume of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD set (released in 2007) and the Porky Pig 101 DVD set (released ten years later in 2017)

Is/Was It Available on Streaming?: It was available on the Boomerang streaming app, as well as on HBO Max (when it was first called that and when it was changed to “Max,” but not when it changed its name back). Currently, it’s part of Tubi’s Looney Tunes collection.

‘Til next time…