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itself isn’t all that impressive (even with the fact that it’s one of the many that doesn’t air much these days due to outdated racial and ethnic stereotyping played for comedy), and the reviews on Letterboxd reflect that.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 say. 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!