Naughty Neighbors (Let's Not Du-et and Say We Did)

Yay! After weeks of interruptions, we finally found this week’s entry! Granted, it’s not one of the better Porky Pig cartoons of the era, but it is sweet and charming and has some good visual gags, so...enjoy?

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

Summary: Petunia Pig and Porky Pig declare peace between their respective families, the Martins and the McCoys, who have been violently feuding all this time, but when the feud starts up again, it’s up to Porky and Petunia to use peace through brute force (or a literal “love bomb”). It’s basically Romeo and Juliet filtered through the Hatfields and McCoys feud, and with a happy ending.

Fun Facts:

• This is the final appearance of Petunia Pig in the Golden Age era. Petunia would come back decades later in the DC Looney Tunes comics and 86 years later in 2025’s The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, now voiced by Candi Milo (with Porky voiced by Eric Bauza).

• The newspaper is dated June 18, 1942, which is two and a half years after this short’s release, yet reports on the sinking of the Titantic, which happened 30 years before the short’s release. That’s probably the weirdest newspaper since the one from “Tortoise Wins By a Hare” that was dated for 1942, but reported that Adolf Hitler committed suicide...which didn’t happen until 1945. Before there was “The Simpsons predicted Donald Trump would be U.S. President,” there was “Looney Tunes predicted Hitler would kill himself.”

• The newspaper also has a headline about animator John Carey’s birth. John Carey was born in 1915 and died in 1987 (Carey would have been 24 when “Naughty Neighbors” was theatrically released and 27 according to the 1942 newspaper), further asking what kind of timeline the newspaper editors think they’re in.

The Channel(s): Unnamed syndication, Nickelodeon (Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon), and WKBD in Detroit, Michigan (1989; as part of the Porky Pig and Friends compilation show)

Part(s) Edited: A rather innocuous part (but one that probably had to be cut due to time or to cover up the shoddy workmanship of the notoriously awful redrawn-colorized version): Porky and Petunia’s duet of “Would You Like to Take a Walk” (with modified lyrics) was shortened on the redrawn-colorized version and when it aired on Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon. How shortened? Well, the first part of it is gone, as you’ll see in the video comparison.

Over on WKBD in Detroit, the first 45 seconds of the short were cut for time reasons, though the video I found on YouTube showed that the cartoon was basically reduced to nothing after a long intro made by the station that feels familiar, like I may have seen it on a local affiliate in Pennsylvania as a kid.

What Grinds My Gears About the Edit(s): The redrawn-colorized/Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon version’s cut is obvious, and kind of surprising, considering that the cartoon is actually safe to watch. The violence isn’t even that gruesome (it’s just the typical slapstick you get from Bob Clampett, though even that feels toned down for this), the kissing is G-rated, and there’s no racial/ethnic caricatures that makes modern audiences cringe in disgust. There is a slight World War II reference with the “non-aggression pact” leading to more violence, but that’s oblique enough that casual viewers aren’t going to understand it at first watch.

Video Comparison: 

Availability Uncut: To show just how unpopular this cartoon is (outside of occasionally airing on television), its physical media history shows it’s only been released twice: once on the 2001 Looney Tunes: The Collector’s Edition VHS (volume 12, dedicated to Porky and Daffy shorts). Sixteen years after that, “Naughty Neighbors” appeared on the Porky Pig 101 DVD set, where all black and white Porky Pig cartoons went to die (and this one has a music mistake where a loop of the “Porky's Tire Trouble” title card music plays over both the title card to this cartoon and the first few seconds up until the Martins and the McCoys start fighting).

Is/Was It on Streaming or Digital Download: However, something good did come from t-t-that: streaming gave it a better home and exposure. Boomerang’s streaming app had “Naughty Neighbors” from 2017 to 2024, while HBO Max (and its short-lived rebrand Max) had it from 2020 to 2025. And yes, it’s one of the Tubi 786 as of this writing.

‘Til next time: Stay Looney and Be Merrie!

I Love to Singa (Gogo Dancer)

Director: Fred “Tex” Avery

Summary: Another early Tex Avery cartoon that doesn’t feel in-character for him, but, unlike “Page Miss Glory,” Tex probably didn’t hate this one as much. This one is the story of an owl family that prides itself in classical music and opera, but are left reeling when one of their children is a jazz singer (back then, jazz was seen with the same disdain as rap and hiphop in the 1980s and 1990s: if you were white and into that, you were a disgrace to your family or a race traitor/poseur). When forcing the jazz singing son (named Owl Jolson) to sing opera doesn’t work, Owl gets thrown out and decides to make it on his own as a jazz singer. His first gig: a radio amateur hour, where anyone who doesn’t win over Jack Bunny (a very common pun name on comedian Jack Benny) gets rejected and ejected from the studio.

And if this short still isn’t familiar to you, the sound clip of Owl Jolson singing the title song was used on the very first episode of Comedy Central’s South Park ("Cartman Gets an Anal Probe") when Cartman is controlled by the anal probe and the cows use alien tech to make Officer Barbrady sing.

The Channel: TNT (on The Rudy and Gogo World Famous Cartoon Show)

Part(s) Edited: Two scenes were cut for time (as there wasn’t anything offensive about the two scenes cut):

1) After Owl Jolson is hatched and shocks his parents with his rendition of “I Love to Singa,” Fritz Owl decides that the best way to “cure” Owl’s jazz singing is to force him to sing “To Cilia,” which doesn’t work, as Owl keeps interjecting, “I Love to Singa” in between verses.

2) When Owl Jolson runs away from home, he happens upon Jack Bunny’s Amateur (spelled “Amatuer”) Radio Show, where contestants keep getting gonged and put through the trap door for bad performances.

How It Plays Edited/Video Comparison: The way I edited it on the video is probably not how it played out on The Rudy and Gogo World Famous Cartoon Show, but it’s one of those edits that Nickelodeon used to be able to do when it aired Looney Tunes cartoons: tried to salvage the cartoon and had a sense of humor about editing the shorts. If you remember Rudy and Gogo and how “I Love to Singa” was cut, then, by all means, describe it in the comments or email me. For now, enjoy the video:

Availability Uncut: This one is popular enough to be released on home media. I'm not going to list them all (a full list can be found here), but I am going to list the DVD and Blu-ray titles that have this short uncut, uncensored, and with original titles restored (if you've ever seen it on television, it was probably the Blue Ribbon Merrie Melodie version):

• Looney Tunes Golden Collection, volume 2 (on disc 2)
• Looney Tunes Spotlight Collection, volume 2 (also disc 2, which would be the last disc on that collection, since Spotlight Collections were the scaled-back version of the Golden Collection).
• The 2005 DVD release of the 1927 movie The Jazz Singer (which I don't recommend, not because of the blackface on the cover being potentially offensive, but because the version shown is the 1995 Turner dub that might not have the original titles to it). The 2013 Blu-ray release of the same movie does have the original titles to "I Love to Singa," so I do recommend that for the completionist Looney Tunes fan.
• Looney Tunes Collection All-Stars volume 3 (this is only available in Australia)
• The DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-ray versions of the 2006 animated movie, Happy Feet. (I know I shouldn't have included HD-DVD, since it pretty much lived and died in the mid-2000s because Blu-ray kicked its ass, but there are probably people out there who still have HD-DVD players for some reason).
• The DVD and Blu-ray versions of the Looney Tunes Platinum Collection (volume 1, disc 2)
• The Best of Warner Bros. 50 Cartoon Collection DVD
• The Looney Tunes Parodies Collection DVD (most recent as of 2025; it was released five years ago).

Is It Available on Streaming and/or Digital Download?: For digital download, it’s on iTunes Video. For streaming, it’s on Tubi (as of 2025). Strangely, HBO Max (both when it started out as “HBO Max” and when it was “Max” and both the United States feed and the Latin American/Brazil feed) didn’t carry this one, and I personally don’t know why.