Pigs Is Pigs (1937 film)
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| Pigs is Pigs | |
| Merrie Melodies series | |
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| Directed by | Friz Freleng |
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| Story by | Michael Maltese |
| Animation by | Bob McKimson Paul J. Smith |
| Voices by | Billy Bletcher |
| Music by | Carl W. Stalling |
| Produced by | Leon Schlesinger |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. Pictures The Vitaphone Corporation |
| Release date | January 30, 1937 (USA premiere) |
| Format | Technicolor, (one reel) |
| Language | English |
| IMDb page | |
- "Pigs is Pigs" is also a noted humor book by Ellis Parker Butler, which was made into a cartoon by Walt Disney Productions in 1954.
Pigs Is Pigs, is a 1937 Merrie Melodies cartoon that featured Piggy and the Hamhock family.
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[edit] Synopsis
Piggy Hamhock (a character concurrent with but separate from Porky Pig) is always hungry, thinking of food, eating, and stealing food when he can. When his mother leaves a pair of pies out to cool, he gobbles one down whole; and would have downed the second as well if his mother hadn’t stopped him.
That afternoon, his mother serves spaghetti for dinner. While she and his brothers and sisters say grace, he sneaks under the table and ties the ends of the spaghetti all together. When his mother says "and now commence," he sucks the entire meal (enough spaghetti for a family of eight) down all by himself in a single slurp. His mother scolds him: "Piggy! What's the matter with you?! Do you want you should burst?!" He listens, but shows that he clearly doesn't care.
The next morning, he finds himself invited into the home of a kindly, hiccoughing, old man. The old man asks Piggy if he's hungry and presents Piggy with a table laid out with a full-blown feast – complete with a roasted turkey. Overjoyed at the man's generosity, Piggy sits down, and the man reveals himself as some sort of mad scientist (voiced by Billy Bletcher, better known for the voice of Paw Bear in some later Warners toons), who straps him down and declares, "So, it's food you want! Ha, ha! (Hic) We'll give you plenty of it!"
The scene switches to the basement, revealing a bizarre machine built for the sole purpose of force-feeding hungry little kids like Piggy (not that he would need any forcing). As he begins his work, the scientist yells, "So, you love food, aye?"
A mechanical chair (with a robotic arm holding Piggy's nose) carries him to a huge vat (labeled "SUPER SOUP FEEDER") filled with gallons of soup; the mechanical arm pulls Piggy's mouth open to let in a torrent of soup. He is then fed bananas shot out of their skins down his throat like bullets. There follow stops at a gumball machine that doles out olives and at a conveyor belt of ice cream cones. Then comes the main course – a sandwich as big as a king-sized bed (featuring the first appearance of Freleng’s "hold the onions" gag), followed by dessert dispensed from the "PIE-A-TROPE" (pies spun on the spindle of a converted jukebox).
Laughing maniacally, the scientist incessantly continues forcing the food into Piggy – shown in montage. After an entire day of this business, the pig is returned up to the mad scientist's house: transformed into an obese, food-packed, ball. Bulging out of the restraints, Piggy could never in the world have been more content, happy, and satisfied as he was at that moment.
Smiling at the sight of Piggy’s obesity, the scientist pokes him twice and kindly asks "Have enough, my boy?" To which Piggy replies "Y-y-y-yes sir!" The doctor then releases him commenting, "Why, you're not half full!"
With the sun setting, Piggy waddles his bloated way to the door, passing by the food the scientist had laid out on the kitchen table to bait him. He looks at the turkey and experiences a thrill at the chance of eating even more. He pulls off a drumstick and after taking a bite, explodes. Or rather, he wakes up in his own bed – it was just a dream. He then hears the sound of his mother calling him down to breakfast. He dashes downstairs and starts eating again with gusto.
[edit] In other works
Over the years, various writers aware of Pigs is Pigs have incorperated the mad scientist’s Feed-A-Matic machine in their works.
[edit] The Gumby Show
Art Clokey did a full re-imaging of this cartoon in 1957 as part of The Gumby Show. "Grub Grabber Gumby" recast Gumby in Piggy’s role. Like Piggy, Gumby has been developing a liking for eating, and he starts the day by eating almost all the cookies on the kitchen table. Then he eats Pokey's sandwich and steals one of the pies Mrs. Applebee left out to cool (as Piggy did at the beginning). With a full stomach, he falls asleep and later awakes to find himself in the clutches of a bipedal equine named "Mr. Stuff".
- Mr. Stuff: Hee, hee, hee -- so, you're the boy who likes to eat!
- Gumby: Who are you?
- Mr. Stuff: Don't worry, just call me Mr. Stuff. I'm going to do you a favor; how'd you like to have all the goodies you can hold?
Like Piggy, Gumby's face lights up with joy at the offer. Mr. Stuff is true to his word, using a conveyor belt to cram thousands of scoops of vanilla ice cream into Gumby's eagerly waiting mouth. After that a tank car of soda pop is brought over and its contents is pumped into him. This all leaves Gumby's stomach over swollen and bloated. But this is Mr. Stuff, and he's not going to finish until Gumby is totally stuffed.
[edit] Andy Panda
In "Apple Andy" (1946, Walter Lantz Studio), Andy Panda is tempted by the Devil to cross a fence to eat apples in an orchard. An angel appears to remind him of what might happen if he follows the devil. After giving in to temptation, Andy has a major nightmare. Andy dreams that he has gone to hell. He is strapped into the Feed-A-Matic machine, with the devil operating the controls. A turning lathe force-feeds green apples to him, followed by a worm shoving fistfuls of applesauce into his mouth, and a dead apple tree pouring apple cider down his throat.
[edit] Treehouse of Horror IV
In The Simpsons fourth Halloween episode segment "The Devil and Homer Simpson," Homer Simpson spends a day in Hell. In the "Ironic Punishment Department," a demon has Homer strapped in the Feed-A-Matic chair (recreated in exact detail) forcing him to eat "all the doughnuts in the world!" The punishment fails, however, when Homer does eat all the doughnuts in the world, and still asks for more. The demon says "I don't understand it. James Coco went mad in fifteen minutes!"
[edit] The Lost Saucer
In the Sid and Marty Krofft series, The Lost Saucer episode, "Fatropolis," Jerry and his babysitter Alice wander into a city where fat is the law. The Mayor declares them guilty of breaking the law, and sentences them to the "Fattenarium" until they each weigh 500 pounds. The Fattenarium is a different version of the Feed-A-Matic, -- it scans the children’s minds so that it knows exactly what they like to eat and artificially stimulates their appetites so that they never stop gulping down the endless supplies of food it provides them.
[edit] Web comic
In 2002-2003, FA artist Willix published a webcomic adapted from the original cartoon. Entitled "Pigs Be Pigs", it was the story of the strange thing that happened to a pair of athletic girls who went door-to-door selling membership in a local gym.
The first girl was a ginger-haired former 327-pound woman who had trimmed down; when she knocks on the door of the home of Piggy's scientist-doctor, she becomes the test subject of his latest invention; the Feed-A-Matic, which combines real food with a contraption that feeds the woman a thick, creamy liquid through a hose, which fills her up faster and gives her a much bigger appetite. Unlike Piggy's dream, this is supposed to be real - the doctor being a "mad genius" with a more gentle and kindly personality. He promises her to restore her to her former beautiful self. At first he stuffs her with a continuous parade of food as was done with Piggy. But when her belly is packed full, the doctor then makes her drink a special liquid concoction he created - a substance which is instantly converted into and stored as body fat without filling her stomach. She soon becomes significantly heavier and fatter, the doctor claiming as he did in the cartoon that she is "not even half full!"
After being fattened to well beyond her original obese weight, she begins to waddle to the door as Piggy did in the cartoon. As she makes for the exit, she comes to an enormous Death by Chocolate cake and she wolfs it down, (first on her own and then with some help from the feed-a-matic), resulting not in her exploding, but in her massive belly outgrowing her legs. The "magic hands" help her up and place her now gigantic belly on a board with rollers. The mad scientist directs her down the hall to a guest bedroom. She is so stuffed and sleepy she goes along. In the guest bedroom she falls asleep, leaving the doctor to give her even more of the fattening liquid in her sleep. She dreams about growing even fatter than she is, by visioning herself as a goddess, an obese queen, a fat superhero ("Fatgirl") and a giant Godzilla-type monster.
When she wakes up in the morning, realizing it was all a dream, she sees that she has become a gigantic ball of jiggling fat, which she enjoys. Asked by the doctor if she wants anything, she decides to quit the gym and stay at the doctor's house, satisfied with her new figure. Soon, while she gorges on an enormous breakfast, the second, black-haired, thinner and less friendly girl shows up looking for the first. She is shocked by her colleague's transformation and is more scornful of her new form, declaring "Why would anyone want to be such a big, fat pig?" At this point, the doctor captures her, puts her in the same chair and subjects her to the same feeding process, while the first watches with glee as she eats and grows even bigger, observing that she, too, will soon be so fat that no chair will be big enough for her. The feeding stops for a moment to allow the doctor to admire the girls.
The first is now even more of a fat blob, her feet no longer touching the ground, her arms hardly able to move and her face covered in multiple chins. The second has massive thighs and, as the doctor points out, huge breasts and buttocks. The doctor sets her free from the chair but she, too, struggles to make it to the front door, and falls over on her front, unable to move and again leaving the doctor to fill her up. The first girl eats masses of cake as the second girl swells up to equal the first's size. The doctor says that he could keep this up forever and notes that they are rapidly running out of room. The story ends with the two girls, at immense proportions, staying like they are supposedly for the rest of their lives and the doctor continually feeding their huge appetites. We are told that they reach weights so huge that they can only be described in the reader's imaginations.
It should also be noted that while the first girl sports a giant belly and overall spherical body, the second develops more fat in the breasts and buttocks, although both girls appear to reach the same weight. This is presumably to outline the different figures of fat women or girls that are often idolised by the FA community.
[edit] Trivia
- The animation appears crude by later Warner standards and contains some goofs.
- Piggy’s design includes a set of distinctive birthmarks on him; in the beginning, he has 3 – one on his head, one on his rear-end, and one on his right knee. Throughout the rest of the film, he has only the ones on his head and rear-end.
- The birthmark on his head keeps changing sides -- see above pictures.
- At the end, when the scientist is letting him go, he is standing behind Piggy, yet (for a moment) his toe is in front of Piggy’s fat belly.
- This film was the second (and last) featuring the Family Hamhock, which Friz Freleng had apparently intended as a series of recurring characters. They made their first appearance in "At Your Service Madame" (1936) – this presented Mrs. Hamhock as a widow to whom her late husband had left a sizable inheritance. Rooted in the concept of morality, each of her 7 children was to embody one of the seven-deadly-sins; Piggy, of course, represented gluttony. Leon Schlesinger didn't like this idea and Mrs. Hamhock's children would never appear again after this film. Mrs. Hamhock herself would make one last appearance in what would have been the next short in the series, "Wholly Smoke" (1938), with Porky Pig cast as her only child.
- The scene at the end of Piggy leaping out of bed to dash downstairs to breakfast was reused footage of the shot that first introduced him in "At Your Service Madame".
- Pigs Is Pigs is considered significant because it is the first ever appearance of Frieling "hold the onions" gag.
- Some aspects of Piggy and his family were revived by Steven Spielberg in his Tiny Toons cartoon series. The character of Hamton J. Pig and his parents are a clear reflection of the Hamhocks. Hamton has Piggy’s incessant appetite and is an ironic neatfreak.
- This short appears in the laser disc collection "The Golden Age of Looney Tunes", volume 3.
- This short appears in the DVD collection "Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 3", which was released on October 25, 2005.
- Another cartoon examining the theme of gluttony, and also including a forced feeding, is Chow Hound (1951). Directed by Chuck Jones, it features a dog who compels a cat and a mouse into various schemes to bring him money and food, berating them when they bring him meat without gravy ("What, no gravy?!").
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Schneider, Steve (1990). That's All Folks!: The Art of Warner Bros. Animation. Henry Holt & Co.
- Beck, Jerry and Friedwald, Will (1989): Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons. Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 0-8050-0894-2
