Pigs Is Pigs (1937 film)
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| Pigs is Pigs | |
| Merrie Melodies series | |
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| Directed by | Friz Freleng |
|---|---|
| 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 U.S. premere |
| 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 (not to be confused with 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, Piggy gobbles one whole and is about to down the second before his mother stops him. That afternoon, his mother serves spaghetti for dinner. While the family says 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) in a single slurp. His mother scolds him: "Piggy! What's the matter with you?! Do you want you should burst?!" He listens but 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 Feed-A-Matic 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 spinning 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 from the basement up to the mad scientist's house: transformed into an obese, food-packed, ball. Bulging out of the restraints, Piggy is utterly happy. Smiling at the sight of Piggy’s obesity, the scientist pokes him twice and asks "Have enough, my boy?" To which Piggy replies "Y-y-y-yes sir!" The doctor then unstraps 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. Looking at the turkey he delights at the prospect of more food. 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. Then hearing the sound of his mother calling him to breakfast, he dashes downstairs and starts eating again with gusto.
[edit] Feed-A-Matic in other works
Over the years, various writers aware of Pigs is Pigs have incorporated the mad scientist’s Feed-A-Matic machine in their works.
[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] The Gumby Show
Art Clokey did a full re-imaging of this cartoon in 1957[1] 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 won't quit until Gumby is totally stuffed.
[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] 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] 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 is instanly converted into fat 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 than her original obese weight, the doctor claiming as he did in the cartoon that she is "not even half full!"
[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 (Freleng/M-Aug 29) [2] – 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 embodied one of the seven-deadly-sins; Piggy, of course, represented gluttony and was a clean freak. 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 Freleng "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. Like Piggy, Hamton has an incessant appetite and is a clean freak.
- This short appears in the laser disc collection "The Golden Age of Looney Tunes", volume 3 and the DVD collection "Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 3".
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ The Big Cartoon DataBase -- Grub Grabber Gumby Production Information
- ^ Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons. Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 0-8050-0894-2
- 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
