Porky in Wackyland

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Porky in Wackyland
Merrie Melodies series
Screenshot of Title
Directed by	Robert Clampett
Animation by	Izzy Ellis Norman McCabe
Voices by	Mel Blanc
Music by	Carl Stalling
Produced by	Leon Schlesinger Ray Katz
Distributed by
Release date	1938 (USA)
Format	Black & White, 7 min, 19 sec
Language	English

Porky in Wackyland is a 1938 animated short film in which Porky Pig goes hunting through a surreal Salvador Dalí-esque landscape to find the Do-Do Bird. In 1994 it was voted #8 of the 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members of the animation field.

1 Credits
2 Humor
3 Notes
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Credits

The voices are by Mel Blanc. The short was directed by Robert "Bob" Clampett. Izzy Ellis and Norman McCabe were the credited animators. Carl Stalling directed the music. Leon Schlesinger and an uncredited Ray Katz produced the cartoon.

[edit] Humor

Similar shots from the two films

The film is celebrated for its surreal humor, such as when Porky is chasing the bird, it disappears and suddenly the Warner Brothers shield emerges from the horizon's vanishing point, as it typically did at every cartoon's beginning, and complete with the standard stretched "boing" of the steel guitar. The Do-Do comes from behind the shield to bop Porky on the head and we see the shield immediately turn to return to the horizon with the bird riding it there (with, consequently, the boing sound played in reverse).

Among the crazy characters Porky encounters is a creature with three heads arguing amongst themselves. From the haircuts on the three heads, it is clear that this is a parody of The Three Stooges. The character then faces the camera and leans into it in such a way that their round heads form a triangle, and a small character explains to the audience that, "He says his mother was frightened by a pawnbroker's sign!"

The long pan through Wackyland was remade in color by Clampett for inclusion in his 1943 short Tin Pan Alley Cats. A Technicolor (and partially Cinecolor) remake of Porky in Wackyland was supervised by Friz Freleng in 1949, and re-titled Dough for the Do-Do. The films were nearly identical, in many cases appearing to match frame-by-frame in certain details, albeit with Porky's appearance updated and the voices having evolved, and many of the backgrounds being different. The Do-Do character was much like the very early Daffy Duck in voice and mannerisms.

[edit] Notes

There were at least two TerryToons plagarizations of Porky in Wackyland in the 1940's or 50's. Dingbat Land (1949) [1] starred Sourpuss and Gandy Goose. The role of the Do-Do was taken by a minor Terry character, Dingbat. [2] The second film, a more direct plagarization of the Porky Pig/Do-Do cartoons, starred a british hunter and a Do-Do stand-in. The creature didn't talk, but made strange hooting noises, and flung flames from a tuft of hair on top of its head.^{[citation needed]}

Tex Avery, for whom Clampett animated at Warners in the mid-thirties, borrowed strongly from this cartoon for his 1948 MGM cartoons Half-Pint Pygmy (in which the characters, George and Junior, travel to Africa in search of the world's smallest pygmy, only to discover that he has an uncle who's even smaller) and The Cat That Hated People (where the cat travels to the moon and encounters an array of characters similar to those in Clampett's Wackyland, e.g., a pair of gloves and lips that keep saying "Mammy, mammy", just like the Al Jolson duck in Porky in Wackyland).

In 2000 the United States Library of Congress deemed the original short "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

According to writer Paul Dini, the Do-Do Bird is the father of Gogo Dodo, a character on the Tiny Toon Adventures animated series.

A small clip from the film was used in a Slappy Squirrel Animaniacs sketch, "Critical Condition", as part of a fake Laserdisc release of the Best of Warner Brothers Animation.

The Do-Do Bird has made occasional guest spots in the DC Comics Looney Tunes comic book, being colored in grayscale as opposed to the rest of the art being in color.

[edit] References

Beck, Jerry and Friedwald, Will (1989): Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons. Henry Holt and Company.