Baby Bottleneck

Baby Bottleneck is a 1945 Warner Bros. Looney Tunes (reissued as a Blue Ribbon) theatrical cartoon short released in 1946 and directed by Bob Clampett and written by Warren Foster.

Plot

There is a baby boom of the post-war United States; an overworked stork (a clear Jimmy Durante reference) gets drunk in the Stork Klub. There is an emergency delivery in which inexperienced animals, mostly older animals but including four crows attempting to deliver an elephant, take the babies to their parents. As a result, babies are getting sent to the wrong parents (such as a baby Hippopotamus to a Scottish Terrier, a baby alligator to a pig and a baby skunk to a goose). To clear up the confusion, Porky Pig is brought in to manage the factory, with Daffy Duck as his assistant. The babies are seen going through a conveyor belt (to the tune of Raymond Scott's famous "Powerhouse") and getting sent by various animals, while Daffy mans the phones, making quick references to Bing Crosby, Eddie Cantor, and the Dionne Quintuplets.

When a stray egg is found without an address, Porky decides to have Daffy sit on it until it hatches. However, Daffy refuses to sit around on top of an egg and he said, "Sittin' on eggs is out! O-W-T Out!!". Though he said, "O-W-T" instead of the correct "O-U-T." Porky chases Daffy around the factory (complete with an imitation of Porky by Daffy), until they wind up trapped on the conveyor belt. The belt winds up stuffing both of them into one package (with Porky as the legs and Daffy as the top half) and send them off to Africa, where a gorilla is waiting for her arrival. When the gorilla looks at the "baby" she sees Daffy Duck crying, Porky peeks through the diaper, causing the gorilla to cry on the telephone, "Mr. Anthony, I have a problem!!" (a reference to John J. Anthony, who conducted a daily radio advice program at the time called The Goodwill Hour; its stock phrase was "I have a problem, Mr. Anthony").

Censorship

• On the Turner Entertainment "dubbed" version (except for Cartoon Network's The Bob Clampett Show where cartoons aired uncut), partially removed was the baby alligator delivered to the mother pig, so that the cut did not seem as abrupt as it is when the cartoon is unedited here. Also removed was the scene near the beginning of the cartoon, with the drunken stork at the Stork Club (though that was only removed on Cartoon Network versions of the short that aired outside of The Bob Clampett Show.^[1]

See also

• List of Daffy Duck cartoons
• List of films in the public domain

References

External links

• Baby Bottleneck at the Internet Movie Database