Since all the cartoon geek rage is over lost footage from a Ben Hardaway-Cal Dalton cartoon, I’ll have to be your friendly neighborhood curmudgeon: that unit’s cartoons, on the whole, are pretty bad. I’ll give them that Hare-Um Scare-Um is pretty fun for its artless execution, and that it was basically retooled (rephrase that; overhauled) for A Wild Hare by Tex Avery. But the rest of their cartoons fit the mold of the 1939 season of Warner shorts: auto-pilot. With a few exceptions (Thugs with Dirty Mugs and Porky’s Tire Trouble are the only two that come to mind), it was a very weak year for the studio. It’d be interesting to find out why there was a studio-wide string of mediocrity that year, but it’s probably too late in history to find out (if you need a memory refresher, see how many classics are listed here). It’s very, very telling that Leon Schlesinger immediately gave Friz Freleng his job (and the same exact unit) back after his foray at MGM.
Here is one of those Hardaway-Daltons that was a bane of my youth. Porky the Giant Killer must have been played at least once a week on Nickelodeon (or at least it was on every time I watched it). It’s fairly meandering and unfunny, lacking the charm and fun that even Bob Clampett’s worst Porkys have (and around this time, a few of Clampett’s worst were indeed made). I sent a disc of this and other cartoons to Mike Kazaleh awhile ago, and he tells me that Rod Scribner animated the scene with the bottle nipple.
No Brave Little Tailor this be, says I.
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It’s been said that Ben Hardaway was good at coming up with gags but had trouble coming up with scenarios for them. That’s why Bugs’ initial creation came about by him simply “putting a rabbit suit on that duck”. I guess Cal Dalton was supposed to fill that void and be able to piece it all together. It looks like neither of those men had that ability.
The Hardaway/Dalton output is not horrible, but definitely unremarkable.
I suppose you could attribute 1939 as being a “bad” year due it to being Chuck Jones’ first year of releases as well as the Dalton/Hardaway time being in full swing. Additionally it seemed that Avery became a bit too settled with spot gag pictures and Clampett was getting bored of using Porky.
It seems as though 1938 was the year Warners figured out that they didn’t have to follow Disney’s story lines to really entertain audiences, while 1939 (and the first half of 1940) was the time period, at least on the Merrie Melodies, when they were trying to figure out what sort of animation worked best with the gags. Compared with 1938, the drawing was technically better, but it was like Hugh and Rudy’s stuff over at MGM — in a lot of cases there was actually too many lines and too much detail in the drawings, which made the characters feel slow and heavy. You got to go to 1940, about the time McKimson went over to Avery’s unit and just after Friz returned from Metro to find the first animation that finds the right balance and gives the characters only as much detail as will work with the faster-paced stories.
(Clampett’s situation over in the Katz unit was different — His cartoons never got into too much detail and too many lines on the drawings, but by 1939 he was running out of ideas for Porky. an individual cartoon might have a few good gags, and they never felt slow or heavy, but the story thread to hang them on was so light it almost floated away.)
“Porky the Giant killer”?
Aw, now what did that Giant ever do to HIM!
Truth to tell, I’ve seen much worse… like the many Clampett “Porky cartoons”, in which Porky is only marginally involved, if that! Here, at least he was front and center for the whole thing.
So, why were so many things in the Giant’s castle rightly proportioned to Porky?
I liked it, no classic but easily more watchable than a post-1950 McKimson.
I never found this cartoon horrible to be honest-perhaps a bit bland-but I did like Porky singing the giant’s baby to sleep, the ending was actually somewhat cute and I also enjoyed the giant singing the baby to sleep-with the baby butting in to sing his own song.
this is better than almost anything in Cartoon Network or Disney
Hey… Scribner DID animate those scenes! I always wondered about that.
Maybe he had spare time since his regular unit was re-using so much footage. :P
Scribner wasn’t in Clampett’s unit during the 30’s. He actually was a regular in Hardaway/Dalton’s unit during this time (check the credits to “Bars and Stripes Forever” and “Fagin’s Freshmen”). He was transferred over to the Avery unit in about 1940 which became the Clampett unit in 1941….. and there you have it.
I wouldn’t say 1939 is completely worthless. Clampett’s “Polar Pals”, for instance, is one of my favorites from his black-and-white era. I even enjoy some of the early Jones cartoons from this period, like “Naughty But Mice” (heck, even “Old Glory” is beautiful to look at, even if it’s not funny). And I have a soft spot for quite a few Hardaway and Daltons from this era, including “Porky and Teabiscuit”, “Katnip Kollege”, and yes, the aforementioned “Hare-um Scare-um”.
Still, I won’t deny that ’39 has its share of some real boring clunkers. “It’s an Ill Wind” and “Robin Hood Makes Good” leap to mind.
Of the other 1939 shorts, I have to say that I honestly do enjoy “Screwball Football” (that’s at least one spot-gag picture of Avery’s in which it actually looks like he’s TRYING and some of the gags to me in that one honestly are “fall-down” hilarious!) and “Snow Man’s Land” (yeah, compared to “The Dover Boys”, it’s nothing at all but this is probably the first “good” Chuck Jones directed cartoon, at least out of his first year’s worth of directing). At any rate, I’d certainly watch either of those two 1939 cartoons over this turkey any day.
And, yeah, many of the other shorts this year (“Hamateur Night”, “Little Brother Rat”, “Chicken Jitters”, “Detouring America”; an OSCAR nominee?!, “Fagin’s Freshmen”, “Robin Hood Makes Good”, “Pied Piper Porky”, et. al.) are pretty unremarkable and mediocre. Schlesinger must’ve been kicking himself for actually letting Friz slip away to MGM like that (Also it hardly must’ve been a surprise to Cal Dalton that he was declined that director’s promotion around 1946 or so when he left the studio over that corporate decision, or so goes the story, considering the quality of the cartoons he co-directed with Ben Hardaway during his 1930’s directing period so he probably should’ve just stuck to animating and been satisfied with his lot in the first place!).
I wish Porky would bite MY finger.
I agree, Thad. I have seen the 1939 Warner cartoons in chronological order, and there are more misses than any other year besides the absolute worst, 1934. I, too, really hated “Porky the Giant Killer” as a kid and still do. It’s slow, cutesy, and terribly unfunny. It’s badly designed too… why on earth would they design a baby with that weird dark coloring around his eyes?
I will give it points for one really funny gag…Porky Pig trying (and failing) to get through “The Alphabet Song”!