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00:05♪♪♪
00:10Hi, this is Mark Kosler commenting on Porky's Romance.
00:14It's that great fat Porky from the 30s
00:17with the great big eyes.
00:19♪♪♪
00:21Ladies and gentlemen,
00:23introducing Leon Schlesinger's new Looney Tunes star!
00:29Petunia Pig!
00:31My public, I hope you pictured my life...
00:35Now, this little bit, this comedy bit,
00:37comes from the radio program Community Sing,
00:40which was only on the radio for one year,
00:43from 1936 to 1937.
00:44But the little bit she does where she said,
00:46who's excited, I'm not excited,
00:48comes from a comedian named Professor Tommy Mack,
00:51who specialized in this kind of thing,
00:53you know, the slow burn
00:54where you get all confused and tongue-tied.
00:57And then the narrator would say,
00:58you know, don't get excited, don't get excited.
01:00He's going to come up in a second here.
01:02Don't get excited, don't get excited.
01:05Excited! Who's excited? I'm not excited!
01:07That's all from Professor Tommy Mack.
01:09That's his routine.
01:10He did it on several radio shows,
01:11on Community Sing, Red Skelton.
01:13He worked on a lot of different things.
01:15If you see The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos,
01:17that's Tashlyn's whole cartoon tribute
01:19to the Community Sing radio program.
01:21All the characters are from that very obscure program
01:24that only ran one year.
01:26For some reason, it had a tremendous impact
01:28on Warner Cartoons, I don't know why.
01:30Maybe it was popular just for that brief period of time.
01:33And I think it was also a West Coast radio program.
01:36Maybe that's another reason why everybody related to it.
01:39I looked at you and a feeling came
01:41And it grew and grew and grew
01:43You can really see Tashlyn's simplified shapes
01:46in this character of Porky,
01:48everything based on square, circle, oval, triangle.
01:51In this case, mostly ovals and arch shapes for the legs.
01:54Tashlyn loved the streamlined, modern style
01:57from the 30s in architecture.
01:59A lot of shiny glass, glass brick all over everything.
02:02Curved surfaces, very fat version of the character.
02:05Even Petunia Pig's house is streamlined, modern.
02:08When you look like that
02:12I wanna woo
02:18I wonder who that could be
02:19I think that's an original song too.
02:21I wanna woo, I think Carl Stalling probably wrote it.
02:24Now there's Petunia and her little dog Fluffnums.
02:27Fluffnums appeared in only this cartoon.
02:30And he's a real obnoxious little dog.
02:39It's interesting, the comedy subtext of this thing,
02:41the indifferent girlfriend and later on the shrewish wife
02:44was part of a lot of famous comedians' repertoire,
02:47especially Laurel and Hardy.
02:49I don't think they ever had wives in their comedies
02:51that actually got along with them very well.
02:53Harry Langdon, a lot of comedians like that.
02:55Fatty Arbuckle.
02:56Just about every female in their comedies was obnoxious.
03:06Here's a famous sequence where there's 10 cuts in 172 frames.
03:14Actually what makes that sequence work isn't so much the cuts,
03:16it's the direction that Petunia's running.
03:18She's running so fast and she has a definite direction
03:20to the way she runs.
03:22And that's what makes it easy to follow.
03:33I think this is probably Volney White's animation here.
03:36He was the animator that kind of set the style for Tashlin
03:39with the great big eyes.
03:41You'll see that later on in some of the cartoons
03:43like Porky in the North Woods and Porky at the Crocodile.
03:47Volney's style is all over those too.
03:49But he worked with very, very simple round shapes
03:51as you can see there.
04:01You can see what the animators were doing
04:03for Porky's stuttering in those days.
04:05They used something called staggered exposure
04:07where you use a sequence of drawings like 1 through 10
04:10and then you mix them up when you expose them
04:12like 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 8.
04:15And that makes the character tremble.
04:17And that's what Porky's doing whenever he's stuttering there.
04:25That song's called The Little Things You Used to Do.
04:28It was used in Coconut Grove as well as this cartoon,
04:31The Little Things You Used to Do.
04:37Here's an example of the Schlesinger studio
04:39trying to do a really tough camera move
04:42and it doesn't quite work out.
04:44You know, like where they truck out from that little sign.
04:47It's like the camera's trying to do more than it can really do.
04:50And that's a lens trick that's just done by unscrewing the lens
04:53and then screwing it counterclockwise or clockwise
04:56in front of the aperture and then going back.
05:09Joe Daugherty was doing Porky's voice in this one.
05:12He actually stuttered.
05:17I think there's another Volney scene.
05:19You can see how round the characters are.
05:31Rice and Old Shoes.
05:33The license plate says Boob. It looks like it says 1-3-0-0-3,
05:36but if you look at it carefully, it looks like it says Boob on it.
05:39I bet Tashlyn probably thought of Porky.
05:44And that's a song called Honeymoon Hotel,
05:46which was used in a Busby Berkeley musical.
05:53Here's about as friendly as they get.
05:56Their relationship deteriorates from there.
06:03And then they play a little piece of When My Dreamboat Comes Home.
06:07That was Billy Bletcher's voice, the guy narrating Time Munches On.
06:14That song is, of course, Oh, You Beautiful Doll,
06:16with a lot of ironic commentary from the clarinets and the horns.
06:29Beautiful details in the architecture, furniture.
06:32Look at that beautiful diamond-shaped floor.
06:35Diamond-shaped tiles on the floors.
06:37And speaking of Tashlyn's timing, this is a wonderful scene
06:40that's very quickly timed, just showing poor Porky
06:42trying to manage all the household duties in the kitchen,
06:45ironing, trying to straighten up all the dishes,
06:48a big juggling act, and everything just collides all over him.
06:55I think Bob Bentley animated this scene.
06:58Yeah, this kind of has his feel to it.
07:01He had very good timing.
07:06That comes also from radio shows.
07:09I've forgotten who said that.
07:11Give it to him.
07:19So there's another camera move that didn't work so well,
07:22where they try to truck up to the northeast.
07:25And then when they come out of the dissolve,
07:27it's in the wrong position, so you get a double image.
07:30Here's what they end up doing.
07:34Here's what the ASPCA wouldn't like.
07:37Porky kicking Fluff Thumbs at the end.