Porky In Wackyland - a 1938 cartoon review

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 Porky in Wackyland is a cartoon starring Porky Pig, released in 1938 by Warner Brothers. Porky is looking for a do-do bird and ends up in Wackyland. Let's get into it. 

Courtesy of alchetron.com


Porky in Wackyland starts off with a typical WB opening, goes into a newspaper picture of Porky with a headline announcing his intentions to get a rare do-do bird, and then shows him flying there. I see some sort of Lindbergh resemblance in this. From there it becomes a little ominous when he lands in "darkest africa" and reads a sign for Wackyland that says "it can happen here" (with an added deep voice to repeat the phrase). From here, I'll just give you the link to the archive: Watch the original in black and white here.

Anyway, it's an odd one. It's taking inspiration from Alice in Wonderland. It's the most nonsensical thing ever. It may also scare your kids. You even see a cat-dog reference that looks kind of like the Cat-Dog show many years later (Nickelodeon). There is also a rather cursed representation of The Three Stooges that might live in my nightmares. Porky does find the do-do, but it's a rather rude do-do that reminds me vividly of Daffy Duck (probably the same voice actor). It turns out many do-dos exist in Wackyland and that's where it ends. It's utter nonsense, but it made laugh once we got to the do-do/daffy chase scene. 

My Overall Thoughts

Some of those images now live in my nightmares. Thanks, Warner Brothers, you're really out there scaring the children. I could have gone without the three-headed, staring into the screen, Three Stooges. It was funny, though, once we actually got to the typical chase scene I was used to seeing in Looney Tunes.  I can't forget The Three Stooges three-headed thing. 


Courtesy of YouTube.com
It turns out they remade this in 1949 as Dough for the Do Do. My husband didn't remember the 1938 version, but instead the 1949 version. Fun fact, they remade it almost the same way and added more antics. 

What I like and disliked

I thought Fleischer was weird, but I guess Looney Tunes were, too. I can't unsee that three-headed Stooges reference. Now you can't either.  Happy nightmares, everyone. At any rate, it was a bit cursed. I disliked the amount of cursed images we saw in 30 second to 1 minute of the runtime. It is a 7 minute cartoon, so at least 1 minute of it was extremely cursed-looking. Watch it yourself and you'll understand. 

What I liked was the part where he finds the do-do. We then get the wacky antics we're used to, from drawing doors on the wall to dropping bricks on Porky's head. It has to be Daffy's original voice because I recognized it immediately. The do-do was voiced by Mel Blanc, according to IMDB. It turns out I was right. There is a whole chase and then Porky manages to catch his do-do, which is not actually the last do-do. 

In summary, half the cartoon is kind of cursed and half of it is what we're used to seeing between Daffy and Porky, only it's a do-do and Porky. 


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