Animator Breakdown: “Porky’s Party” (1938)

Today, you’re all invited to Porky’s birthday party in this Bob Clampett classic!

With his previous Looney Tune, Injun Trouble, Bob Clampett’s directorial unit solidified with five animators: Chuck Jones, Norm McCabe, Bobe Cannon, John “Jack” Carey, and Izzy Ellis. The production scene draft for their next cartoon, “Porky’s Birthday Surprise,” credits Bob and Chuck Jones underneath the director’s slot, confirming another co-directorial feat. While Chuck still retained animation credit on screen, as he also does in Porky’s Party, his involvement in co-directing was removed from the “dope sheets” for the unit’s three previous releases—What Price Porky, Porky’s Five and Ten, and Injun Trouble. This time, Jones shares animation billing with Norm McCabe, another key figure in Clampett’s lineup.

Bob’s original story sketches for Porky’s Party have been widely circulated on home video and for this post, coupled with the production draft. This gives us a rare glimpse of how Clampett developed one of his black-and-white Looney Tunes from story to screen. In the storyboards, Gabby Goat and Petunia Pig were intended as Porky’s party guests—they were replaced by an unnamed penguin and Goosey (fittingly named) in the final product. The draft still lists Gabby for scenes belonging to the penguin; speculation posits that the character layouts contained Gabby, who was substituted with the penguin; the animators adjusted during their work on the cartoon.

“Bei Mir Bist Du Schön,” a worldwide phenomenon spawned by the Andrews Sisters’ recording in the fall of 1937, invites the viewers to Porky’s Party. Birthday boy Porky jubilantly sings his natal greetings to the popular hit tune as he lights the candles on his birthday cake. Expecting more company, he runs to answer the doorbell. These first two scenes, animated by Bobe Cannon, may have been added as an afterthought to establish the party before the following sequence; their scene numbers are scribbled in the right margins of the “dope sheet,” and the surviving storyboards do not reflect this opening set-up.

Porky opens the door and receives two taps on the head from a postman who delivers a gift from Porky’s uncle, Pinkus Pig. The audience reads his letter with Porky—his uncle has sent a silkworm that knits on command with the word “sew.” (Viewers may notice a glaring camera/checking mistake: the fields are mismatched for the cross-dissolve, so the letter moves upward as the postscript message is highlighted.)

When Porky takes the silkworm out of the box to “do his stuff,” it instantly manufactures a silk stocking followed by a brassiere, much to Porky’s embarrassment. Porky puts the silkworm in his pocket to freshen up for his birthday guests; his dog, Black Fury—named after the 1935 Warner Bros. movie by Michael Curtiz—follows Porky into the washroom. Clampett originally suggested in the storyboards to use Paul Lincke’s “The Glow-Worm (Das Glühwürmchen)” as a recurring theme for the silkworm’s productivity. Presumably, due to rights issues, the silkworm instead knits to the pizzicato sounds of François-Joseph Gossec’s “Gavotte.” Carl Stalling incorporates a then-contemporary pop song, “Sissy,” when Porky reads his uncle’s letter; the melody continues moments after, when Porky and Black Fury are together in the washroom, and later, during the arrival of Porky’s co-stars.

Clampett adjusted his comedic timing by degrees throughout his first production season as a director. The introductory scenes with Porky and Black Fury, aided by Bobe Cannon’s animation, showcase a subtle advance in externalizing brisk action: the postman’s hasty gift exchange to Porky before exiting, Porky excitedly unwrapping his present, and, seconds later, when he sheepishly hides the undergarments and kicks away the gift box. Clampett was undoubtedly impacted by the work of his contemporaries Tex Avery and Frank Tashlin; speed played an integral part in their cartoons. With eight black-and-white Looney Tunes under his supervision, Clampett invested more in his animators with this new picture—by giving them individual sequences.

In the washroom, Porky applies a hair grower to his bald pate, smooths it down with a brush, and then leaves to await his guests (animated by Izzy Ellis). Mimicking his master, Black Fury pours the tonic onto his scalp; he pauses, detecting a peculiar taste when it dribbles into his mouth: the hair product is 99-proof alcohol! As Clampett’s chief animator and character layout man, Chuck Jones has Black Fury convey an emotional shift through his reactions to the tonic’s potency: curious, he samples it again and feels its effect; the delighted pooch then guzzles it down; now truly intoxicated, Black Fury leans his head right up to the camera, drunkenly addressing the audience: “Hap…py birthday!” The rowdy canine douses himself all over. The scenes of Black Fury in the washroom, distinguished by Chuck’s exceptional acting and posing, lend credence to his directorial contributions to the cartoon if Clampett had not delegated them to Jones.

Meanwhile, Porky’s first guest rings at the door; he ducks to avoid more raps on the noggin but gets them anyway—again, animated by Bobe Cannon. An unnamed penguin quickly gifts his host, then makes a direct beeline for the ice cream and wastes no time devouring it. When he spots the large cake, the penguin cuts himself a slice and then exits with the remainder, leaving just a sliver behind! This gag, animated by John Carey, predates a similar routine in Donald’s Cousin Gus, released by Disney a year later. (The story sketches suggested Gabby Goat spin the tablecloth to eat other guests’ refreshments, which was scribbled out, possibly to avoid such reprehensible behavior.)

Next, Goosey waddles inside and greets Porky with a less than courteous handshake—a phony arm slips out with an insulting card attached: “Happy birthday, FAT BOY!” Porky expresses his awareness of the goose’s crude but silly nature to the audience in a litany of “so’s”; the silkworm, still in Porky’s coat pocket, mistakes the repeated word as its command to sew, producing more women’s lingerie that emerges from beneath his coat. This scene reveals the most distinctive difference between Clampett’s original story treatment and the finished picture: originally, Porky interacted with his sweetheart, Petunia Pig, and timidly complimented her looks as he discarded the unmentionables that materialized from his coat. In the final cartoon, as animated by Norm McCabe, Porky now scatters and tucks away the undergarments with bashful grins at the camera.

Now flung into the ice cream dish, the tiny silkworm continues its needlework, unbeknownst to the gluttonous penguin who shovels down heaping spoonfuls of ice cream. The penguin finds a silk stocking in his dessert, then extracts a collapsible top hat from his mouth that instantly pops open. He fails to spot another silk hat, which activates mid-bite, causing his head to assume its shape. Unable to squeeze his cranium back to normal, the agitated little penguin yells for help. Analogous to Chuck’s earlier sequence of Black Fury’s gradual inebriation, McCabe’s animation exhibits strong changes in moods—at first unperturbed as he greedily enjoys the refreshments, the penguin erupts into bounding hysteria within thirty seconds of screen time. It seems evident that Clampett replaced Gabby Goat with the penguin as an artistic choice. The penguin’s high-contrast coloration and head shape—his beak doubles as a brim—read better than Gabby Goat’s horns and ears for the recurring series of gags with the top hat.

To help the penguin’s dilemma, Goosey uses him as a battering ram and slams his head against the wall. All seems fine until the hat reopens and shoots the two backward. Goosey tries again, and the penguin’s head regains its natural state. With their problem solved, the two strut back to the table, but soon, the obstinate hat expands again. Goosey then smashes the hat (and the penguin) with a large mallet to flatten it, but still no luck: the penguin bounces wildly around the room as the chapeau continuously deforms his head. When Goosey traps him inside a washtub, that remedy doesn’t work—his penguin chum has crashed through the floor! Izzy Ellis animated this slapstick episode, accompanied by “Let That Be a Lesson to You,” a Johnny Mercer-Richard Whiting tune from WB’s Hollywood Hotel.

A close comparison of the production draft reveals two scenes, sandwiched between Izzy Ellis’s sequence of Goosey and the penguin, which were cut from the final version for pacing. Scene 17B’s description, scratched out, reads: “Porky + Silky,” obviously a scene with Porky and the silkworm, animated by Chuck Jones, and lasting 25 feet (16 seconds) of footage. The preceding action description, rubbed out by an eraser but still faintly legible, reads: “Mummy spin,” initially intended as scene 18. It’s possible that, in this cut sequence, Porky admonished the silkworm, after which the worm swiftly wrapped Porky like a mummy, which sent the pig into a spinning action. Ultimately, the action in scene 18 switched to Goosey’s first swing with his mallet. In the final film, a slight jump occurs between scenes 17A and 18, signifying that Chuck’s scene 17B possibly went into photography but was removed shortly after.

Meanwhile, the hair grower has transformed Black Fury into a drunken, shaggy hound. Aghast by his unkempt appearance, the pooch lathers himself with shaving foam. In his panic, the dog’s errant paw switches on an electric razor that goes haywire. This terrifies Black Fury, who charges out of the washroom, shaving foam and all. Earlier, in the film’s opening, Black Fury scoops a dollop of ice cream and places it on his nose while Porky sets the table—a piece of business that cleverly foreshadows this frenzied moment. Jones seemed fascinated by the realistic canine behavior seen in Norm Ferguson’s landmark animation of Pluto for Disney; Chuck’s work on Black Fury is a dry run for the two curious dogs that appeared in six of his cartoons between 1939 and 1942. (Electric razors and inebriation coexisted again when Chuck Jones directed his first Sniffles cartoon, Naughty But Mice, released a year later.)

Electric razors were still relatively new. Schick put out its successful razor in 1931; Remington Rand put out their first in 1937, probably right around the time of the cartoon.

As in Clampett’s second Looney Tune, Get Rich Quick Porky, a secondary plotline involving a dog intertwines with the first; in Porky’s Party, the two threads merge in a manic climax—primarily assigned to Izzy Ellis and John Carey—when Porky and his guests believe Black Fury is a “mad dog” (rabid). A more recent number made known by the Andrews Sisters, “Joseph! Joseph!” underscores the chaotic flow of these culminating scenes. (Like “Bei Mir Mist du Schön,” the song was written and performed before its modernized swing rendition.)

Porky whisks Goosey away, leaving Black Fury behind. As they run along the hallway, the penguin speeds past them with his slab of cake above him. The penguin makes his way into another room and disguises himself as a hat rack; this gag doesn’t sync with the character’s design, as an artifact of Gabby Goat’s original appearance in the character layouts. The trio barricades a nearby door with furniture before they rush into an open closet, unaware that Black Fury already hides there. To make matters worse, Porky slams the door before the penguin can enter. Inside the pitch-black closet, Porky and Goosey spot Black Fury behind them when they light a match—they tear through the door and flatten the penguin in their path; he suffers more abuse when Black Fury tramples over him.

Black Fury and the penguin run into the bedroom and jump onto a Murphy bed, hiding underneath the covers—seconds later, the two spot each other. The penguin tries to flee, but the mattress lifts against the wall, exposing Porky and Goosey. Inside the Murphy bed, a skirmish ensues as the penguin tries to break away; the bedspring (and Black Fury’s paw) stretch out and pull him back for more. The mayhem ends when the bed tilts down and breaks apart—the gang realizes the “mad dog” was Black Fury all along. Fed up with the calamities he has endured, the scrappy penguin rolls his sleeve, snarling to Black Fury, “SO!”—which provokes another high hat from the silkworm that again warps his head; a closetful of attire spews from his beak in his apoplectic rage. His body is shrouded in silk—reflecting a similar action in the deleted “mummy spin” scene—and once more, the top hat bursts open, and Goosey implements his trusty mallet. The little penguin’s troubles persist in the final “topper” of the cartoon: the hat springs open during the iris out!

When the cartoon was previewed, Porky’s Party generated an ecstatic reaction, which Clampett gauged; he scrawled “24 laffs [sic]” on the production draft sheet. The cartoon opened in Broadway’s Strand Theater on June 18th, 1938, before its general nationwide release a week later, on June 25th.

As a bonus, Clampett’s story sketches are synched with the final cartoon in this video. The story sketches reveal why Gabby Goat was quickly replaceable: Gabby doesn’t act as Porky’s sidekick, as he did in their other pairings, nor does he interact with Porky after entering the house, aside from the deleted gags/sequences—also shown below.

Story to screen comparison:

Deleted scenes:

Thanks to Jerry Beck, Ruth Clampett, Bob Jaques, Daniel Goldmark, Eric Costello, and Frank M. Young for the production materials and contributions to this post.