This article was published on my Patreon page in January 2023—with slight modifications in the text here. Since the series is going to the start of Bob Clampett’s directorial career, and for readers to keep abreast of the important details, here’s a link that presents the animator breakdown columns of Clampett’s first season of B&W Looney Tunes in production order. (Animator breakdown columns detailing Porky’s Poppa and Porky’s Five & Ten will be posted here on Cartoon Research next Monday.)
LT-3: Porky’s Badtime Story
LT-4: Get Rich Quick Porky
LT-5: Rover’s Rival
LT-6: Porky’s Hero Agency
LT-7: Porky’s Poppa
LT-8: What Price Porky
LT-9: Porky’s Five & Ten
LT-10: Injun Trouble (also includes its 1945 remake, Wagon Heels)
LT-11: Porky’s Party
LT-12: Porky & Daffy
Like Rover’s Rival and Porky’s Hero Agency, Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones (initialed “C. M.” for Charles Martin [Jones]) share the director’s slot in the production draft for Porky’s Poppa. This confirms another black-and-white Looney Tune where the two acted as a team. This time, no animation start date is listed in the document. Given that Clampett’s unit started animation on a new Looney Tune monthly, the animator’s duties on Poppa could have begun in August 1937, a month after pencil animation on Hero Agency began.
Poppa’s opening begins with a rendition of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” (sung by The Sportsmen Quartet), which grows more absurd as the barnyard animals exhibit idiosyncratic behavior, in a sharp contrast to straight man Porky. Instead of emitting a “moo” sound, alternate lyrics dictate Bessie the cow to have “a little calf here, and a little calf there”—first showing off her calves, which resemble a shapely woman’s legs; she then displays her two bovine offspring (calves) to the audience in a different scene. A little black duck—not quite Daffy—shouts, in the fashion of a movie theater sing-along in a Donald-like quacking voice, “Everybody sing!” The song concludes with a wild finale; each barnyard animal repeats their actions at super-speed.
In Poppa, Porky is portrayed as a young pig with a father. Earlier, in 1936, Porky had a father in two shorts directed by Tex Avery, Porky the Rain-Maker and Milk and Money. Porky’s father returned as Phineas Pig in 1939’s Porky and Teabiscuit (directed by Ben Hardaway and Cal Dalton). Porky’s titular “Poppa” is first introduced as a distraught farmer who frets over the financial woes, with a spoof on the popular radio program/newsreel series The March of Time: “And so today, as it must to all men, debt comes to Porky’s Poppa, 48.”
As in Rover’s Rival, Clampett plays on the theme of modernity—here through technological innovation. Porky’s poppa orders a mechanical cow (“The New 1938 Creamlined Cow”) via air mail delivery to replace their old cow Bessie; her milk production is alarmingly low due to literal “hoof ‘n mouth trouble.” As in Rover’s Rival, the young Porky does not spurn Bessie when the “ol’ newfangled heifer” dispenses full milk bottles (and other dairy items) as a mass-production assembly line.
In a sequence animated by Chuck Jones, Porky uses Bessie’s “hoof n’ mouth” disease to his advantage, and nurses her back to health with a large mound of hay. Jones’ animation continues when Bessie “births” milk bottles (“quart-uplets”), each individually wrapped in a newborn’s swaddling cloth; a rather risqué gag unfolds when Porky and Bessie reticently pause their milk production when the old cow produces a chocolate milk bottle, underscored by “Dixie”! A few moments later, Clampett toys with the censorship of cows’ udders, a taboo subject in animated cartoons in the 1930s: a border mask obscures the frame of Porky grasping what appears to be the cow’s anatomy to fill empty milk bottles; the mask opens up to reveal Porky holds a trio of funnels for Bessie to pour the liquid from a bucket.
Porky’s Poppa was the first Warner Bros. cartoon with animation by Isadore “Izzy” Ellis, credited for scene 61 towards the end of the film, when the mechanical cow rushes into the barn; she produces a heap of milk bottles, similar to an egg-laying gag in Porky the Rain-Maker (1936). Like Bob Clampett, Izzy started professionally as a young cartoonist in the “Junior Times” supplement of The Los Angeles Times in the late 1920s. Clampett might have recommended Izzy for a job at Ray Katz’s studio based on that connection.
Tony Labriola
Porky’s Poppa was reviewed in The Film Daily on December 23, 1937, before its general release on January 15, 1938. Los Angeles’ Warner Bros. Hollywood and Downtown theaters exhibited the cartoon on January 27, 1938, with the WB feature Hollywood Hotel, and a Warners Technicolor subject, The Littlest Diplomat, with child film actress Sybil Jason.
Below is a reconstruction of the film’s opening that introduces Porky, as shown through Clampett’s story sketches:
Porky’s Poppa (reconstruction w/story sketches):
Porky’s Poppa (animator breakdown):
• Thanks to Jerry Beck, Ruth Clampett, Keith Scott, and Frank M. Young for the production materials and information for this post.
DEVON BAXTER is a film restoration artist, video editor, and animation researcher/writer currently residing in Pennsylvania. He also hosts a 
“I don’t believe in dairy cows. They are the most inefficient creatures in the world.” — Henry Ford
Ford, who grew up on a farm, hated horses and cows, and he devoted much of his life’s work to rendering them obsolete: the former through mass production of motor vehicles, and the latter by promoting soybeans as a healthful and cost-effective alternative to meat and dairy products. Like practically everything Ford said or did, his views on machines replacing dairy cows received widespread attention and, just as often, derision. In 1933 Red Book magazine ran a humorous piece titled “The Synthetic Cow”, which took the notion to some absurd extremes. So in the midst of the Great Depression, people were already exploring the comic possibilities of mechanical milk production.
Beating Warners to the punch by several months, Paul Terry had already released “The Mechanical Cow” (1937): Farmer Al Falfa’s cow has gone on strike, so he builds a robot cow about of spare parts in his barn to replace her. After a brief period of productivity, however, the mechanical cow, too, goes on strike, then runs amok, terrorising the countryside. Terry’s views on labour relations are on full display here.
The Sportsmen Quartet turns in a great performance in “Porky’s Poppa”, as always. They did a lot of work for Warners over the years, but I’ll always remember them as “the boys in the chorus” with a scowling Bugs Bunny in “What’s Up, Doc?”
It’s interesting that Chuck Jones allowed his intense dislike for Bob Clampett to cause him to deny that he ever animated on any of Bob’s cartoons. Thanks to the drafts, we now know that to be untrue. Chuck’s scenes in Porky’s Poppa are very fine, especially the “little calf here” scene and the “Quart-tuplets” sequence. Note that Chuck was assigned to personality scenes, rather than the big chase sequence at the end that Jerry Hathcock and Norm McCabe handled. I love that exaggerated shot of Bessie with a tremendous mouthful of hay that Chuck animated, proving he could do the kind of cartoon exaggeration that Clampett was known for.
When did Chuck make that claim? I don’t doubt that he did, but you’d think given he’s credited onscreen as an animator on all of the early Clampett b&w Looney Tunes it would be foolish to deny it.
I wonder how exactly the co-directing arrangement worked with Clampett and Jones, as clearly Clampett had more authority over the story and content of these cartoons (and ergo, sole ‘supervision’ credit). That said, you can see the Jones influence in scenes like the drunk dog in Porky’s Party, which is very similar to the acting in the first Sniffles cartoon where the mouse gets intoxicated.
Clampett’s color works are superior but there is a rough charm to these 30’s black and white shorts that I missed in the subsequent decade.
Superior? What about “Porky in Wackyland”?
Porky in Wakcyland is Clampett’s first great film but it isn’t as good as his great color works like Great Piggy Bank Robbery, Baby Bottleneck, or Book Revue.
I disagree. I think “Porky in Wackyland” was the greatest cartoon Clampett ever directed.
Wakcyland is a fine cartoon but Piggy Bank Robbery absolutely wipes the floor with it. Daffy Duck is far more memorable than Porky or The Dodo. Rod Scribner’s nutty facial expressions and the striking Noir/Nightmarish backgrounds are unparalleled. Porky in Wackyland is creative, funny, and one of the best Looney Tunes shorts but it’s primitive compared to what Clampett accomplished later.
Two outhouse jokes!–Take that, Hays Office!
I remember watching the Korean colorized version of this short in the Seventies, and the maraschino cherries the “mechani-cow” was depositing on her newly-processed treats were painted a weird light gray color–I actually thought it was buckshot at first.
Can someone explain the “risqué” chocolate milk bottle gag?
It’s a joke that she gave birth to a “black” baby, hence “Dixie” on the soundtrack. Clampett was known for poor taste by his peers for a reason…