Friday 20 July 2018

Help! I'm Outside the Cartoon!

Porky the Rainmaker has a great ending. Porky’s farm animals swallow meteorological pills, which turns them into living versions of the weather (fog, lightning, tornado, etc.). But the rain pill gets into the sky, causing a downpour that saves the crops on the farm. Porky, his dad and the animals celebrate and strike a pose like at the end of a stage musical.



But it’s not over. The animals suddenly turn back into the weather-emulating versions of themselves.



But it’s still not over! The goose gets thrown, then gets caught “outside” the cartoon as the iris closes on him. He bangs on the “wall” and is pulled back in to end the short.



Leave it to Tex Avery to screw around with the ending of a cartoon (he also had a reach-out-from-the-iris gag to end I Love to Singa, released two weeks earlier).

Sid Sutherland and Cecil Surry are the credited animators; Avery’s little group also had Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, Virgil Ross and assistants Bobe Cannon and Elmer Wait at the time.

3 comments:

  1. Hardaway, Dalton, and 'Tubby' Millar reused this plotline a few years down the road in Sioux Me (the ending even feels like a gag Avery would try at Metro: attempted murder).

    ReplyDelete
  2. While the remake had the standard 1939 quality animation, the timing and gags were very lackluster compared to Avery’s original.

    ReplyDelete
  3. One of my favorites growing up

    ReplyDelete