Monday 14 December 2020

Ground Floor: Pigs, Santas

Rich Hogan and Tex Avery agreed. Fairy tales are worn out. How many parodies did they make at MGM?

One Ham's Family (1943) barely starts with the premise of the Three Little Pigs. We do have three pigs and a wolf, but that’s about all it has in common. The wolf ends up dressing up as Santa to try to get into the home to eat the baby pig.

Avery has to throw in the unexpected, though sometimes his ideas aren’t too surprising. Here, the little pig sees the soot of Santa descending. The gag: Santa’s actually in an elevator.



Preston Blair, Ray Abrams and Ed Love are Avery’s animators in this one.

1 comment:

  1. The first time I saw "One Ham's Family" was under somewhat singular circumstances around 1985. I had a little RCA XL-100 color TV set on my desk that did double duty as the monitor for a Coleco ADAM (which I still think to this day had some of the best keyboard feel ever built). Anyhoo, I had just logged out of one BBS or another, and was surfing the UHF offerings in Philadelphia when I ran into a new station out of Delaware, WTGI (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WPPX-TV). It was running a cartoon show and, lo and behold, here was a Tex Avery I'd never seen before! Quite amusing. TGI had some great programming in the beginning, such as the 1980 Astro Boy et cetera. One of my fave stations back then...

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