Friday, 24 December 2021

A Ham for the Holidays

The closest Tex Avery got to a Christmas cartoon was One Ham's Family (released in August 1943), where the mean widdle pig outsmarts the wolf (both played by Kent Rogers) dressed as Santa.

The typical Tex Avery wolf notices the pig looking up the chimney for St. Nick. He shakes his head so violently, his eyes get left behind (okay, it’s really smear animation).



As this is a war time cartoon, there’s a meat ration-point gag. Didn’t most of these kinds of gags get cut in the post-war re-releases?



Later, the wolf dresses up as Santa Claus and gets bashed around by the Red Skelton piggie stand-in.

Kent Rogers, by the way, was dead 11 months after this cartoon was released, killed in a WW2 training exercise.

1 comment:

  1. If you read the package closely, you can see a reference to Swift (as "Swifty"), one of the major pork producers of the era.

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