Teabiscuit's Record

Some of you reading here are old enough to remember when a real organ used to play at baseball and hockey games. Eventually, organists got fired and replaced by someone in the press box with a CD player. The CDs have been replaced with audio files on a computer.

Here’s a musical gag along those lines from Porky and Teabiscuit, a 1939 effort by the Hardaway-Dalton unit at Warner Bros. The bugler in his traditional outfit appears to make the call to the post. Except instead of blowing, he puts the needle on the 78 on a record player on top of the horn.



Some old Carl Stalling favourites show up in the score after this happens. The parade of horses takes place to the strains of “Sabre and Spurs.” After the starting pistol fires, we hear two pieces from silent film composer J.S. Zamecnik. First is “Western Scene.” After the shot of the Danger sign, when the camera cuts back to Porky and Teabiscuit, the tune switches to “In the Stirrups.”

There are some non-Mel Blanc voices here. Joe Twerp, who you’ll recall from I Only Have Eyes For You (1936) is the spooneristic race announcer. The sound of Porky’s car and the horse whinnies are courtesy of Pinto Colvig. The car start-up noise was made by Colvig blowing into wrong end of a trombone he bought for $2 at a pawn shop. He used it for Jack Benny’s Maxwell on a pair of shows in 1937 and elsewhere. The auctioneer is another non-Blanc voice, but I don’t know who it is.

Tubby Millar received the story credit and Herman Cohen the animation credit.

And for anyone not aware of it, “Teabiscuit” is a pun on the name of championship race horse “Seabiscuit.”