No Product Placement Here

It’s fun, at least for me, to watch cartoons from the 1930s with punny labels or inside gags on product packages. But they didn’t appear all the time.

A good example is in Homesteader Droopy (1954). A third of the way into the short, Tex Avery has the camera focus on a door for a bit so we can read the puns on the inscription.

Later in the cartoon, Droopy Jr. is drinking milk from a garden hose attached to a cow. The bad-guy cattle rustler shoots a hole in the hose. The baby screams out a quick cry.

Mom hears the cry and rushes off scene to solve the problem. Cut to a canister. You’ll see there are no inside gags here, just some phoney printing.

Maybe there’s no gag here because Tex and Heck Allen couldn’t think of one, or they didn’t want to stop the action for the audience to clue into a gag name.

Johnny Johnsen is the background artist and, I imagine, Ed Benedict was responsible for the layouts.