Hitching a Ride The Speedy Way

Speed lines and outlines predominate in one scene of Porky the Wrestler.

A wiener dog is trying to hitchhike to the wrestling matches.



The dog stretches out then zooms back into position. Here’s how the animator (and the painter) handles it. These are consecutive frames.



The cartoon was copyrighted in 1936 but released in early 1937. Elmer Wait gets an animation credit. He managed to live to see it. He died July 20, 1937 at the age of 23. To the right is an ad from the Los Angeles Evening Express when he won third prize in a contest in 1926. He was 12.

At the risk of beating the dead old grey mare, but on the “Porky 101” there’s a sound edit between the title theme music (“Puddin Head Jones”) and the first cue of the cartoon. I don’t know the reason for this because the soundtrack on other versions of the short is just fine. There’s also a picture jump and another edit when the scene changes to a wrestling fan lifting up a ratty old window shade to look outside.

Joe Dougherty is Porky, except for when he yoo-hoos like the future Daffy Duck when Mel Blanc takes over. Dougherty's cartoon voicing career was about to end as Leon Schlesinger added more and more professional actors to his roster.

This is the Tex Avery cartoon with the sequence where the bad guy wrestler swallows a pipe, starts blowing smoke like a locomotive, then Avery and the writers heap one train gag on top of another in a wonderful moment of twisted logic.