Fashionable Fur Filtched

A familiar gag ends Tex Avery’s Christmas cartoon One Ham’s Family (released nowhere near Christmas in 1943). There’s been a violent fight off-screen between the Mean Widdle Pig and the Big bad Wolf disguised as Santa. The noise awakens Junior’s parents who come downstairs to investigate and discover a huge mess. But they forget about it when Junior offers his mother a Christmas present.



Mother Pig opens the parcel. “A fur coat!”



Mother models the fur, and reveals a bandaged tail—the same bandaged tail the wolf had before the fight. “Why, this coat is just what I need,” she exclaims.



The half-naked wolf jumps into the scene, grabs his fur and says “You and me both, sister.” The wolf is a sound-alike for radio’s Great Gildersleeve, and turns to the audience makes out with the Gildersleeve laugh.



With that he bounds out of the pig home carrying his fur.



He reaches in and slams the door shut. Avery’s shot moves quickly in on the door so we can easily see the sign gag to end the short.



Avery uses the “corny” routine later in Red Hot Riding Hood and Swing Shift Cinderella (complete with a cornstalk).

Junior was inspired by Red Skelton’s Mean Widdle Kid character on radio, but he also has some Bugs Bunny in him by telling the audience “I bang and crash him like this all through the picture.” And then there’s the pie-baking scene that’s similar to Bugs’ cake-baking sequence in Rabbit Hood some years later.

Kent Rogers is the Skelton pig and the Gildersleeve wolf. Pinto Colvig does a combination of Disney’s Practical Pig and Andy Devine as the father and Sara Berner is the fur-less mother.