Two Silver Spoons

John Brown’s hipster tells John Brown’s Noah Webster he was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Webster tries to imagine it.



So comes the first visual pun in Tex Avery’s Symphony in Slang, released by MGM in 1951

The gag wasn’t a new one. You can see it in Friz Freleng’s Confederate Honey, released by Warners in 1940. The narrator (John Deering, not John Brown) tells us Colonel O’Hairoil has a daughter, Crimson, who was born the same way.



Cut to reveal the gag.



This was the first cartoon made by Freleng after he escaped from MGM and accepted an offer from Leon Schlesinger to return. It’s a parody of Gone With the Wind with rotoscoping, effects animation, lots of overlays at the beginning, radio references, racial stereotypes, Mel Blanc as a Hugh Herbert caricature, and Elmer Fudd. Freleng’s next release for Warners, The Hardship of Miles Standish, features at least the latter four.