A Mid-Day Siesta

Audiences probably found it a new, refreshing gag in 1937, but it’s something today Golden Age cartoon viewers would expect out of Tex Avery.

Picador Porky opens with a title card that appears to be on parchment, telling us about a siesta interrupted by a soft guitar.



You and I both know the next scene will be anything but placid. We are not disappointed.



I like how Avery makes the transition. It's a gag in itself. Instead of a dissolve, the parchment rips open. Treg Brown ingeniously puts a ripping noise on the soundtrack.

The background drawing is the same one seen over the opening title, which is placid.



This cartoon gets its fame from Mel Blanc's talk-show circuit chatter about being asked to do the voice of a drunken bull when he was being hired at Warner Bros. He actually voices a guy in a bull suit.

Tex revisited a bull-fight at MGM with Señor Droopy (1949). The stories are quite different but they're both funny cartoons. In this one the bull disappears inside Porky's cape. In the Droopy short, Avery improves on it by pulling out an egg, cracking it, and the liquefied bull pours out and into his normal shape.

Chuck Jones and Sid Sutherland are the credited animators. There is no story credit, but Bob Clampett said in at least one interview he worked on the plot and gags with Avery.