Before Bugs Bunny, before Daffy Duck, Before Foghorn Leghorn, Before Roadrunner, Before Wile Coyote, Before Speedy Gonzales, before Tweety, and before Lola Bunny,
There was a cartoon created by Warner Bros. in 1935 that featured an all-star cast of characters.
But for what purpose?
Well, Leon Schlesinger was sore about losing Bosko, as well as the failure of his replacement Buddy, that he desperately needed something to compete against the likes of Mickey Mouse and Popeye.
But the previous characters they had introduced all proved to be a bust, so Leon as well as several directors decided to create a cartoon featuring characters with varying personalities. The idea being that the audience would vote on who's the most popular character of the short that would eventually get cartoons of his/her own.
Another was Warner Bros. was getting interested in making color cartoons but there was another problem.
After FLOWERS AND TREES, Disney wanted to have exclusive rights to the Three-Strip Technicolor process for cartoons so this prevented "I haven't got a hat" as well as Betty Boop's "Poor Cinderella" from using the 3-strip process.
"Work's been hard for me since Cartoons went to color... More like work's been hard for me since the Hays Code, Popeye, and Disney refusing to let me be in 3-strip technicolor."
So with the cartoon now stuck with the inferior two-strip technicolor process, animation acting had to be taken more seriously rather than use visuals alone.
Anyway, this cartoon features multiple characters that would star in this cartoon.
This included Beans the Cat
Little Kitty
Ham and Ex
Oliver Owl
and most importantly: PORKY PIG.
......
However, he looked more like this in the cartoon:
Speaking of Porky Pig, his stutter was actually more authentic in this cartoon compared to later portrayals because Mel Blanc was not the one portraying Porky.
Instead, that honor went to Joe Dougherty who had a real life stutter but unfortunately, that stutter was severe and it proved so problematic for WB's budgets that he was fired from his role and Blanc would eventually assume the role of the character. OUCH!!!
But back to Dougherty, yes, he had a severe stutter and it's prevalent where Porky does his Paul Revere sketch.
Rather than show a bunch of screenshots and considering I always forget to put up said screenshots before I go back to edit these particular blogpost, I direct you to the wiki where the Cartoon has been embedded for you to watch:
For some reason, a lot of the Dailymotion and Vimeo links that were available got taken down so just navigate to video C since that's still active.
I guess the takedowns are because the cartoon may still be under copyright which always isn't the case with Looney Tunes cartoons that don't feature mainstays like Bugs Bunny.
As a matter of fact, this cartoon's copyright was renewed back in 1963.
Update as of June 23 2024:
The Embedded videos to the cartoons on the Looney Tunes wiki have been taken down. Now you're best bet is Archive.org.
GODDAMMIT ZASLAV!!!!
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