Crowing Pains

Crowing Pains
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Airdate:	12 July 1947 Blue Ribbon reissue: 23 April 1955
Series:	Looney Tunes
MPAA Number:	11538
Production Number:	1030 1371 (reissue)
Vitaphone Number:	1553
Runtime:	6 minutes, 48 seconds
Copyright Renewed:	5 August 1974
Starring:	Sylvester Foghorn Leghorn Henery Hawk Barnyard Dawg
Crew
Voice Characterizations:	Mel Blanc Robert C. Bruce (uncredited)
Director:	Robert McKimson
Written By:	Warren Foster
Producer:	Eddie Selzer (uncredited)
Animated By:	Manny Gould Charles McKimson John Carey I. Ellis Anatole Kirsanoff (uncredited) Fred Abranz (uncredited)
Layout Artist:	Cornett Wood
Background Artist:	Richard H. Thomas
Film Editor:	Treg Brown (uncredited)
Musician:	Carl Stalling

Crowing Pains is a 1947 Looney Tunes short directed by Robert McKimson.

Plot

Sylvester is sneaking to the doghouse in a bush. He tries to steal a bone outside the doghouse, but the Barnyard Dawg grabs the paw and looks inside the bush to see Sylvester with a flower in his mouth and several more flowers on his head. After Sylvester deliberately whacks Barnyard Dawg on the head with his dog food dish, Barnyard Dawg chases Sylvester on the wall and jumps over a branch, only to get caught by the leash and hangs from the branch by the leash. Sylvester is about to cut the leash with an axe, but Foghorn grabs the blade and Sylvester whacks too hard and vibrates as he goes by the fire wood, and the branch breaks and Barnyard Dawg gets hit on the head and walks off.

Foghorn lectures Sylvester to "Bury the hatchet, I say bury the hatchet, but not in anyone's head, boy!" when Sylvester is trying to speak, Sylvester angrily yells "Ah, SHUT UP!" and whacks Foghorn on the head with the bladeless axe and leaves as Foghorn sees stars and still holds the blade. Henery says, "I'm not sure, but this might be a chicken," and drags him as Foghorn asks, "What's the ga-I say what's the gag son? GAG that is! Where are we takin' me, boy? Speak up!" After Henry tells Foghorn that he is a chicken, Foghorn convinces Henery that Sylvester is a chicken.

Foghorn sticks Henery in an egg and places it under Sylvester. Sylvester wakes up, thinking he's laid the egg and has become a mother, sings "Rock A Bye Baby" to it then hides the egg when he sees Foghorn coming and Foghorn congratulates Sylvester for laying the egg and Sylvester realizes that "HEY, tomcats can't be Mothers! Cats don't lay eggs! There's something screwy here!" and attempts to detach himself from this egg that suddenly follows him and attaches itself to him and that literally scares Sylvester out of his wits when he thinks the egg is possessed by a ghost. He runs from it and literally does all sorts of things, including running into the dog house belonging to the Barnyard Dawg. The dog pulls the cat out and stomps all over him and walks off. Henery, still in the egg, runs into the dog, which causes the dog to trip and fall over. The dog looks at the egg and then at the camera and ponders "I just takes a step and presto, I lays an egg!" A mother duck, with her ducklings, says to herself, "Presto, and he lays an egg. And to think for fifteen years, I've been doing it the hard way." The egg/Henery finally discovers Sylvester's hiding spot, a barrel, and he starts to attach himself to Sylvester's skin.

Reaching a breaking point, Sylvester comes close to literally smashing the egg with a mallet. Just as the egg is about to be smashed, Henry breaks out and hollers "STOP!!" to which Sylvester literally yanks his head up and down by his ears and grabs his tail and literally yanks on it, causing his head to literally pop up and down on his shoulders because he himself thinks he's crazy. Henry, seeing enough, clobbers Sylvester with a mallet and drags him off. Sylvester wakes up and asks "Say, what's the big idea?!" and Henry warns the "chicken" to not give him any trouble and Sylvester realizes that he's been part of a trick and he leaps up and shows Henry that the actual chicken, "A ROOSTER in fact!", is Foghorn himself. "Rooster? If I'm a rooster-I say if I'm a rooster, I hope to be struck by-" bellows an offended Foghorn, but is interrupted when he is almost struck by lightning and decides "Well, let's put it another way. WAY that is" and an argument arises between Sylvester, Foghorn, and the Dawg as they accuse each other of misleading Henry Hawk. Finally, Henry decides the only way to settle the matter is to see who crows at dawn, and they all agree with an "OKAY!" with Foghorn alone "OKAY, THAT IS!"

At dawn the next morning, a sun pops up and rooster crows, but from whom? Sylvester has his mouth open because he typically always has his mouth open, looking dumbfounded, but Barnyard Dawg thinks Sylvester is crowing and walks off after hearing enough. Henery mistakes this for the sound of the rooster and he drags Sylvester away. Foghorn crows out the side of his mouth holding up a how-to book on ventriloquism. Foghorn says, "You gotta-I say you gotta keep on your toes. TOES that is!"

Availability

8mm Associated Artists Productions

(1992) LaserDisc
The Golden Age of Looney Tunes, Vol. 2, Side 9: Best Supporting Players

(2008) DVD
Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 6, Disc One (original opening titles restored)

(2008) DVD
Looney Tunes Spotlight Collection: Volume 6, Disc 1

(2024) Blu-ray
The Man I Love

Streaming

Boomerang App (2017 - 2024) (restored)

HBO Max (2020 - 2023) (restored)

Max (2023 - ) (restored)

Censorship

• When this cartoon aired on The WB, the scene of Barnyard Dawg hanging from a tree branch by his leash and Sylvester, armed with an axe, is about to swing it at him, was cut, jumping from Barnyard Dawg chasing Sylvester to Foghorn telling Sylvester, "Let's bury the hatchet, but not in anyone's head".
• There is a short sequence where Henery Hawk says "I'm a chicken hawk and I'm gonna get me a chicken today! I am so!" just before the opening credits. This sequence was cut when the short was reissued. This sequence has was restored for the Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 6 DVD release.

Notes

• This is the only cartoon in the Golden Age of American Animation which Sylvester shares the screen with any of the three other stars. Sylvester and Foghorn Leghorn later appeared in "The Yolks on You" (1980).
• Crowing Pains has been featured on several public domain home video releases, though it is still under copyright. This likely occurred due to the cartoon being mislabeled as "Growing Pains" in its copyright renewal; several sources presumably thought the copyright was never re-registered because of this.
• This is one of the few cartoons where Foghorn Leghorn wins out against another character; Sylvester is the loser in this case. It is also the first cartoon where Foghorn wins in the end.
  • This is also the only Foghorn Leghorn cartoon where Foghorn wins alongside Henery Hawk and Barnyard Dawg. Similarly, both Foghorn and Barnyard would win together in the end again in "The High and the Flighty" and "Fox-Terror".
• Barnyard Dawg's one line of dialogue was provided by Robert C. Bruce due to Mel Blanc being away in New York for his work on various radio broadcasts. Despite this, Blanc provided the voices of Foghorn Leghorn, Henery Hawk and Sylvester.
• Foghorn's line "Open the window, Richard," when he puts Henry in the false egg, is a reference to a popular 1947 song.
• This is Sylvester's first appearance in a Robert McKimson-directed cartoon, and Sylvester's second appearance in the Looney Tunes series.
  • Robert McKimson redesigned Sylvester slightly in this cartoon short, giving him a dopier, off-model look, with slanted eyes, a wider mouth and a bigger nose with three whiskers instead of two, a plumper stature and a thicker, shorter tail with no white tip on his tail. This design would continue to be seen in the rest of the Sylvester cartoons directed by Robert McKimson throughout the late-1940s and early-1950s. It was not until "Hoppy-Go-Lucky" where McKimson redesigned his version of Sylvester to closely resemble how his original creator Friz Freleng drew him. This design McKimson initially used for Sylvester from 1947 to 1952 would later be re-used for New Looney Tunes.
• This cartoon was re-released into the Blue Ribbon Merrie Melodies program in the 1954-55 animation season, and original closing and music was kept on the reissue. However, both American and European Turner prints erroneously replace the end title card and ending music to those of Merrie Melodies.

Transcript

For a complete transcript, click here.

Gallery

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Dick Thomas background