Porky's Hero Agency is a 1937 Looney Tunes short directed by Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones.
Plot[]
Porky is reading the story of the gorgon, a Greek myth about a woman who turned everyone she looked at into stone. His mother tells him it's time to go to bed. While he's asleep, he dreams of being a Greek hero known as Porkykarkus. In this version, the Gorgon runs a photo studio, and Porky is able to save by sneaking in and grabbing her life-restoring needle just before he wakes up.
Caricatures[]
- Bill Comstock - The Gorgon is a parody of his character Lizzie Tish on Al Pearce's radio show.
- Al Pearce's salesman character Elmer Blurt is a statue used as a doorstop
- The Three Stooges make a cameo. When turned to stone, they resemble the famous "three wise monkeys" sculpture.
- Dick Powell - as the Dick A. Powello statue
Availability[]
Censorship[]
- Versions shown on Cartoon Network (barring The Bob Clampett Show), Boomerang, and, most recently, MeTV, cut all the scenes featuring the Gorgon's bodyguard (the guard pulling Porky in and forcing him in line and the guard telling Porky that he is next, with Porky fearfully picturing himself as a piggy bank) due to fears that the guard either looks like he is in blackface or is a stereotypical depiction of a black person. Unusually, these scenes were not cut when the short aired on Nickelodeon.[4] The short aired only once on MeTV, on the 10 December 2022 installment of Saturday Morning Cartoons.
Notes[]
- This is one of the few times Porky is depicted as a child.
- The name "Porkykarkus" is a parody of Parkyakarkus, a Greek stereotype who was the stage personna of comedian Harry Einstein.
- The Emperor Jones is a 1920 Eugene O'Neill play and its 1933 film adaptation.
- The Emperor's "fireside chat" is a nod to Franklin D. Roosevelt's weekly radio addresses.
- The "bring-em-back-alive" needle is a pun on hunter Frank Buck's best-selling novel Bring 'Em Back Alive.
- Bob Clampett and members of his animation unit (Chuck Jones, Lu Guarnier, Robert "Bobe" Cannon, John Carey and Ernest Gee), appear as statues placed together to form a human picket fence.
- Porky gives the broken Venus de Milo statue a set of Popeye arms. The first few bars of Popeye's theme song are heard on the soundtrack.
- Porky brings to life a Greek temple labeled "Shirley", a reference to child star Shirley Temple.
- Carl Stalling's name is misspelled as Carl W. Stallings in the opening.
- MeTV aired a previously unreleased restored print of the cartoon on Saturday Morning Cartoons.
Gallery[]
References[]
- ↑ Catalog of Copyright Entries
- ↑ (3 October 2022) Cartoon Voices of the Golden Age, Vol. 2 (in en). BearManor Media, page 57.
- ↑ https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/animator-breakdown-porkys-hero-agency-1937/
- ↑ https://www.intanibase.com/gac/looneytunes/censored-p