Porky the Fireman is a 1938 Looney Tunes short directed by Frank Tashlin.
Plot[]
Porky is a fireman who, along with his friends, has to save a theatrical boarding house from burning down. Porky and the others check in before he grabs the hose and they all start to spray water at the building. Porky tells one of the workers to turn the water on, but the lazy fireman slowly approaches to ask him what he said. He then slowly makes his way back over and turns it on. But when it reaches Porky, only a single drop of water comes out so he resorts to using a pail to fetch water. As he returns, the fire itself grabs the water and throws it back on Porky!
The lazy worker sees Mabel the Fat Lady screaming for help. He slowly climbs the ladder and asks her what she said. When she tells him she wants to be put on the ground, he takes her out of the window and drops her. A minute later she lands. An old man needs saving too. Porky climbs up the ladder but he is delayed by the lazy worker who takes his time to get down. Porky runs into the building and the old man jumps out the window, telling Porky to go save Grandma, who is still in the house.
Meanwhile, the stream of water chases the flame around the building, going through many windows until it finally notices the water stopped chasing it. When it's guard is down, the water suddenly appears and sprays it.
Porky grabs onto another hose and hooks it up to the fire hydrant but struggles to get it working properly since it wants to come out of every slot he doesn't have attached to it. As the lazy worker comes out of the nearby sewer entrance, Lucy the Bearded Lady yells for help. Porky attempts to save her and has one of the firemen raise the ladder. Which proceeds to wind itself through several windows of the burning building while a group of acrobats jump out and fall to the ground while posing, revealing them to be a group called The Flying Leroys.
A man falls to the ground but passes through a huge cloud of smoke. Porky gets his bucket and collects a bunch of small flames and dumps them into a fishbowl. The firefighters continue to spray the building and a wall falls down, narrowly avoiding hitting any of them.
Eventually, the building is reduced to rubble. The final remaining flame slowly peeks out from under the debris, seeing nobody else around. But when all seems safe, all of the firefighters spray it. But it retaliates by spraying them with its own massive hose and pounds it's chest giving a King-Kongish roar of victory.
Caricatures[]
Availability[]
Streaming[]
Censorship[]
- Versions of this cartoon shown on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network shorten the part where a panicky white man screaming "Help! Help! Get the net ready!" as he falls comes out of a dark cloud and becomes a lazy black man, a caricature of Stepin Fetchit, to remove the latter part of that scene (yet the scene of Porky dumping smoke into a fishbowl and the fish inside becoming blackfaced was never edited, at least on Cartoon Network's version).[3]
Notes[]
- When the firetruck slides off of its frame, on the sign on the wall the words "Looney Tunes" can be seen.
- The computer colorized version has the 1939-46 drum ending instead of the 1937-39 ending.
- This is one of the redrawn colorized cartoons that used original theatrical opening and closing titles but retraced.
- This was the first Warner Bros. cartoon since 1934 to use "RELEASED BY WARNER BROS. PICTURES, INC" instead of "RELEASED BY WARNER BROS. PRODUCTIONS CORP" in the end title.
- When Porky is asking for the hose to be turned on, a sign for “Millars” can be seen behind him; a reference to writer Melvin Millar.
Gallery[]
References[]
- ↑ Catalog of Copyright Entries
- ↑ (3 October 2022) Cartoon Voices of the Golden Age, Vol. 2 (in en). BearManor Media, page 61.
- ↑ http://www.intanibase.com/gac/looneytunes/censored-p.aspx