The Sour Puss is a 1940 Looney Tunes short directed by Bob Clampett.
Plot[]
Porky is sitting on a rocking chair reading the newspaper while his pet cat sleeps nearby. He spots an ad for fishing season and makes his cat guess what they'll be having for dinner tomorrow. The cat asks if it's chicken and Porky replies that it isn't, making the cat disappointed. Porky then tells the cat that it's fish. After hearing this, the cat parades around the house, bouncing off the walls and pausing to pull a mouse out of its hole and kisses it. Porky's canary sees this and declares, "Well now I've seen everything!" He pulls out a gun and commits suicide.
That night, the cat is having trouble sleeping so he takes a bottle of sleeping pills containing a mallet, and knocks himself out with it. The next day, Porky and the cat go down to the fishing hole and spot a flying fish that is literally flying out of the pond. The cat knocks out the fish with a swipe of his claws and picks it up. Porky then says, "Well Pussy it looks like we're having fish for di-di-di-supper," but the fish regains consciousness and says, "That's what you think chum!" He then laughs hysterically and honks the cat's nose. The flying fish skids through the water, laughing nervously all the way, and dives back in. The cat looks for the fish while sticking his face underwater, but the fish punches the cat's nose like a punching bag and climbs on the cat's back playing his tail like a cello, then he taunts the cat and knocks him into the water.
The fish torments Porky and makes him think that he caught him, but he goes up and down like a yo-yo on Porky's fishing line. Meanwhile, the cat recovers, and the fish asides "Hey gang, get a load of this!" and dives into the water making his fin look like a shark's. Porky tells the cat to look out, but the cat sees this and picks him up only to realize he is now holding a real shark. The cat and Porky run off into the distance, the shark turns and says in a Lew Lehr imitation, "Pussy cats is the cwaziest peoples," and laughs.
Caricatures[]
Availability[]
Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 4, Disc 4 (region 1; region 2 does not have this)
Porky Pig 101, Disc 5
Streaming[]
Censorship[]
- After Porky tells his cat about their fishing excursion, the cat goes bouncing around the room happily, a display that catches the attention of a canary who proclaims, "Now I've seen everything!" and shoots himself with a gun. Barring its appearance on The Bob Clampett Show, Cartoon Network has aired both a color and black-and-white version that has cut the scene to remove the bird blowing his brains out.[3]
Notes[]
- The Flying Fish's behavior is possibly an homage to Bob Clampett's version of Daffy Duck; for example, he frequently pinches the cat's nose like a bicycle horn, emits one of Daffy's quotes "That's what you think chum!", as well as the tendency to laugh hysterically non-stop and hyperactively hopping around, in and out of the water reminiscent of Daffy's "Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo! Hoo-hoo! Woo-hoo!" routine.
- This is one of the redrawn colorized cartoons that used original theatrical opening and closing titles but retraced.
- This is the first appearance of the gag where a character commits suicide with gunfire after seeing something weird and unusual which he/she could not comprehend and saying "Now I've seen everything!" in response to it. The gag is most commonly used in cartoons directed by Bob Clampett, and to some extent, Frank Tashlin, who inherited Clampett's old unit in 1943, and is often censored on American television.
Gallery[]
References[]
- ↑ Catalog of Copyright Entries
- ↑ (3 October 2022) Cartoon Voices of the Golden Age, Vol. 2 (in en). BearManor Media, page 86.
- ↑ http://www.intanibase.com/gac/looneytunes/censored-s.aspx