Trap Happy Porky

Trap Happy Porky
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Airdate:	24 February 1945 Blue Ribbon reissue: 5 August 1950
Series:	Looney Tunes
Production Number:	9-15 1186 (reissue)
Copyright Renewed:	25 October 1972
Starring:	Porky Pig Hubie and Bertie Claude Cat Hector the Bulldog
Crew
Voice Characterizations:	Mel Blanc (uncredited) The Sportsmen Quartet (uncredited)
Director:	Charles M. Jones
Written By:	Tedd Pierce
Producer:	Eddie Selzer (uncredited)
Animated By:	Ken Harris Ben Washam (uncredited) Robert Cannon (uncredited)
Film Editor:	Treg Brown (uncredited)
Musician:	Carl W. Stalling

Trap Happy Porky is a 1945 Looney Tunes short directed by Charles M. Jones.

Plot

Porky is being disturbed by mice, which is causing him to lose sleep. He hires a cat in order to get rid of the mice, but things don't go as well as he planned, as the cat gets drunk and disturbs his sleep.

Caricatures

• Billy Gray - "I'm only three-and-a-half years old"

Availability

(1986) VHS
Viddy-Oh! For Kids Cartoon Festivals: Porky Pig Cartoon Festival Featuring "Nothing but the Tooth"

(1987) VHS
Porky Pig

(1988) VHS
Cartoon Moviestars: Porky Pig and Company

(1992) LaserDisc
The Golden Age of Looney Tunes, Vol. 2, Side 10: Variations on a Theme

(1996) VHS
Looney Tunes Collection - Further Adventures of Porky Pig

(2012) Blu-ray
Looney Tunes Mouse Chronicles: The Chuck Jones Collection (original opening and closing titles restored)

(2012) DVD
Looney Tunes Mouse Chronicles: The Chuck Jones Collection (original opening and closing titles restored)

(2013) DVD
Best of Warner Bros. 50 Cartoon Collection: Looney Tunes (Europe only; but replaced by "Chow Hound" on the American DVD)

Trivia

• This is the second appearance of Hubie and Bertie, and their first appearance in the Looney Tunes series. In this cartoon, however, they are unnamed generic mice, indistinguishable except for fur color. Only one line is said by one of them: "I'm only 3-and-a-1/2 years old."
• This is the only cartoon with Hubie and Bertie paired with Porky Pig.
• The unnamed black-and-white cat from this cartoon resembles a prototype Claude Cat who previously debuted in "The Aristo-cat".
• The Rube Goldberg-esque contraption appeared again in the 1947 Sylvester and Tweety cartoon "Tweetie Pie", where Sylvester uses it to catch Tweety, except that the bait used bird seed instead of cheese, and it fails as it injures Sylvester instead. Coincidentally, both "Trap Happy Porky" and "Tweetie Pie" were written by Tedd Pierce.
• The mouse that robs the trap Porky sets out quotes Billy Gray's line, "I'm only three-and-a-half years old". However, as house mice are adults at an age of fifty days and have a short lifespan of two to three years, a three-and-a-half-year-old mouse would be a geriatric case.
• The original print (with original titles) is copyrighted MCMXLV (1945), while reissue print is copyrighted MCMXLIV (1944).
• In both the a.a.p. and 1995 Turner "dubbed version" prints of the cartoon, there appears to be two noticeable split-cuts in the opening shots of the cartoon, firstly as the scene zooms in from the establishing shot stating "Uncle Tom's Cabins: Boarders Taken (For All They've Got!) to Porky's room window, and then as the camera zooms in into a sleeping Porky. This is probably due to the deteriorating 16mm film elements used to make both transfers, as a.a.p. and it's successor companies had no access to the cartoon's original negatives stored at the WB vaults at the time.

Censorship

• The opening shot, of the sign stating "Uncle Tom's Cabins: Boarders Taken (For All They've Got!)" is cut on Cartoon Network, Boomerang and The WB!, although it has aired uncut on overseas Cartoon Network and Boomerang channels and at least one showing of this short on Cartoon Network's Looney Tunes compilation show in the United States has aired this cartoon with the "Uncle Tom's Cabins: Boarders Taken (For All They've Got!)" establishing shot intact in 2009 and on a Boomerang USA re-run in 2018. It is unknown whether this was a mistake or intentional.
• The version on the former WB network also edits the part where the cats drunkenly sing "Moonlight Bay" to remove all of them pausing in the middle of the song to down some more cider.

Gallery

Lobby card