Porky's Snooze Reel is a 1941 Looney Tunes short directed by Robert Clampett and Norman McCabe.
Title[]
The title is a play on a "newsreel."
Plot[]
Porky shows a newsreel parody. It includes an Elks parade; bad tax advice; a Swiss navy battleship; Lew Lehr presents a dog show; a flooded town; a tank trap; a mine that is swallowed by a jellyfish; several new airplanes; a horse race with a photo finish; and a swimming race around the everglades.
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Censorship[]
- On the redrawn version of this cartoon that aired on Nickelodeon, the sequence with the giant jellyfish eating an underwater mine was edited to remove the part after the explosion, where a row of jelly jars land on the ocean floor along with a sign that reads, "Six Delicious Flavors". The computer-colorized version that aired on the same network (and later, Cartoon Network and Boomerang) reinstated the punchline to that joke.
Notes[]
- This is the most recent black and white Warner Bros. cartoon still under copyright. All black and white cartoons released after this are in the public domain.
- This is also Norman McCabe's only short to still be under copyright; the rest of Norm McCabe's shorts are in the public domain.
- This was the one of two cartoons that credited both Bob Clampett and Norman McCabe as directors (the other one being "The Timid Toreador" a year before). Norm finished both cartoons while Bob was ill during production.
- The opening debuts an altered version of the opening title card with an updated Porky design, which would be used up until "The Henpecked Duck".
- The film was copyrighted on 20 December 1940.[2]
- The opening music to this cartoon would be reused five years later in "Baseball Bugs".
- The opening shot identifies the program as "Passe News", a takeoff of "Pathe News", producer of newsreels from 1910-1970. The joke is that passé is a word meaning "outdated, or old news".
- In the flooding story, the general store is owned by "Adam Lazonga", a reference to a character from the "Li'l Abner" comic strip. He is the world’s greatest lover and gives Abner advice on wooing girls.