Trap Happy Porky

Trap Happy Porky
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Airdate:	24 February 1945 Blue Ribbon reissue: 5 August 1950
Runtime:	6 min. 53 sec.
Series:	Looney Tunes
MPAA Number:	10153
Production Number:	9-15 1186 (reissue)
Copyright Renewed:	25 October 1972
Starring:	Porky Pig Hubie and Bertie
Crew
Voice Characterizations:	Mel Blanc (uncredited) The Sportsmen Quartet (uncredited)
Director:	Charles M. Jones
Written By:	Tedd Pierce
Producer:	Eddie Selzer (uncredited)
Animated By:	Ben Washam Ken Harris (uncredited) Robert Cannon (uncredited)
Layout Artist:	Robert Gribbroek (uncredited) Chuck Jones (uncredited)
Film Editor:	Treg Brown (uncredited)
Musician:	Carl W. Stalling

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

Title

The title is a play on "slap-happy."

Plot

Porky resides at the Uncle Tom Cabin, where his sleep is being disturbed by mice. Seeing the two break plates to open walnuts, Porky tries to literally rat them out of the house. He first tries to set up a mouse trap, but one of the mice steals all of the cheese without being snapped. When a cat knocks on the door, Porky hires him to be rid of the mice. The cat builds a contraption, which ends up successfully knocking out each mice with an olive. With all of the mice gone, Porky bids good night to the cat, but Porky's plan backfires when the cat brings his drunken friends along while playing the piano, proving much worse than the mice.

Porky tries to kick the cats out, but he is bailed back to his bedroom. The cats eventually throw him out of the house and locks the door on him. Porky buys a bulldog in attempt to be rid of the cats, but the cats douse him with alcohol off-screen, causing the dog to join in on the cats' ruckus. Porky gives up and joins in with the drunken singing.

Caricatures

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

Music Cues

• Marty Symes and Al Kaufman - "How Many Hearts Have You Broken?" - plays during the opening credits.
• Josef Myrow and Edgar DeLange - "Velvet Moon" - plays during the opening scene.
• "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" - plays when a mouse tells its age to Porky Pig.
• Johannes Brahms - Hungarian Dance No. 6 - plays when the mice steal food from Porky Pig.
• Raymond Scott - "Powerhouse" - plays when the cat sets up the trap.
• Edward Madden and Percy Wenrich - "Moonlight Bay" - sung by the cats.
• "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" - sung by the cats.
• "Old Oaken Bucket" - sung by the cats.
• Chauncey Olcott, George Graff, Jr., and Ernest Ball - "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling" - sung by Porky Pig, the cats, and the bulldog.

Availability

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

(1987) VHS
Porky Pig

(1990) 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 and later USA pressings only; replaced by "Chow Hound" on early pressings of the American DVD)

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.

Notes

• 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 mice that only make a cameo in one scene where the mouse hole door is barred up; indistinguishable except for fur color. The rest of the mice shown in the cartoon are generic grey and brown mice.
• 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 uses 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 appear 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.^{[dead link]} This is probably due to the deteriorating 16mm film elements used to make both transfers, as a.a.p. and its successor companies had no access to the cartoon's original negatives stored at the WB vaults at the time.

Gallery

Title card (Blue Ribbon, 16mm print)

Lobby card

Lobby card

Production cel

Layout drawing by Chuck Jones

Layout drawing by Chuck Jones