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.
Caricatures[]
Availability[]
Streaming[]
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, including his World War II shorts that are rarely shown on American TV due to objectionable content ("The Ducktators", "Hop and Go", "Confusions of a Nutzy Spy", and "Tokio Jokio").
- 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, 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 The joke is that passé is a word meaning "outdated, or old news".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.