Little Beau Porky (1936)

Wow! Such a good movie.

Very Cool!!!

recommended

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Little Beau Porky (1936) ** 1/2 (out of 4) Porky joins the foreign legion but he's upset to learn that he can't fight but instead he's given various boring chores that just don't sit too well with the pig.There are a lot of Arab stereotypes as you might expect from a cartoon made in 1936 but this really doesn't hurt or help the film much. On the whole this here is one of the lesser Porky Pig shorts that were made up to this point because there's really not too much of a story going on and sadly there aren't too many laughs either. The highlight of the film is a scene later in the picture involving a horse but I won't give too much away to prevent the gag from being ruined. As you'd expect there's some nice animation and it moves at a nice pace but there's still not too much here.

Directed by Frank Tashlin (billed as "Frank Tash"), "Little Beau Porky" is a fairly good Warner Bros. cartoon starring Porky Pig, even though he is not the Porky we are more familiar with (and he was not yet voiced by Mel Blanc), but we love him just the same. In this film, Porky is a bumbling, incompetent, fearful, yet determined soldier in the French Foreign Legion, way out in the bleak desert. When a messenger informs the commanding officer (a pompous, humorously accented bulldog with numerous bell-chiming medals) that Ali Mode and his Riff Raffs plan to attack their army, the unlikely Porky manages to save the day in a severe test of his fortitude.Two highlights: First, the commanding officer angrily addresses Porky, who is the only officer not properly standing at attention; Porky exerts his usual uncontrollable stutter when he asks "Who? Me?", and the commander hilariously imitates Porky's stutter when he answers, "Yes, you!" And second, Porky learns that trying to scrub the commander's camel can be quite an ordeal, because every time Porky climbs the ladder to scrub the camel's humps, the camel hunkers down, and every time Porky climbs down, the camel stands up; Carl Stalling's music score greatly accentuates this rapid "seesaw" effect between Porky and the uncooperative camel, with Porky eventually breaking the ladder."Little Beau Porky" is a nice, enjoyable little cartoon. In typical fashion for director Frank Tashlin, the final battle sequence features a lot of rapid camera-cutting and a conglomerate of wild sight gags. Everything happens almost TOO quickly during this finale, but no matter. The battle scene is full of Tashlin's energy and spirit, which is just what this cartoon needs in order to end with a bang!

Current events in the Middle East give us Americans an incentive to watch Porky Pig's early cartoon "Little Beau Porky". This one came out back when the famously stuttering swine was less than two years old and looked like a walking heart attack (and Joe Dougherty was still providing his voice, as Warner Bros. hadn't yet hired Mel Blanc).Anyway, the plot goes something like this. Porky is a soldier in a foreign legion outpost in either the Arabian desert or the Sahara. He always gets the most menial jobs and isn't allowed to participate in missions to trap the dastardly sheik Ali Mode (the Termite Terrace crowd loved to give people crazy, pun names, didn't they?). But when Ali Mode - who bears a mild resemblance to Osama bin Laden - attacks the fort, Porky pretty much becomes Rambo.Obviously, the Arab stereotyping makes it a little harder to laugh at this cartoon. It's mostly funny just because of some of the gags they pull. As long as we understand the stereotyping, then it's a pretty entertaining cartoon.Back when they made this cartoon, they probably never imagined that sixty to seventy years later, a lot of the world's focus would center on the Middle East. "Syriana" should explain it all.

This short has Porky as a military man, with the job of scrubbing camels and not much else. Because I want to discuss this in a little detail, this is a spoiler warning: Porky Pig is a soldier in the Foreign Legion, though he isn't a terribly good one. He's given the assignment of scrubbing the Commandant's camel and the camel outwits him badly! When the command is ordered out to track down and capture the dreaded Ali Mode, Porky is contemptuously left behind as a "camel scrubber".Naturally, once the command rides out, where do Ali Mode and his men decide to attack? If you said "The fort where Porky is", you get a gold star for your paper. Ali Mode first tries to trick Porky and when that fails, starts issuing orders in Pig-Latin to his followers.What follows is a very well animated series of combat gags, including a few repeat gags (one poor guy really needs to move away from his spot next to the well) and culminating in the capture of Ali Mode by Porky and the camel, who work in tandem for once. The dialog coming from Ali Mode is hilarious! The cartoon ends with Porky and the camel getting their well-earned reward. This short is available on the Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume 4 and is well worth having. Recommended.