058 Porky and Teabiscuit

Title: Porky and Teabiscuit
Studio: Warner Bros.
Date: 5/01/39
Credits:
Supervision
Ben Hardaway & Cal Dalton
Story by Melvin Millar
Animation Herman Cohen (ted. note: it's possible these are conflated; see title image)
Musical Direction
Carl W. Stalling
Series: Looney Tunes
Running time (of viewed version): 7:44

Synopsis: Porky accidentally wins a horse and auction and intentionally wins a race to have $11 so his father doesn't punish him.


















Comments: A jaunty tune gets us going. Then an even jauntier version of Jeepers Creepers. The auctioneer is a nice guy; and then he's not (as you'd expect). Lots of bad drawings in this one. The animation almost seems like animation what you would have seen five years earlier. And some jokes feel more like 1929 vintage. There's a visual sheen to the images; I'm not sure if that's special to the cartoon, if it's brough out by the classy LTGC transfer, or if it's been shellacced onto it by the transfer. My guess is the transfer brings it out (there's a certain candy coatedness to the forthcoming Old Glory as well). I suppose this would have come out on the Monday before the Kentucky Derby (the 1939 winner: Johnstown), making it holiday related. Seabiscuit never won the Kentucky Derby, or the other Triple Crown events. He instead won a bunch of horse races I've never heard of (and if you aren't into horse racing, I assume you've never heard of them either), with most of his major wins in 1938 (40 million people supposedly listening to a November 1938 race called "The Match of the Century"). While this makes the reference here timely, his best days appear to have ended by 1939. I get the impression only Californians liked Seabiscuit, and the prevalence of Seabiscuit references are a product only of the concentration of media in California.