Der Dudel Didel Da Da Do Do

This black-and-white early Looney Tunes cartoon looks different, sounds different...and is terrific.

We read in the "The Globe" that Porky is off on a rare do-do bird hunt, trying to get a bird that is nearly extinct and worth billions of dollars. He flies off to "darkest Africa" and winds up in "Wackyland" where the population is "100 nuts and a squirrel" and the sign that says that audibly speaks to Porky saying "It can happen here!!!!"

With that, we start seeing some really bizarre things regarding the scenery, the characters who inhabit this place and the weird things that happen. It looked a cross between a Salvardor Dali painting and Alice In Wonderful.

Porky is then led to "the last of the do-do birds" and this a one strange bird, who fits right into Wackyland.

This is great stuff, a real visual treat and a cartoon you could enjoy over and over just trying to catch all of the sight gags and great drawings in here. I couldn't help wonder what the audience thought way back in the 1930s. This had to be something really unusual for them to see.

"Porky in Wackyland" is a true milestone in animation. It is an amazing example of no-holds-barred animation. It's very obvious the artists had a great time just letting their imaginations go wild on this one. The plot is simple, Porky Pig is searching for the last Do-Do bird. His quest leads him to Wackyland. In Wackyland anything can happen...that's what animation is all about if you ask me. Anything can be brought to life in animation, all you have to do is dream it and draw it. "Porky in Wackyland" represents many crazy dreams, and many wonderful drawings. And on top of it all, it's very funny!

In 1937 Robert Clampett was promoted to director and one year later he created his first, true classic cartoon of the many that he would direct for Warner Bros. studio: Porky in Wackyland. Along with Tex Avery and Frank Tashlin, Clampett was instrumental in creating the Warner style. He was an innovator who liked to push the boundaries of the medium, and Wackyland is a perfect example of this. It was also the first of Clampett's many cartoons to use hallucinatory, surrealistic images; others would include The Great Piggy Bank Robbery, The Big Snooze and Tin Pan Alley Cats (which re-used animation from Porky in Wackyland.) Wackyland was later remade in color as Dough for the Do-Do by Friz Freleng.

This cartoon is an early pinnacle of animation insanity, the prototypical Warner Brothers short. A blitzkrieg of jokes, puns, and free-wheeling mayhem, WB-style cartoons sometimes equaled, but never surpassed, "Porky in Wackyland". Every square inch of every frame is packed with information that flows in several directions at once. Carl Stalling's score is as integral to this cartoon as any of the visual elements (and more so than the "script"). For these, and many other, reasons, "Porky in Wackyland" is the blueprint for the best of WB cartoons, as well as a signpost to various late-20th Century highbrow/lowbrow aesthetics.

Porky Pig goes on a hunt to catch the surreally elusive last Do-Do bird.

This cartoon has been credited as the 8th best cartoon ever made. I am not going to get into the minutia of deciding if it is better or worse than 8th, but it absolutely needs to be on that list, because it takes such a simple thing and makes it so strange.

The way I saw this was side by side with "Dough for the Do-Do". You could watch them individually, but side by side will blow your mind. Almost all of the scenes are identical, though some of the backgrounds are colored differently. Saying one is better than the other is hard to do.