Der Dudel Didel Da Da Do Do

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 short has Porky hunting for the last of the Do-Do Birds. He ventures into the strange and hilarious Wackyland to find him. It's a classic Warner Bros. short with wild and random things happening every second. One of Porky's best.

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.

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.

Wow! Over sixty years later, this cartoon short stands out as one of the greatest achievements in this medium. Bob Clampett, given the complete freedom that producer Leon Schlesinger let him have, spun out some of the weirdest and wackiest ever made.

We start out with a typical beginning for that era, Porky Pig is flying to Darkest Africa to find the last Do-Do, worth billions. But what follows is a mind bending journey, where no one evidently studied the laws of physics. Some of the humor are stock Bob Clampett jokes that are repeated in others of his cartoons, but he was always best with visual humor, when he let the animation be the star of the show.