Little Johnny Jet

There are a few bright spots here but to anthropomorphize some airplanes is pretty easy pickings. The plot involves a WWII bomber who uses propellers and is now termed obsolete. When he has a son, it is a speedy jet. This is what is putting dad on the scrap heap, until a race comes along.

John is an obsolete B-29. He's a war hero but everybody just want a jet. His wife Mary gets pregnant. When the baby comes, he's also a jet. John enters an Air Force competition but he falls behind early to the jets.

This is another good one from the legendary Tex Avery. It's very similar to the cab story. Maybe Pixar got a bit of inspiration from these old cartoons.

A retired air force plane can't get a job to support his expanding family, because everyone wants jets these days. When his child is born and proves to be a jet.

Like Avery's earlier ONE CAB'S FAMILY, it uses the basic premise as a framework to string a lot of gags on. Fortunately, he has his best writer, Heck Allen, to work with.

"Little Johnny Jet" is a cartoon directed by Tex Avery, though its style is much more conventional than most of the films he made for MGM....though the characters are far from conventional!

The film stars a cartoon propeller-driven airplane. It claims to be a B-29 bomber but looks absolutely nothing like one. Apparently, this cute cartoon airplane is now considered obsolete in the jet age. But when the airplane's wife(?) has a baby, it's a lightning fast jet plane. What's next? See the short film.

This film is essentially a re-working of the previous year's cartoon short, "One Cab's Family"...also by Tex Avery. If you like anthropomorphic planes or taxis, then these films are for you. As for me, I just thought it was okay...mostly because although the characters were unconventional, the humor was very conventional and lacks the weird Tex Avery touches. Worth seeing but very far from Avery's best.

Fun fact, the development of the B-29 bomber was more expensive than the entire Manhattan Project. Its use in the Pacific Theater during WWII led to it being used to drop the atomic bombs on Japan, but after the war, the rise of jet planes (as opposed to those with propellers, like the B-29, John here, or the DC-3, Mary) began the slow process of it being phased out, its service in the Korean War notwithstanding. Similarly, Douglas MacArthur had seen his glory days come to pass, having been relieved of his command in Korea a couple of years earlier for insubordination. So the backdrop to this lighthearted short from the legendary Tex Avery were these shifts in the military, and it perhaps also resonated with veterans competing in a younger workforce.

There are lots of amusing gags to be found in this pair of bombers giving birth to a baby jet, who then zooms in and out of the house while his mother holds up food or new diapers for him to pick up while whizzing by. The smog being removed from Los Angeles was a cute reference to a problem that was just then on the rise in the city, and who can resist the Leaning Tower of Pisa being tilted the other way, or the Statue of Liberty's undergarments being revealed? Naughtiest of all was the mass production reference at the end, and the blush on the mother plane's face was priceless.