Porky's Railroad

"Porky's Railroad" is a Looney Tunes cartoon that offers few laughs, though it is entertaining. In this short, Porky is the engineer of an old steam engine...one that clearly is outdated. The plan is to replace him with a new Streamliner engine. However, before this happens, there's a race between one of these modern trains and Porky's...with rather predictable results.

For a 1937 Looney Tunes cartoon, this one is pretty good, though considerably less fun to watch than Looney Tunes' later work. Not bad...but nothing special here.

In this one, our blubbery friend is an engineer on an out of date train. After many efforts to barely survive a trip, Porky bets he can beat a guy with a brand new, silver streak train. There are several pitfalls along the way, but something Porky does early in the cartoon becomes his salvation. This is a pretty typical cartoon with only a couple clever events.

Clearly this cartoon has been around a long time, produced prior to my birth. However in about 1997 I had an occasion to be viewing this piece in the company of several small children. In the midst of this viewing, I caught what I detected to be Morse code signals. I wasn't sure at first but as I carefully listened to this piece (on VHS tape), the more I was convinced that I was right. The problem was complicated because the Morse was somewhat hidden beneath a rendering of "California Here I Come." Nevertheless, taking time to be sure, I found that the real message was different from the message being show to those in a theater watching the cartoon. In the picture Porky, in a race against a new and modern train, was alerted by telegraph that a cow was on the tracks ahead. To convey this message to the film watching audience, a hand came to the screen taping a message on a telegraph key. There was this Morse code sound and the audience would have assumed the sound was a representation of a message to Porky that he should be careful. However the real message of the code was an invitation to contact the producer in Hollywood and receive a picture of Porky. At this late date it is fair to say that there is no way to know if anyone ever did this. In the days when this cartoon was being viewed by the theater going public, few in the audience would have had the opportunity to get a copy of this and go over it many times to weed out the truth of the hidden message. This didn't really become easily available to the general public until the development of VHS tapes. I view this as a simple little joke by the cartoon producers who probably had a long laugh in their offices for many years. A similar Morse code message can be found in The Lone Stranger and Porky produced in '39. Were it not for my skill at Morse, acquired as a condition of being a ham radio operator, this hidden message would probably never have come to my attention. I have no reason to think I was the first to note this message. Nevertheless it was an interesting experience to discover something few others would have noticed.

Porky Pig is a conductor driving an old railroad engine. It struggles to get up a hill. When it gets on top of Piker's Peak, it starts to pick up speed. Porky encounters a cow on the tracks which leads to a funny confrontation with a bull. The Streamline Train is much faster. Porky Pig is told that he and his train engine are no longer needed. In frustration, he challenges the new train to a race.

This is an early black and white Porky Pig. It is a fun train-based cartoon. It is solid fun with plenty of action and good cow fun. As often is the case, there is a racially insensitive joke, but that's nothing new.

The work of Frank Tashlin is always worth a look. Porky's Railroad is one of his weaker Porky cartoons, and a disappointment after the brilliant Porky the Fireman. The weakest asset with Porky's Railroad was the story, which is agreed rather feeble, structurally it's thin and the pace is lacking in crispness. Porky's Railroad does have a few inspired moments, but the gags mostly are forgettable and not all that funny marred by their predictability and dull timing. Tashlin was an underrated animation director who a vast majority of the time showed signs of masterful technical and directorial brilliance, you can see this in cartoons like Plane Daffy, there is evidence of this brilliance but the pace and gags don't really serve him all that well. The slow motion shot at the start is an oddity, unusual for Tashlin. However, the animation is very good on the most part, the camera angles generally do impress and there's little wrong with how everything's drawn and shaded. The music sounds beautiful and is very characterful, as to expect the synchronisation from sound to visual works very well, in Porky's Railroad the best example is to the train starting up and accelerating very quickly. As well as the shocking and poignant ending, that is also the best gag/highlight of the cartoon, though the jumping off the drawbridge was also quite nice. Porky is a good lead character, not the strongest one but a credible one, while Mel Blanc's characterisations are without fault. Billy Bletcher gives nice support too. All in all, decent but could have been better. 6/10 Bethany Cox