Swooner Crooner

Frank Tashlin's 'The Swooner Crooner' is a cartoon I never saw on TV as a child and seeing it on DVD now it's clear why it was kept off children's TV. The concept for the cartoon is one big dirty joke! Porky Pig is a farmer who wants to increase the amount of eggs that his hens lay. He realises that the sexual arousal they experience when watching a Frank Sinatra caricature rooster perform results in them laying eggs in enormous quantities. So Porky sets about auditioning singing roosters to keep the hens in a permanent state of arousal. 'The Swooner Crooner' is a bizarre and ever-so-slightly grotesque short which I've never warmed to in the least. Most of the gags consist of various images of swooning chickens or chickens laying piles of eggs in one go. It's scarcely the stuff of split sides. Nevertheless, the cartoon was nominated for an Academy Award. No doubt the Sinatra and Bing Crosby caricatures were funnier back in the heyday of both performers. Indeed, the funniest part of 'The Swooner Crooner' in the rooster auditions in which we see a variety of caricatures of such performers as Jimmy Durante and Cab Calloway. The plot on which these caricatures are hung, however, is paper thin and the final gag is particularly strange and grotesque.

This wartime cartoon features Porky Pig as manager of the "Flockheed Eggcraft Factory." Yes, nobody loves plays-on-words more than the writers of these cartoons.

The hens clock in for their wartime assembly-line duties. The assembly is clever and funny, how they picture the eggs being dumped out of a bombardier, caught below with catcher's mitt, etc.

The caricature of Frank Sinatra had me laughing out loud. If you've seen pictures of Frank when he was really young and the girls were screaming over him, you saw a real skinny guy with a bow-tie. The artists here had fun with that, and portraying the different ways in which all the hens "swoon."

Later, we see other famous singers "audition" but no one makes the grade until "Bing" shows up....and the swooning starts all over again. The the two stars both sing and the egg production goes sky high!

I grew up a decade later but I can still appreciate this fantastic cartoon, which was part of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume Three.

I have loved Looney Tunes cartoons for as long as I can remember, and I could watch them all day if I wanted to. Swooner Crooner is just wonderful, and one of Porky's best for me. Porky is great value here, he can be bland when he is partnered with stronger characters but he is always endearing regardless. The animation is beautiful to watch, very crisp and vibrant in colour, while the music has so much character and nostalgic value. The songs are a treasure trove of old favourites, and are just a joy to the ear. Maybe the story is not the strongest one in the world, though it is an original one, but that doesn't matter in the slightest to me as there is never a dull moment and the whole of Swooner Crooner is relentlessly entertaining. The dialogue has freshness and wit, the gags are clever and imaginatively timed- the auditions especially are an absolute riot- and the caricatures of Frank Sinatra(the best one for me), Bing Crosby, Cab Calloway, Jimmy Durante, Nelson Eddy and Al Jolson are really fun to spot. Mel Blanc's vocal characterisations never disappoint, always a large part of why Looney Tunes cartoons work so well as a majority whole, and Swooner Crooner is no exception. All in all, wonderful and recommended with no hesitation. 10/10 Bethany Cox

In the only Porky Pig cartoon to receive an Oscar nomination, filmdom's most famous swine owns a farm and has the hens lay eggs all day - to the tune of (what else?) Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse" - but the hens get distracted by a crooning rooster. But when Porky hires another rooster to woo the hens back, the whole ordeal really turns into a battle of wits.

An obvious aspect of "Swooner Crooner" is that it's truly a product of WWII, what with the clear allusion to Rosie the Riveter. But of course, they parody singers like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. Yeah, those guys may have been really popular in those days, but I just bet that most people in my generation believe that BC and FS deserved to get mocked as brutally as possible.

OK, so I don't know whether or not I can speak for every member of my generation. But I can say that this is a really funny cartoon. It got included in Leonard Maltin's "Bugs and Daffy: Wartime Cartoons".

This cartoon, nominated for Oscar, was Porky's only shot at the gold. It's a marvelous cartoon and parodies Sinatra and Crosby, among others. Watch particularly the audition, when Porky is trying out singers to get his hens laying eggs again. The guys at Termite Terrace loved parodies, not only actors, but singers as well. The auditionees are all parodies. It's a scream and great fun figuring out who's who. Reportedly, Bing Crosby hated it when he was parodied in cartoons. How Frank Sinatra felt about it, I have no idea. Recommended.