Swooner Crooner

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".

Good cartoon.

Unlike Lee Eisenberg I won't write irrelevant, completely out of the blue stuff in a review, he wrote something like everyone in his generation firmly believes Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra should be mocked as brutally as possible. Where did this come from? I don't know. Why was it worth including? I have no idea. What on earth leads him to believe that Crosby and Sinatra are today viewed alongside Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini as some of history's greatest dictators? only in Eisenberg's special little mind can this one be answered.

The cartoon itself is highly recommended.The fact that it is able to skillfully blend a great mix of WW2 propaganda together with humorous parody's of contemporary entertainers at the time, All while not looking a bit dated by todays standards and reaming one of the most entertaining Looney Tune cartons and far more entertaining than most cartoons produced today alone earns it a great deal of merit.

8/10 Highly recommended.

Porky Pig has a highly efficient egg production farm. The hens are placed on a production line. They are all distracted by Frank Sinatra Rooster. Soon, none of the hens are at the factory to lay eggs. Porky starts auditioning other crooners to lure the hens back.

This is a fine Porky Pig cartoon. It got an Oscar nomination. It may not be as good for the modern audience. We are not all that familiar with the old crooners' singing even if we know their names. I can imagine the old audiences recognizing each rooster's representation and having fun with it. That's not happening for the present day.

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.