Porky's Five & Ten (1938)

Love animation, it was a big part of my life as a child, particularly Disney, Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry, and still love it whether it's film, television or cartoons.Another early effort for Bob Clampett and Porky Pig, 'Porky's Five & Ten' is not one of the best for either of them. It is nevertheless very good and has a lot to recommend in its favour. Other Porky Pig cartoons do more justice to him and are better representations of him, but even when he went on to greater things it is a quite great representation of Clampett, containing all that made worthy of much admiration. Not much wrong here in 'Porky's Five & Ten'. Porky is underused somewhat and the ending is rather weird and comes out of nowhere.However, Mel Blanc is outstanding as always. He always was the infinitely more preferable voice for Porky, Joe Dougherty never clicked with me, and he proves it in 'Porky's Five & Ten'. Blanc shows an unequalled versatility and ability to bring an individual personality to every one of his multiple characters in a vast majority of his work, there is no wonder why he was in such high demand as a voice actor.The animation is excellent, it's fluid in movement, crisp in shading and very meticulous in detail. The story may be predictable, but it's beautifully paced with never a dull moment and strongly structured.Clampett's unmistakable humour and style is all over 'Porky's Five & Ten', to highly imaginative and deliciously wild effect. This comes through in both the writing and the sight gags, with some inspired and witty Hollywood caricatures seen with the fish characters.Ever the master, Carl Stalling's music is typically superb. It is as always lushly orchestrated, full of lively energy and characterful in rhythm, not only adding to the action but also enhancing it.Summing up, very good. 8/10 Bethany Cox

The above quote is from the version of "Hooray for Hollywood" performed in this cartoon short. It's obvious that Warner Bros. didn't want to plug Disney character Donald Duck when they now had their own star duck (created just the year before) to publicize. Anyway, Porky sails ship to open a store somewhere on an island but a swordfish opens the bottom and all the contents fall out. As a result, a swanky nightclub opens underwater with many celebrities impersonated there. Bob Clampett does many funny spot gags here like a fish swallowing a radio and getting bombarded with sounds of gunshots which causes him to...oh, watch the short which is available on the DVD of Hollywood Hotel as an extra. Quite hilarious and very amusing.

In "Porky's Five and Ten," Porky decides to open a dime store on a remote desert island in the South Pacific. With his tiny sailboat overladen with supplies, he heads out onto the open waves, but is sabotaged by a swordfish and a group of his finny friends, desirous of the treasure within Porky's store stock. Most of the cartoon takes place beneath the waves with the fish interacting with the various items from Porky's merchandise. It's no "Porky in Wackyland," though it is harmless and only marginally funny; the little ones may well get a kick out of it and should be able to relate this to the universe of SpongeBob Squarepants quite readily, if they are kids not allergic to black and white.It is recognizably the work of Bob Clampett and if you are a Clampett booster this might rate two "woo woos!" out of four, being of lower grade than his best work, but not quite the throwaway property that some of his spot gag cartoons are. If you are of the camp that is irritated by Clampett generally than this will irritate you too, though not as much as perhaps "The Wise Quacking Duck." One thing though; its inclusion on the Warner's "Hollywood Hotel" DVD is a reason to celebrate. "Porky's Five and Ten" was a cartoon that fared very poorly in a stenciled, colorized version made in the 1960s; it has since been digitally colorized as well, with better results. The copy of the stenciled version used by WXIX-TV in Cincinnati starting in the 1970s was cut down to around four minutes, and the resulting butchery made Gefilte fish of the storyline. That Warner's was able to recover the original with its proper titles and restore it to the crisp, pristine black and white original condition seen on the "Hollywood Hotel" DVD was the best thing that could have ever happened to this picture. It was the least that they could do, given how badly this title has been mangled in the public domain market, on television and elsewhere.

I will say that "Porky's Five & Ten" is far from the best cartoon that the Termite Terrace crowd produced. But knowing that Bob Clampett directed, you should know that you're in for a few surprises. Certainly some of the celebrity impersonations were pretty cool. It seems that once again, nobody ribs Hollywood more than Hollywood itself.OK, maybe we could be cynical and ask why this is labeled a Porky Pig cartoon when he doesn't appear that much in it (not to mention that people in the 21st century very likely won't get some of the pop culture references). But I say that as long as we just accept the cartoon for it's completely wacky premise, then we should be able to have fun. Available on YouTube.