Studio: Leon Schlesinger Productions (Looney Tunes)
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
Produced by: Leon Schlesinger
Short Synopsis
The Sahara, where it is so hot that even the fan dancers use electric fans. Porky Pig is a legionnaire in the French Foreign Legion. Leaving a restaurant, he is slipped a secret message by Tattle Tale Gray, a spy caricatured from George Raft: Ali Baba and his band are about to attack the desert fort. Porky hires a baby camel, Baby Dumpling, and races to the fort, to find that the garrison has all gone to the Legion convention in Boston. He is alone when Ali Baba's men arrive, and the siege is a run of gags: a bandit used as a battering ram and fed headache pills, a high-striker to reach the walls, a suicide squad with a bomb strapped to one man's head. Baby Dumpling's mother arrives to turn the tide, and the fort is saved, more or less.
Why It Matters
- Clampett's black-and-white Porky cartoons are the loosest, rubberiest films the studio made, and this is one of the funniest, a Beau Geste parody built on absurd details, the fan dancers, the Boston convention, the bomb-headed bandit who refuses to be lit. The pace never drops and the drawings have the elastic quality that was Clampett's signature.
- It is in the public domain because Warner Bros. failed to renew the copyright, which has made it one of the most-seen of Clampett's Porky films. The suicide-bomber gag, played for laughs in 1940, is a reminder of how far the context of a joke can shift; the film is otherwise a model of the late-1930s Looney Tune.
Notes and Trivia
- The title puns on the song "Alabamy Bound"; the camel's name comes from the Blondie films' baby.
- Mel Blanc voices everyone, including the spy's Raft impression.
- See also: Porky's Railroad (1937), Porky's Duck Hunt (1937), Confusions of a Nutzy Spy (1943).
