Studio: Leon Schlesinger Productions (Looney Tunes)
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures
Produced by: Leon Schlesinger
Short Synopsis
Porky Pig and Daffy Duck cannot pay their bill at the Broken Arms Hotel, which has charged them for everything including air, sunshine and goodwill, because Daffy has lost all their money at craps. The manager, a tiny, furious man with a huge moustache, blocks every escape: they try the lift, throw him down the spiral staircase (an enormous, dizzying fall, drawn from above), knot the sheets and rappel from the window, swing to the building across the street, and each time he is waiting. He locks them in their room in shackles until they pay. Winter comes, Daffy goes quietly mad, and Porky wonders what Bugs Bunny would do; they phone him. Bugs, it turns out, is in the next room, in the same shackles.
Why It Matters
- Tashlin shot it like a film: the staircase fall seen straight down, the manager's entrances cut on movement, long shots and close-ups alternating with a rhythm no other Warner director used, and David Hilberman's layouts give the hotel real space. The Bugs ending is one of the first cross-over gags in the series and still gets a laugh.
- It is one of the few Porky and Daffy cartoons in the public domain, after United Artists failed to renew, and so it circulates widely, usually in a colourised version made for television; the original is black and white. Hilberman, the layout man, had been a leader of the 1941 Disney strike and would co-found UPA; Tashlin left for live action within a few years. The film shows both on the way to their later work.
Notes and Trivia
- Bugs's cameo is one of only two in a black-and-white cartoon.
- The hotel's name, the Broken Arms, is a joke on the Broken Arms Hotel in the Marx Brothers' Room Service.
- See also: Yankee Doodle Daffy (1943), Porky's Railroad (1937), The Dover Boys (1942).
