Studio: Leon Schlesinger Productions (Looney Tunes)
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures, The Vitaphone Corporation
Produced by: Leon Schlesinger
Short Synopsis
The gleaming 30th Century Limited roars down the main line; Porky Pig drives the 15th Century Unlimited, a wreck of a locomotive he calls Toots, which is outrun by a snail on the hill at Piker's Peak until Porky feeds it black pepper and it sneezes itself up the slope. A cow will not move off the track; a bull stands politely aside and Porky mistakes its tail for the cow's. Then Porky is handed his notice: he is to be replaced by a streamliner, the Silver Fish, whose driver mocks him and challenges him to a race. The streamliner's slipstream mangles Toots at the start, but Porky keeps going, through a drawbridge, a tunnel and a collision with the bull, which charges the little engine and shoots it past the finish line first. Porky keeps his job, driving the Silver Fish, with Toots towed behind as a trailer.
Why It Matters
- Tashlin, newly a director, treats the race like a movie, with fast cutting, low angles and the two trains framed like duelling cars, and the gag of the bull as a locomotive booster is a good one; Porky, still the studio's only real star in 1937, has a sweetness here that the later Daffy cartoons would knock out of him. The train designs are lovingly observed.
- The film is one of the Warner shorts whose copyright was never renewed, so it has circulated freely for decades and is often the first black-and-white Porky cartoon people see. Tashlin's brief first stint as a Warner director produced a handful of these cinematic, railway- and machine-obsessed cartoons before he left for Disney and, eventually, live-action comedy. The film contains a racist sight gag of the period, which the entry does not excuse.
Notes and Trivia
- The race parodies the 1934 competition between the streamlined Burlington Zephyr and the Union Pacific M-10000.
- Billy Bletcher, the voice of the Silver Fish's driver, was the Big Bad Wolf in Disney's Three Little Pigs.
- See also: Porky's Duck Hunt (1937), Porky Pig's Feat (1943), The Dover Boys (1942).
