Porky Chops

A hip squirrel from New York goes to the woods to relax but his vacation is interrupted by lumberjack Porky, who's trying to cut down his tree. Judging by some of the reviews on here, this one seems to set off some Porky Pig fans. I can kind of see why since Porky is little more than an Elmer Fudd-like villain for the squirrel to defeat. But this didn't really bother me as Porky is not high on my list of favorite Looney Tunes characters. The squirrel is clearly the star of this short with all the best lines and gags. I disagree strongly with another reviewer who said this cartoon was ugly. The animation is quite lovely, with beautiful colors and nicely-drawn characters and backgrounds. Lively, whimsical music from Carl Stalling. Great voice work from Mel Blanc. An enjoyable cartoon if all one is expecting is entertainment. If you're a Porky fan looking for an impressive showcase for his character, you might be disappointed.

Porky Pig is clear cutting the North Woods. A squirrel lives in the last tree standing. Porky starts chopping. Well, the squirrel is not surrendering his home yet.

I don't mind Porky Pig as a lumberjack, but maybe there are better choices. The no-name squirrel is fine, but maybe there is a better choice there too. At the end of the day, neither are obviously the perfect choices for the roles. This feels like an extraneous short. There is nothing special about this. Even the bear feels non-special. I don't know the size of this bear, but he ends up in the squirrel's home. Maybe he shrank along the way.

Arthur Davis, who directed "Porky Chops", was most famous as an animator; maybe he just didn't have exactly what it takes to be a director. This cartoon is pretty funny - hell, it looks like "Citizen Kane" compared to some of the cartoons coming out today - but it mostly seems to be a one-joke premise, as Porky Pig tries to chop down a tree but the wise-guy squirrel using it as his vacation home keeps interfering.

So, it's not a great cartoon, but still good for a few laughs...particularly with what happens after the dynamite gag (the Termite Terrace crowd sure had a way with dynamite, didn't they?).

PS: The name "The squirrels of Central Park" originally came from Gary Larson's cartoon "The Far Side". The squirrel here reminded me of that.

In a nutshell, Porky Pig is a lumberjack who's chopping down a tree that occupies a squirrel who wears pajamas, hangs a "Brooklyn Dodgers" banner over his bed, and reads the racing forms from the newspaper. The squirrel tries various ways to shoo the pig away like putting aluminum siding on the tree and then disguising it with varnish as Porky fails to chop with various axes that keep losing their sharp heads. Many funny chase gags abound and a twist involving a bear especially pays off here. This cartoon came from the short-lived Arthur Davis unit and it shows how talented Davis really was with the timing of the gags and pacing that also marked his predecessor, Bob Clampett. Too bad, due to budget constraints, Warner Bros. later had to cut Davis' staff. Porky Chops is highly recommended.

I don't understand this cartoon at all. Essentially, Porky is the villain, trying to chop down a tree in which a vaguely Bugs Bunny-esque squirrel makes his home. Our villain is a much-beloved regular character, and our hero is a generic wiseacre squirrel that we've never seen before. It's almost as if they were originally going to use Bugs, but decided he was too big to live in a tree, so they used Porky in the other role just to have a "star" in the picture. Also, most of the gags just plain aren't funny. The cartoon just kind of sits there until it's over, and then you forget about it. How this was chosen for the first Looney Toons DVD set over classics like Book Revue and the Great Piggy Bank Robbery, I'll never know.