ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Lela The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Jenni Devyn Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

Edgar Allan Pooh . . . this animated Looney Tunes short released by Warner Bros. in the 1940s could go a long way toward fleshing out that dire Another Dimensional possibility. Sid Squirrel doesn't even merit a name on Wikipedia's Master Compendium spreadsheet of all things Looney Tunes (unlike "Michigan J. Frog," whose lone appearance in ONE FROGGY NIGHT will live forever in cartoon infamy). Perhaps this also is Sid's only Looney Tunes role (though I cannot say for sure, as I have seen just 200 or so of Warner's 1,039 classic shorts). Suffice it to say that Sid hails from Brooklyn, and is a huge Dodgers fan (with no inkling that his team will desert him for greener pastures within a decade). Here, Sid is vacationing high in the Last Tree Standing on a woodlot Porky Pig is clear-cutting (or "pork-chopping," if he's working as a government contractor). Taking offense to Porky's efforts, Sid affects Bugs' accents and clothing styles as he rivets a metal girdle around "his" tree, breaking 11 of Porky's axes, driving the porker to resort to firearms and dynamite. Amid this action, Sid drops a few of Bugs' tag-lines, such as "Bon Vo-Ahhh-Gee" (for "Bon Voyage"). Bugs, however, could have said, "What's up, Doc?" if he had starred in this episode, with Porky clear-cutting something more down-to-earth (such as ginseng or morel mushrooms).

phantom_tollbooth Cult director Arthur Davis has made some hysterically funny cartoons in his time but 'Porky Chops' sure ain't one of 'em! One of the ugliest, most unfunny Warner shorts I have ever seen, 'Porky Chops' is something of an oddity. Its problems are numerous. For a start, it is very poorly paced and full of misfiring gags. The animation is clunky and the character designs are unattractive. This is especially true of the one-shot squirrel character who spends the cartoon trying to prevent Porky from cutting down his tree. Aside from looking lousy, this squirrel is a thinly veiled re-imagining of Bugs Bunny. Come to mention it, Porky's role in this film could just as easily have been played by Elmer Fudd and there are even moments when, if you squint, Porky looks just like Elmer in his hunting hat and brandishing his gun. As he was replaced by more interesting characters, Porky's starring roles became rarer and even in his earlier cartoons he frequently played second fiddle to crazier characters (see 'Porky's Party', in which Porky barely gets a look in). Chuck Jones brilliantly injected new life into him by casting him opposite Daffy in several inspired genre spoofs but Davis's attempt to throw the spotlight on the fame-starved pig falls completely flat. 'Porky Chops' is as pitiful as its dreadful title would suggest.

Lee Eisenberg 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.

Wizard-8 Even if you were not to know who the director and the writers were before watching this cartoon, it's almost certain that you would start suspecting none of the usual gang at the Warner Brothers animation studio were behind this entry. What we have here are writers who worked at the studio only for a brief time, and a director who was more successful as an animator. The end result is very strange, feeling like it was done by people who had only seen a handful of Looney Tunes cartoons before being assigned to make this cartoon. They have the words, but not the music - the timing is very off, and they don't seem to understand how the characters (both the protagonist and antagonist) need to act. I agree with the previous poster that this was an odd choice for Warner Brothers first box set of Looney Tunes cartoons - it certainly is no classic. Still, I must admit it shines when placed next to some of the cartoons that came out of the cartoon studio during its dying days.