I’m getting depressed looking at my own website, so I’m basically making this post in order to bump my Ledger post down.

This is Punch Trunk (1953), an oft-forgotten but intriguing one-off by Chuck Jones. Like many of my generation, my first real encounter with the Looney Tunes brand of animation was on Saturday afternoons in a two-hour block on Nickelodeon, just around the dawn of Nicktoons. Though this short is considered a lesser-known film, I remember it being featured quite regularly on the program, which makes the fact that it doesn’t appear on any of the first five Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVDs rather disappointing for me. (Yes, I know - it’s in Daffy Duck’s Quackbusters as well, but I want it context-free and presented independently, thanks.) I’m a huge fan of this cartoon, in part because of the nostalgic function it serves for me, and in part because it’s genuinely hilarious.

A few thoughts:

Notice the bizarre error around :42-:44 - some weird, stylized UPAish elephant makes its way into the film for half a second before the more classically Looney one walks out from behind the bananas.

The Dumbo reference around 4:34 seems remarkably late - didn’t it come out in 1941? But keep in mind that Disney rereleased their best features about once a decade before home video - the most recent Dumbo rerelease had been in 1949, making this a reference children of any age could understand.

Things I love here: “Sure you do. I keep a giraffe in mine.” The rubbery liquidity of that timid elephant on the tightrope. The cat transforming into a monkey. The entire bit in the analyst’s office. The ridiculousness of “I seen it.”

Notably, I also recall watching a number of other fantastic, and now that I’ve delved more into the world of animation, fascinating works. Before Nickelodeon had the resources to really settle into its golden age (that is, the Pete and Pete/Salute Your Shorts/Ren and Stimpy era of amazing nostalgia-fodder), it was an eclectic collection of off-color originals (Welcome, Freshmen), imports (You Can’t Do That On Television, The Mysterious Cities of Gold, Danger Mouse/Count Duckula), and revivals, some of which are underseen (Chuck Jones’ Rikki Tikki Tavi, which is magnificent; the Fleischer Gulliver’s Travels, which, admittedly, I thought was a total snooze at the time).

(I know - the video goes a bit out-of-sync near the end. If this were latter-day radio-with-pictures style television animation, it’d be one thing, but this is such a gorgeously visual cartoon that the sound sync isn’t nearly as important.)

• BROWSE / IN TIMELINE
• « Broken.
• » This Photo

• BROWSE / IN Miscellaneous
• « Broken.
• » This Photo