General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Porky in Wackyland

Porky in Wackyland is a 1938 Warner Bros. Looney Tunes animated short directed by Bob Clampett, in which Porky Pig flies to Darkest Africa to hunt the last surviving Do-Do bird through a landscape that defies logic and the laws of nature.¹^•² Produced at Leon Schlesinger Productions and released on September 24, 1938, it is widely regarded as Clampett's defining film and was inducted into the National Film Registry in 2000.¹^•³

Key fact	Detail
Release	September 24, 1938, as Looney Tunes no. 8608, Warner Bros. / Leon Schlesinger Productions¹^•⁴
Director / writer	Robert Emerson "Bob" Clampett; story by Warren Foster¹^•⁵
Voices	Mel Blanc as Porky Pig, the Do-Do, and various Wackyland citizens; Billy Bletcher as the Roaring Goon⁶^•⁵
Music	Carl W. Stalling, musical director¹
Length	About 7 minutes (7:23)⁵^•⁷
Remake	Dough for the Do-Do (1949), in color, directed by Friz Freleng⁸
Recognition	National Film Registry, Library of Congress, 2000³

Spoilers

Plot

A newspaper vendor opens the film by breaking the fourth wall, stepping in front of the title card to announce that Porky is off on a do-do hunt. The headline offers a reward for the rare bird, which MUBI's synopsis puts at four sextillion dollars.⁷^•⁹ The front-page photograph comes to life, and Porky flies east through Dark Africa, Darker Africa, and Darkest Africa into territory marked with a question mark, landing in Wackyland under a sign declaring "It CAN happen here!"⁷^•²

The inhabitants Porky meets include a peacock with playing cards for tail feathers, a cross-eyed rabbit swinging on his own ears as they hang in empty air, a duck with enormous lips imitating Al Jolson, a creature with a honking horn for a body, and a hybrid animal with a cat at one end and a dog at the other that attacks itself.¹⁰^•² A three-headed creature talking nonsense is a caricature of the Three Stooges, with Moe Howard, "Curly" Jerome Howard, and Larry Fine.¹¹

The Do-Do Bird, an oblong, pointy-headed, tufted loony bird, outwits Porky at every turn: it pulls a giant brick wall out of nothing, sits behind a window floating in empty space, draws a door in midair and slams it in Porky's face, and even appears on the Warner Bros. shield when the logo rises from the horizon, using it to knock Porky down.²^•¹² Porky finally captures the bird by disguising himself as a paperboy and announcing that the Do-Do has been caught, but a hundred more Do-Do birds then appear from nowhere.¹²

Surrealism and style

Anti-realism governs the film from the first shot, when the newspaper boy enters the title card, and intensifies once Porky reaches Wackyland. The reviewer at Dr. Grob's Animation Review calls it the most surreal cartoon since Max Fleischer's Snow-White (1933), noting background paintings that recall the comic-strip artists George Herriman and Cliff Sterrett, including one scene with three simultaneous moons, and others that are completely abstract.² Carl Stalling's score and a multitude of strange sounds and voices heighten the effect; a scholarly essay on music in Termite Terrace cartoons argues that such accompaniment was critical to the surrealist suggestion because of the way music can move a listener from the waking state into the dream state.¹³

The film's place in art history has been examined formally. In the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, Jorgelina Orfila, an art historian at Texas Tech University, and Francisco Ortega Grimaldo argue that Porky in Wackyland should be considered a surrealist animation, situating it in the 1930s American reception of Surrealism that began with the Museum of Modern Art's "Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism" exhibition of 1936–37.¹⁴ Reviewers have also read the cartoon through Lewis Carroll, pointing to the mushroom field, Porky sliding down a hatch in place of a rabbit hole, and a character mixing the Mad Hatter and the March Hare.¹⁵

Place in Clampett's career and the Warner style

Clampett (1913–1984) had joined what became the Warner cartoon studio in 1931 and, working under Tex Avery from 1935 in the back-lot bungalow nicknamed Termite Terrace, helped forge the wild, irreverent humor that became the Warner style.¹⁶ From 1935, Avery, Frank Tashlin, and Clampett had experimented with natural-law-defying, dimension-breaking scenes; in Porky in Wackyland those experiments are, in one reviewer's phrase, unleashed full throttle.² The film is the best known of eight 1938–39 Porky shorts that the scholar Rajko Petković singles out as representatives of Clampett's emerging deranged, zany world, and he calls it Clampett's seminal film of that period.¹⁷ The Do-Do itself behaves, in one account of Termite Terrace's style, in a truly crazy, lunatic, carnival-grotesque way, in the lineage of the anarchic "anti-prey" characters begun with Daffy Duck in 1937.¹³

Remake and legacy

In 1949 Friz Freleng remade the cartoon in color as Dough for the Do-Do, reanimating Porky throughout, dropping some scenes, and replacing the original's loosely defined, Herriman-like backgrounds with settings inspired by Salvador Dalí, complete with Dalí-style rocks, sticks, eyes, and melted watches on the title card.⁸ By the late 1940s this kind of wild surrealism had largely toned down at Warner Bros. in favor of character humor and dialogue, and the remake reads as more old-fashioned than the 1938 original.⁸

The Library of Congress selected Porky in Wackyland for the National Film Registry in 2000 as culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant, and it appears in the book 100 Greatest Looney Tunes Cartoons.³^•¹⁰ Television prints distributed by Guild Films and Sunset Productions in the 1950s cut the gag in which the Do-Do pops onto the Warner Bros. shield and hits Porky with a slingshot rock, because Warner Bros. did not want to be associated with television when the cartoon was sold for broadcast in 1955.¹⁸

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026