P-38 and P-40
Two of the most distinctive fighters produced in the United States during World War II, the Lockheed P-38 was a superb long-range fighter with a highly dinstinctive twin-boom design. The Stupid Cupid (Tashlin, 1944) uses a drawing of one, when a love-struck bluebird, hit by a Cupid-fired arrow, pursues his lady love with the speed of a P-38, briefly turning into one. The little Daffy Duck-like bird in A Corny Concerto (Clampett, 1943), upon spotting a goofy vulture/condor making off with some cygnets, gets angry and takes off after the predator, mimicking a Curtiss P-40 Warhawk, the famous fighter of the Flying Tigers (note the distinctive use of the shark-tooth painting on the picture used).
Passe
A parody of Pathe, whose symbol was a French rooster (the company was originally French) who supplied newsreels for Warner Bros; WB eventually purchased the newsreel operations in 1947, shutting them down in 1956.
Parodies using this gag and/or similar gags can be seen in Buddys Theater (Hardaway, 1935), Tokio Jokio (McCabe, 1943) and others. Porkys Snooze Reel (Clampett/McCabe, 1941), uses the rooster logo in conjunction with the slogan The Eyes, Ears, Nose and Throat of the World, a play on the slogan of Paramount News, the newsreel for Paramount Pictures. The Hole Idea uses a Warner Pathe newsreel.
Paul Revere Foundation
Name of the medical facility where Bugs Bunny is an experimental animal (destined for use in a brain-switching experiment) in Hot Cross Bunny (McKimson, 1948).
The slogan underneath the name reads: Hardly a man is now alive, a clever reference to the well-known Longfellow poem.
Peck, Gregory
Peck is caricatured in Slick Hare (Freleng, 1947) as eating a steak with an old-fashioned cut-throat razor. This is likely a reference to his role in the Alfred Hitchcock movie Spellbound, in which such a razor features prominently.
Penelope
Name now given to the mostly black female cat who is usually unlucky enough (or, perhaps, lucky enough) to acquire a white stripe, thus making her the object of the affections of Pepe le Pew in a number of cartoons. I believe Cats Bah (Jones, 1954) is the only cartoon that actually identifies the cat as Penelope (she is addressed by her owner as she is being walked on a leash).
Penner, Joe (1904-1941)
Penner had a brief but meteoric career and radio in the 1930s, briefly achieving fame with a series of catch phrases such as Wanna buy a duck? and You nah-sty man! One of the earliest roles of Mel Blanc on national radio was as the voice of Goo-Goo, the duck that figured in the catch-phrase above.
. Egghead, the forerunner of Elmer Fudd, was based in part on Joe Penner, using some of his mannerisms (most notably in Daffy Duck and Egghead (Avery, 1938)). The little brother rabbit Elmer in My Green Fedora (Freleng, 1935) laughs like Penner. Vocal actor Dave Weber seems to have provided Penner-like voices for a number of WB cartoons in the 1930s.
Pepe le Pew
One of the signature characters of Chuck Jones, this skunk with an overactive libido and fetid Franglais (mostly courtesy of Mike Maltese) did not start out in that form. in Odor-able Kitty (Jones, 1945), the character is revealed to be a fraud, with a midwestern accent and a wife and two kids. Jones wisely decided to bring back the character, without these handicaps, and the fetid Frenchman won Jones his only Oscar for a WB theatrical cartoon, For Scent-imental Reasons (1949), in spite of the fact that Eddie Selzer, the producer, hated the character.
While most of the Pepe cartoons are alike, and have similar plots, there is still enough fun in the fractured French to liven up the shorts, and prevent them from becoming mere Speedy Gonzales cartoons in a different Romance (so to speak) language. A funny twist on the usual cat-gets-painted routine comes in Dog Pounded (Freleng, 1954), in which Sylvester makes a bid for Tweety disguised with white paint as a skunk, which scares away the dogs, but attracts Pepe!
The character is usually a spoof, in name and manner, of the Charles Boyer character of Pepe le Moko (e.g., Algiers ), though Pepe did spoof Maurice Chevalier in at least one cartoon ( Scent-imental Romeo , 1951).
There is one somewhat unusual Pepe cartoon, Odor of the Day (Davis, 1948), that has a practically silent Pepe, and makes no use of the Franglais dialogue that marks the Jones efforts (though this does not, by any means, make it an inferior cartoon).
Most Pepe cartoons, where a locale is cited, take place either in France, or in a French-speaking area, such as New Orleans ( Really Scent ) or Algeria/Sahara (Little Beau Pepe ). One cartoon, Scent-imental Over You , however, takes place in New York City, on the Upper East Side.
Filmography (all Jones, except where noted):
Petrillo
At the end of Hurdy Gurdy Hare (McKimson, 1950), as Bugs and Gruesome Gorilla are raking in a fortune from a hurdy-gurdy, Bugs says I hope Petrillo doesnt hear about this!
Bugs is referring to James C. Petrillo, the imperious head of the American Federation of Musicians, the musicians union. Petrillo lead numerous strikes, one of which prohibited the members of the AFM from performing live music on television between 1944 and 1948. From 1942 to 1944, Petrillo banned all AFM members from making records, the record companies eventually capitulating and giving musicians royalties on every record sold or broadcast in radio. Petrillo did not hesitate to take on the movie studios as well; the studios, in the switch to sound, threw a lot of former movie theater orchestra members out of work, and Petrillo fought the studios for years over the use of recorded music in theaters. Hence the concern expressed by Bugs over using hurdy-gurdy music.
Petunia Pig
The girlfriend of Porky Pig in a handful of thirties cartoons. Bob Clampett, in his interview in Funnyworld #12 (1970), credits Frank Tashlin with the creation of Petunia, at the instigation of Leon Schlesinger. The character has generally been much more prominent in the comic books that in cartoons.
Filmography:
Picker, Sylvia
Radio actress of the 1930s. Believed by researcher Hames Ware to have provided the voice for Sniffles at one time or another.
Pierce III, Edward Stacey (Ted or Tedd)
Along with Warren Foster and Michael Maltese, one of the writers with the longest tenure at WB. Pierce is listed in the first cartoon to give story credit, The Lyin Mouse (Freleng, 1937). Pierce was teamed for a time in the mid-1940s with Maltese for such cartoons as:
Pierce teamed up with Warren Foster for Room and Bird (Freleng, 1951). Solo writing credits for Chuck Jones include:
Pierce also received solo story credit for such Friz Freleng cartoons as:
Starting c. 1951, Pierce began to write virtually exclusively for Robert McKimson; credits for McKimson cartoons include:
His last credited film is Hawaiian Aye Aye (with Bill Daunch for Gerry Chiniquy, 1964). A gap in credited work during 1954 and 1955 can probably be explained by work at UPA during that period (see below).
It is alleged that Pierce added the second d to his nickname after puppeteer Bil Baird dropped the (next-to-last, Pierce always insisted) l from his nickname. Screen credits until c. 1943, however, list his name as Ted.
Pierce is caricatured as the tall, thin castaway in Wackiki Wabbit (Jones, 1943), and provided the voice as well. Pierce is also alleged to have provided the shadow of the theater patron shot by Egghead in Daffy Duck and Egghead (Avery,1938), and the stool-pigeon theater goer who tips off the police in Thugs With Dirty Mugs (Avery, 1939).
References to Pierce may be seen in Bugs Bunny Rides Again (as one of the names carved in the pillar Bugs is leaning on), and in Rocket Squad (as one of the known criminals listed on the crime computer) and Dr. Pierces Mild Pills in Stupor Duck (McKimson, 1956).
Pierce did a fair amount of voice work as well; he was probably responsible for the Babbit voice in cartoons like A Tale of Two Kitties (Clampett, 1942), the father quail in Quentin Quail (Jones, 1946), and possibly as the Gildersleeve character in Hare Conditioned (Jones, 1945). Some of these characterizations, which are credited to Pierce in Funnyworld #17, may be open to question, especially the Gildersleeve character.
Pierce also worked for other cartoon studios, on either a full- or part-time basis. Pierce worked for the Fleischer studio in the late 1930s and early 1940s on both shorts and the feature film Gullivers Travels (1939). Pierce is credited with at least one Superman short, The Arctic Giant (1942); qualification, perhaps, for Super-Rabbit! Pierce also did voice work there, in such cartoons as Stealin Aint Honest (1940), in which he played Bluto, as well as others. I have also seen him credited as the voice of C. Bagley Beetle from the ill-fated feature Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941) Pierce worked on a part-time basis at Screen Gems (Columbia) c. 1946-7, Walter Lantz c. 1960, UPA c. 1954-1955 (including one Academy Award winner, When Magoo Flew, 1954), and MGM (in the Gene Deitch era, for Tall in the Trap, 1962).
Pirate Subs
The plot of Porky the Gob (Hardaway/Dalton, 1938) involves a hunt for a pirate sub, staffed by some outlandish characters, one of which has an outlandish uniform and an even more outlandish mustachio. Porky, left alone to guard his ship, manages to fend off an attack by the sub, capture it, and claim the reward.
It is interesting to note that so-called pirate subs were very much an issue at the time of the making of the cartoon. The Spanish Civil War was still ongoing at this point, with the forces under General Francisco Franco being supported by fascist Italy and Germany fighting against the Loyalists, who were in part supported by the Soviet Union. Italian subs, operating as (in the words of one historian) pirates (that is, without identification) sank several Soviet and other merchant ships attempting to bring weapons to the Loyalist side.
Pistol P. Momma
The author of the book on child psychology offered by the mother Blockheed welder to Porky in Brother Brat (Tashlin, 1944). Probably a reference to a popular song of the era, Pistol Packin Momma.
Pitts, ZaSu (1898-1963)
Scatterbrained character comedienne whose zany presence and oh me, oh my characterizations livened many 30s comedies and, not incidentally, was the model for Mae Questels characterization of Olive Oyl in the Popeye cartoons. (Her name by the way, was derived from combing the names of two of her fathers sisters, Eliza and Susan, according to Katz.)
The mama pig at the end of Farm Frolics (Clampett, 1941) wearily observes in a ZaSu voice: Ohhhh, dearrr...every day its the saaaamme thing.
Plane Daffy
1944 cartoon directed by Frank Tashlin, featuring Daffy as a military courier facing a Nazi seductress/spy, Hata Mari. The cartoon opens with rhyming narration. It would be interesting to know if this narration was written by Dr. Seuss (Ted Geisel), who is known to have worked on some of the Private Snafu cartoons being worked on at the same time.
Note the list of pigeons on the blackboard, many of whom refer to studio personnel: #17 Cal [Dalton?], #16 Ace [Gamer], #15 Ray [Katz], #14 Leon [Schlesinger], #13 Homer, #12 Walter [a reference to actor Walter Pidgeon?], #11 Curt, #10 Dick, #9 Tubby [Millar], #8 Warren [Foster], #7 Fred.
Caricatures of Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering, and Joseph Goebbles appear at the end of the cartoon, when Hata Mari makes her report.
Playboy Penguin
Sad-eyed, silent little penguin who appears in two Jones cartoons, Frigid Hare and 8 Ball Bunny (1949 and 1950). I have taken the name from the copyright registration for the character, GU 15567, February 27, 1950.
Poddany, Eugene
At one point in the early 1950s, when Carl Stalling suffered a head injury, he was temporarily replaced by Eugene Poddany, one of his assistants. Poddany, in the 1960s, would work on many scores for the Chuck Jones MGM cartoons.
Filmography: (All 1951)
Pons, Lily (1898-1976)
The entry in Katz for Pons: Celebrated coloratura soprano of the Metropolitan Opera who starred in several Hollywood films [...] RKOs answer to Columbias Grace Moore. There is a town in Maryland named Lilypons in her honor.
A caricature of Pons as Lily Swans appears opposite Grace Moose in The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos (Tashlin, 1937), each trying to outdo the other in hitting high notes.
Popeye
Remarkably, there are four direct references in WB cartoons to the rival Popeye series, which was made by the Fleischer studio. In Porky's Garden (Avery, 1937), a little chick who loses out to a big bully chicken in a scramble for veggies eats some spinach and turns into a mini-Popeye, complete with bulging forearms and gravelly voice, and thrashes the bully. In The Major Lied Till Dawn (Tashlin, 1938), the Major, after getting bounced from a boxing ring where he was sparring with numerous animals, notes as he takes out a can of spinach: By Jove, if its good enough for that sailor man, its good enough for me! He eats the spinach, gets bulging muscles, and thrashes the animals. In Porkys Hero Agency , (Clampett, 1937) Porky adds a pair of Popeye arms to the Venus de Milo, and in Scrap Happy Daffy (Tashlin, 1943), Daffy moans for a can of spinach after getting thrashed by the Nazi goat.
Porkyakarkus
Character played by Porky in Porky's Hero Agency (Clampett, 1937) who is based on a character named Parkyakarkus played by Harry Einstein on the Eddie Cantor radio show. Another bow to Einsteins character can be seen in the character of the turtle who referees the duel in Daffy Duck and Egghead (Avery, 1938).
Porkys Double Trouble
1937 Tashlin cartoon involving a switch between Porky and a nogoodnik lookalike who is, naturally, quite different from Porky in attitude (especially in kissing Petunia). To a certain extent, the cartoon borrows from the plot of The Whole Towns Talking, a 1935 film directed by John Ford, where bank clerk Edward G. Robinson was a dead ringer for a notorious crook.
Porkys Hero Agency
1937 Clampett cartoon featuring Porky who, in a dream sequence, imagines himself in Ancient Greece, attempting to defeat the Gorgon, who uses a magic needle to petrify her enemies. She has evidently been at work at the WB studio. A still reproduced in Schneiders book shows a picket fence comprised of people in the Clampett unit at that time. Left to right, they are Lu Guarnier, Robert Cannon (in glasses), John Carey, Ernest Gee, Clampett, and Chuck Jones (who was not yet a director at the time).
Note also the references to Shirley Temple, and the Three Stooges (who get turned into the Three Wise Monkeys).
Porky Pig
A landmark character in the WB pantheon, primarily because he was the first character developed that had staying power. His origins came about in the years after Harman and Ising left WB, taking Bosko and Honey, the only real cartoons stars WB then had, with them to MGM. After the obviously failure of Buddy to develop of following, Bob Clampett suggested a kiddie gang, modeled after the Hal Roach Our Gang comedies. Porky made his appearance in I Havent Got a Hat (Freleng, 1935) as the requisite fat boy character, stuttering through a rendition of the Longfellow Poem The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere .
While the other characters in the gang (Beans, Ham and Ex, Tommy Turtle, etc.) faded out, Porky was carried forward. Between 1935 and 1937-8, there was a wide degree of experimentation with the character, casting him sometimes as a child (such as in The Blow-Out (Avery, 1936)) or as a wooding adult ( Porkys Romance (Tashlin, 1937)). It took two events to cause the character to jell: one was Mel Blanc taking over for Joe Dougherty as the voice of Porky, and giving the stutter a cute, subtle spin. The other was the virtual taking over of the character by Bob Clampett. While Clampett did not have a monopoly on the character, it was his tenure as a Looney Tunes director in 1937-1941 that played a fundamental role in shaping the character, and making the character a foil for wacky doings, usually opposite Daffy Duck, who made his debut in a Porky Pig cartoon (and who had succeeded characters like Gabby Goat, who did not take as a sidekick).
Ironically, it was the era of fast-paced cartoons that eventually did Porky in. His sweet, gentle, low-key persona did not quite fit in the 1940s style of WB animation, and he gradually faded into the background, in spite of a number of fine efforts by Frank Tashlin, Friz Freleng and, particularly in the late 1940s, Chuck Jones. It was Jones who eventually found an ideal role for Porky as a wry Greek Chorus to the nonsense of Daffy Duck in cartoons like Rocket Squad , Deduce, You Say and Robin Hood Daffy (1956, 1956 and 1958, respectively).
One self-described (and appointed) advocate for stutterers has attempted to launch a campaign to have Porky dropped, alleging various harmful effects of the trademark stutter on children who really stutter. Aside from the fact that I doubt there is any proof of this, I think it is insulting to the character. Stutter or no, Porky has nearly always been presented as a decent, nice, and, in later years, very observant character. In spite of his speech impediment (not unlike the one Elmer Fudd has), he usually manages to triumph over or otherwise evade whatever is threatening him.
Powder Gag
Gag used twice by Freleng in the shipboard confrontations between Yosemite Sam and Bugs Bunny. The gag involves Bugs tossing matches into the powder hold, having Yosemite Sam fetch them initially, and then causing an explosion when Sam refuses to get the match one last time (though Sam usually relents at the last minute and attempts to get it). Seen in Buccaneer Bunny and Captain Hareblower (1948 and 1954, respectively)
Powell, Dick (1904-1963)
Crooner who starred opposite Ruby Keeler in a number of WB musicals in the 1930s, including Flirtation Walk , Footlight Parade , 42nd Street, and others. Powell made an interesting career shift in the 1940s, becoming a tough guy (e.g. Murder My Sweet, 1945) However, it was still in his singing phase that he was caricatured by WB cartoonists. The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos (Tashlin, 1937) features a crooning Dick Fowl, and A Star Is Hatched (Freleng, 1938) features a very good caricature of Powell singing a medley of military tunes in a Busby Berkley-type routine.
Powell, William (1892-1984)
Longtime actor best remembered for playing the Dashiell Hammetts character of The Thin Man (Nick Charles) in a series of movies in the 30s and 40s. Powell also played Philo Vance in a series of films, and a number of other memorable roles, including 1932s Lawyer Man and Flo Ziegfeld in 1936s The Great Ziegfeld.
Powell, in his Thin Man character, can be seen in Tashlin things-come-to-life cartoons "Have You Got Any Castles?" and "Speaking of the Weather" (1938, and 1937).
Pratt, Hawley
Outstanding figure in the Freleng unit, whose layout work was essential in making the cartoons produced by that unit some of the slickest and best-made cartoons at WB. Like many of the top people at WB, he was given a chance to direct late in his career at WB.
A Hawley & Pratt baking soda box can be seen in I Taw a Putty Tat , in another one of the many little jokes Paul Julian slipped into his backgrounds.
Filmography as director:
Private Snafu
Character created by the WB studio for "The Army-Navy Screen Magazine", which was produced by Frank Capra during World War II. Snafu (which was a play on the soldiers acronym for Situation Normal All Fouled/F***ed Up) was a soldier who rarely, if ever, did anything right, and his mistakes were used to get across serious points in a humorous way. Some of the Snafu shorts had scripts written by Ted Geisel (a/k/a Dr. Seuss), and W. Munro Leaf, who was in the Army at that time, is known to have collaborated on at least one Snafu short with Geisel. Standards were a little looser for the Snafu shorts; given their target audience, more cheesecake shots (the pinup used to hatch pigeon eggs in Three Brothers or the sexy Nazi spy in Spies) and more risque humor and dialogue, including a few four letter words like damn and hell were used. Other than that, the cartoons had some similarities with WB shorts, to the extent of using the same artists, Carl Stalling's scores, and Mel Blanc (with Robert Bruce, as usual, doing the narration and a few of the voices, especially for Outpost and The Chow Hound ).
Not all of the Snafu shorts were made at WB, though most of them were. The forerunner of UPA produced a few shorts utilizing Snafu, and toward the end of the war, the Tex Avery unit at MGM was working on one short, ÒMop UpÓ (a/k/a ÒHow to Get a Fat Jap out of a CaveÓ), which was terminated by the end of hostilities.
Animation from one Snafu short, Target: Snafu was reused in a later Freleng short, Of Thee I Sting (1946). The gag using the misplaying of Those Endearing Young Charms, followed by the correct playing with disastrous consequences, was first used in Booby Traps (Clampett, 1944), years before Freleng would use it to great effect in Ballot Box Bunny and Show Biz Bugs (1951 and 1957, respectively).
Snafu had a naval counterpart, Hook, a few of whose films have recently been discovered. He made one appearance in a theatrical WB cartoon, as the soldier giving the horse a rubdown in The Draft Horse (Jones, 1942).
Filmography:
A survey written by the author of the Snafu and Hook cartoons, providing more detail as to their production and the individual cartoons, can be seen in Issue 37 of Animato! magazine.
Pussyfoot
Wide-eyed, innocent kitty who wins the heart of bulldog character Marc Antony in a series of Chuck Jones cartoons, which usually involve Marc Antony protecting Pussyfoot from a variety of threats.
Filmography (all Jones):
Put out that light!
During the Second World War, blackout conditions were imposed in a number of areas, particularly on the East and West coasts, for fear of submarine or air raids. Air raid wardens (in distinctive white helmets and arm bands, of the type worn by the Mount Rushmore figures and the Statue of Liberty in The Weakly Reporter (Jones, 1944)) would patrol an area, telling people if they had lights showing to put out that light!
This phrase was used as a gag in a number of cartoons. One very clever use was in Hiss and Make Up (Freleng, 1943), in which Roscoe the Dog, in order to prevent Granny from seeing the muddy pawprints Wellington the Cat has put all over the living room to frame Roscoe, shouts the phrase as soon as Granny turns on the light, causing her to turn off the light and hurry back to bed. Other uses can be seen in Meatless Flyday (Freleng, 1944), in which a warden, observing the neon sign being lit up by the chasing Spider and Fly, yells the phrase. An offscreen warden shouts the phrase in Jack-wabbit and the Beanstalk (Freleng, 1943) when Bugs lights a match to see inside the hat belonging to the Giant. It is also the closing gag in A Tale of Two Kitties (Clampett, 1942), as shouted by Tweety.