Porky's Railroad (1937)

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Expected more

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Porky's Railroad (1937) ** 1/2 (out of 4)Decent, if nothing overly special, short has Porky Pig traveling around in his 15th Century train when a newer, faster 30th Century challenges him to a race.PORKY'S RAILROAD is pretty slim on story and I'd also argue that there really aren't too many laughs either. The short manages to be slightly entertaining thanks to the very good animation, which is certainly the highlight. I'd say that Porky is in fine shape and manages to hold your attention as he talks to his train and keeps trying to make it do better than it actually should.

The work of Frank Tashlin is always worth a look. Porky's Railroad is one of his weaker Porky cartoons, and a disappointment after the brilliant Porky the Fireman. The weakest asset with Porky's Railroad was the story, which is agreed rather feeble, structurally it's thin and the pace is lacking in crispness. Porky's Railroad does have a few inspired moments, but the gags mostly are forgettable and not all that funny marred by their predictability and dull timing. Tashlin was an underrated animation director who a vast majority of the time showed signs of masterful technical and directorial brilliance, you can see this in cartoons like Plane Daffy, there is evidence of this brilliance but the pace and gags don't really serve him all that well. The slow motion shot at the start is an oddity, unusual for Tashlin. However, the animation is very good on the most part, the camera angles generally do impress and there's little wrong with how everything's drawn and shaded. The music sounds beautiful and is very characterful, as to expect the synchronisation from sound to visual works very well, in Porky's Railroad the best example is to the train starting up and accelerating very quickly. As well as the shocking and poignant ending, that is also the best gag/highlight of the cartoon, though the jumping off the drawbridge was also quite nice. Porky is a good lead character, not the strongest one but a credible one, while Mel Blanc's characterisations are without fault. Billy Bletcher gives nice support too. All in all, decent but could have been better. 6/10 Bethany Cox

Directed by Frank Tashlin, "Porky's Railroad" is a delightful Porky Pig cartoon in which Porky is the engineer of his own locomotive, the 15th Century Unlimited, which he nicknames "Toots".Here are my favorite sequences from this cartoon. Wonderfully voiced by Mel Blanc, Porky struggles in coaxing a cow to not sit on the railroad tracks. At the opening of this film, Porky operates his slow, broken-down train to an equally slow accompaniment of "California, Here I Come"; he adds a pepper shaker to the engine, and the train suddenly SPEEDS, and so does the music. And when Porky's train jumps the opened drawbridge, I am reminded of the live-action comedy "The Blues Brothers" (1980), in which a humble automobile does the same thing!Catch "Porky's Railroad" on the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 4 Disc 2, a disc that specializes in the directing style of Frank Tashlin.

One of the many cartoons from the days when Porky Pig was the top Warner Bros. cartoon star - though Daffy Duck would soon overtake him - "Porky's Railroad" looks to me like a parable of many American's hopes during the Depression. We see how Porky is the simple little guy with his ordinary train going about things as he's always done, but he gets replaced by a big guy, much like how the banks foreclosed on many people's homes during those years. So, Porky's only hope is to race the big galoot: he's the underdog against seemingly improbable odds.Of course, I just might be reading too far into this cartoon. I don't know what specifically director Frank Tashlin wanted to say here; he may have just intended it as a way to pass time. Whatever the gist is, it's still a pretty enjoyable cartoon. Not their best by any stretch, but worth seeing.