Dick Rickard | The Practical Pig / 1939 [animated film]

everybody lies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Larry Clemmons and Dick Rickard (screenplay), Preston Blair, Ollie Johnston, John Lounsbery, and Frank Thomas (animators), Dick Rickard (director) The Practical Pig / 1939 [animated film]

 

As the years passed after the original “Three Little Pigs” cartoon in 1934, The Big Bad Wolf, it’s clear that the Hays censorship committee was beginning to affect the animated world as well as that of feature movies. Between 1934 and the end of the decade, not only did the animators cease the Wolf’s drag appearances, but dropped the pansy affections of the first work, choosing safer costume choices for the last in the series, this 1939 film, The Practical Pig.  It is as if the dangerous drag queen of a “fairy Goldilocks” had reverted to a populist favorite like Bette Midler’s Dolores DeLago in a cheap hotel lounge act, portrayed in their human representation of the mythological Mermaid.

     Yet in 1939 once more Fifer and Fiddler Pig make fun of their brother’s busy obsession with the Wolf. As he hammers together a new lie detector to trap the Wolf, the lazy duo decide to go swimming. Practical Pig warns them, just has he has in the past, “Don’t go swimming, do you hear? The pond ain’t safe, the Wolf is near.”

     They giggle and rush off to the nearest swimming hole, donning their swimming trunks. And there, of course, is the Wolf in wait. He quickly dons his mermaid outfit, pulls out his harp, and sings, through Billy Bletcher’s fairly convincing rendition of Mae West’s “Frankie and Johnny,” as they swim up to the calypso with sexual anticipation.

      In seconds, he’s trapped them in a net, put them in bag, and brought the porkers home for his mean and hungry Three Little Wolves. The kids, grabbing up cleavers move into carve up their dinners, but their father insists that first he must get the cause of his previous failures, The Practical Pig. Writing up a letter supposedly by Practical’s brothers, he goes off to deliver it, demanding in the meantime that the boys leave the other two pigs alone.

      As disobedient of the Wolf dad as are Fifer and Fiddler of their brother, the Three Little Wolves have the pigs in a platter to which they’ve added potatoes and other vegetables ready to toss into the oven.

       The Wolf appears as a messenger boy at Practical’s door, leaving a message under it upon which he blows so hard to carry into the house that Practical is not fooled for a moment. Pulling a lever, The Wolf is dropped into a chair and pulled into the house where he, now hooked up to the grand Lie Detector is asked questions, each time the lie resulting in increasingly painful punishments, from soap in the mouth to a serious mechanical spanking.

       The Two Little Pigs, meanwhile, have been put into a pork pie and are almost about to be shoved into the oven, when The Three Little Wolves realize they’ve forgotten the pepper. The pepper producing, as one might suspect, a gigantic double sneeze which splatter the contents of the pie upon the Wolves and frees the Pigs who run off home.

       The torture of lying continues for their father, who finally breaks down and admits where they’re holding Practical’s brothers. Practical prepares to run off to save them, but they come rushing in at that very moment. Miffed by their disobedience he backs them into the Lie Detector seats, reminding them he had told them not to go swimming.

       Fifer and Fiddler fib, declaring they never went swimming, as the machine turns them over and spanks their pork butts red. Practical, speaking like thousands of parents before him, insists, “Remember, this hurts me more than it hurts you,” another part of the machine grabbing him up to provide a proper spanking for his false truism—suggesting, perhaps, that everyone lies. 

 

Los Angeles, June 23, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).