Shrunken Cinema/Termite Terrace/The Ducksters
From Eccentric Flower
The Ducksters
1949
Summary: Porky is a hapless contestant on Daffy's quiz show.
Director: Chuck Jones
Writer: Michael Maltese
Featuring: Daffy Duck; Porky Pig.
Onreel
0:19 Sound cue for titles: "I'm In Love."
0:41 The cotton gin was indeed invented by Eli Whitney.
0:45 The guillotine is labelled "Little Gem Guillotine Service."
0:50 Re "Truth or AAAAHHH!" see Offreel. "Hand laundry" would normally imply the laundry was done by hand instead of machine, but here it's a little different.
1:02 "Who was the father of our country?" Sound cue: "My Country 'Tis of Thee."
1:12 "You don't get the Super Chief, but you're still the winner of the Rocky Mountains, a seventeen-jewel half-nelson, and the La Brea Tar Pits." A half-nelson is a wrestling hold; "seventeen jewels" describes a watch movement. The La Brea Tar Pits are not in Scotland.
1:40 Sound cue: A source tells me this is another one of those weird Harry Warren compositions, "The Girlfriend of the Whirling Dervish."
2:03 It's always fun to be reminded that there were only 48 states until relatively late in the timeline of these cartoons. (Alaska statehood: 1959)
2:17 Sound cue: "We're In the Money." Played again when Porky actually gets the $26,000,000.03 later.
3:38 Sound cue: "Freddy the Freshman" (as Porky staggers about).
4:00 "And the gentleman wins the Rock of Gibraltar!" Not quite. 600 gallons of genuine Niagara Falls (water), now, that's another matter entirely.
5:10 Sound cue under the Miss Shush sequence is a somewhat unusual version of "Love Somebody, Yes I Do."
5:31 Miss Shush is not Lauren Bacall. (There were both Warner and MGM cartoons called "Jungle Jitters" - the former is in the Censored Eleven - but this appears to be coincidence.)
6:51 "The Wreck of the Hesperus" is a poem by Longfellow.
7:12 "Have you got a doctor in the balcony, lady?" Wikipedia: "This line was a takeoff of another radio quiz show, 'Doctor IQ,' where the announcer would note 'I have a lady in the balcony, doctor' to introduce a new contestant."
Offreel
The game show was beginning to come into its own by 1950. "Truth or AAAAHHH!" - and its format - is a joke on "Truth or Consequences," one of the first of the form. Quiz shows had existed well before then, but the key bit of evolution provided by "Truth or Consequences" was to mix the quiz portion with penalties that involved some sort of stunt or action. Among other things this made it the first game show that really demanded the television format (so you could see contestants performing the forfeit stunts). However, the television version of the show didn't begin until 1950 and this cartoon was actually made in 1949 (though released in 1950), so in this case it is a reference to the show's radio version, which began in 1940.
The title of this cartoon is a reference to The Hucksters, a 1947 film satirizing the advertising business.
