posted 08-28-2003 06:42 AM                       

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I wonder if they are going to include the Porky Pig "outtake" where he smacks his finger with a hammer and then says "Son of a bi -son of a bi -- son of a GUN!" and then looks at the camera and says "I'll bet you thought I was gonna say son of a BITCH."

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posted 10-23-2003 07:47 AM                       

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There is a video store in the East Village that has the non-PC cartoons like "Tom & Jerry" and others of that era.

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posted 12-07-2003 12:17 PM                       

Actually, Porky doesn't make an appearance in Tokio Jokio though Admiral Yamamoto does. Obviously, due to PC sensitivities distribution of this title has been suppressed but you can see it here:

http://www.authentichistory.com/images/ww2/toons/Tokio_Jokio.html

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Here's the MSN Slate review for The Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD set, emphasizing Carl Stalling's musical contributions:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2092021/

The Mickey Mouse Genius
The brilliant composer behind Looney Tunes, now on DVD.
By August Kleinzahler
Posted Friday, Dec. 5, 2003, at 10:18 AM PT

The singular advantage of growing up in the 1950s was being able to watch Looney Toons on television. But the children of today need no longer feel culturally deprived. Now, with the release of The Looney Tunes Golden Collection, a selection of classic Looney Tunes, kiddies everywhere, by merely pressing a button, may gain entry into a veritable Age of Pericles—cartoonwise, that is.

But it's not just the animation of the cartoons that's so good. It's the man who composed their music. You probably have never heard of him, and if you go looking for his name in the compendia of music—whether jazz, classical, popular—you'll be unlikely to find him. He is, however, an authentic American genius, an original; if you were to hear even a few bars of any of his musical compositions you would recognize the source immediately.

His name is Carl Stalling. And from 1936, when he hooked up with Warner Bros., until his retirement in 1958, he wrote the musical scores for 600 cartoons. As the musicmaker of Merrie Melodies and Looney Toons, Stalling is as important, in his way, as Ives, Copland, Cage, Partch, and Ellington; his most notable compositions include "Putty Tat Trouble," "Porky's Poultry Plant," "Speedy Gonzales Meets Two Crows From Tacos," "To Itch His Own," and hundreds more.

Walt Disney discovered Stalling in the early '20s at Kansas City's Isis Theater, where Stalling was conducting his own orchestra and improvising on the organ to silent movies. Stalling would have been in his early 30s then. Born in Lexington, Mo., he saw The Great Train Robbery projected in a tent when he was 5. From that point on, he was hooked on motion pictures. By the time he was 13, he had become resident pianist at the primitive local movie house where he played during reel changes.

Disney had Stalling score two animated shorts for a new character named Mickey Mouse. When Disney set up his studio in Hollywood, he brought Stalling along with him. Stalling invented cartoon scoring, which included a "tick" system, whereby individual members of the orchestra were provided with earphones through which they heard a steady beat and, on one occasion, the voice of Mickey, and which allowed them to synchronize the music more precisely to the action.

Stalling's detractors sometimes call what he invented "musical mickey-mousing"—that is, merely a description of visual events. But he had many admirers, not least the formidable avant-gardist John Zorn:

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In following the visual logic of screen action rather than the traditional rules of musical form (development, theme, variation, etc.), Stalling created a radical compositional arc unprecedented in the history of music. … All the basic musical elements are there—but they are broken into shards, a constantly changing kaleidoscope of styles, forms, melodies, quotations. …

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