A Clip Of Porky Pig Swearing Was Kept Hidden For 60 Years
Behold, a video of Porky Pig swearing:
Porky, hammering a nail, misses and hits his thumb. “Oh, son-of-a-b-b-b,” he says, stammering. “Son-of-a-b-b-b, son-of-a-b-b-b ... gun.” He laughs. It’s an old joke: You think the character is going to swear, but then they don’t because you’re not allowed to swear in a cartoon/in a song/in a kid’s movie. And Porky of course is forever stumbling on some stutter-prone word then substituting a different word in at the last moment.
Then, Porky turns to the camera. “Heh heh,” he says. “You thought I was going to say ‘son-of-a-bitch,’ didn’t you?”
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This clip goes back to 1940. Every year, Warner Bros. put together a compilation of “breakdowns,” a blooper reel of all their productions. Most of these were genuine outtakes (a whole lot of actors flubbing their lines and then saying, “Aw nuts”). With cartoons, of course, you can’t have actual fully animated outtakes, but they made this one of Porky as a joke, much like how Pixar used to attach fake bloopers to the end of its movies.
You can watch the longer reel of these breakdowns (featuring a lot of 1939 movies that you may not have ever heard of), or here’s just a longer bit of Porky, now showing him messing his hammer scenes multiple times, just like it’s a real series of outtakes.
Warner Bros. made this reel to show at a private dinner. Naturally they never actually stuck the Porky clip in theaters, but they did air it on TV in 1986 as part of a 50th anniversary special. Unless you had a camera pointed at your TV screen that day, your next chance at seeing it came 20 years later, when they finally stuck it on a couple different DVD collections at let it loose into the wild.
By this point, “son of a bitch” wasn't quite as profane as it once was. So we have to assume Warner Bros. secretly also created an updated clip, where Porky subs in some choice four-letter words, and maybe one 12-letter one.
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