CrawlerChunky
In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.
Brennan Camacho
Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.
Kamila Bell
This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.
Vimacone
Frank Tashlin had returned to the Schlesinger studio in 1942 after a four year absence. He returned in stronger form, directing several cinematic masterpieces.This Oscar nominated short is one of most popular and celebrated short he directed. The WB cartoons are known for caricaturing famous celebrities of the day. There were a few cartoons in the late 30's that lampooned popular crooners, but this was the ultimate tribute to the crooners and the songs they popularized. Frank Sinatra was an up and coming singer around this time and his intense popularity with teenage girls is referenced. Bing Crosby is featured as his rival to the ladies. I wonder if either of them ever commented on their depiction in this short, given how popular it was.This short was very popular among release and would be referenced in and influence future cartoons of this type. Chief among them Tex Avery's LITTLE TINKER (1948) and an uninspired CATCH AS CATS CAN (1947).One of my favorite shorts from the wartime period.
Edgar Allan Pooh
. . . is about more than propagating enormous piles of chicken eggs, Warner Bros. makes clear. The sign at the beginning of SWOONER CROONER indicates that Porky Pig is managing the "Flockheed Eggcraft Factory--100% War Work." But is this facility REALLY populated by farmyard fowl? Heck no! When one hen is temporarily Defeathered about four minutes into this animated short, it's revealed that underneath her fluffy white quills she's sporting a matching lingerie set comprised of a lacy pink brassiere and panties! Furthermore, whenever the Frank Sinatra or Bing Crosby roosters croon love songs, they send this female flock's egg ducts into overdrive, upping their output from a single white orb to dozens of eggs popped out per hen at a single sitting. Clearly, SWOONER CROONER constitutes a U.S. War Department-sanctioned effort to get America's Rosies riveting overtime. Why all the love songs at a "100% War Work factory?" (After all, these are not the "Make love, not war" 1960s!) Mainly this bullets & bombers by candlelight campaign was implemented due to Hitler's threat to spearhead a "Thousand Year Reich" or Ten-Century Reign of Nazi Terror. This, of course, raised the specter of a multi-generational conflict. That made it the DUTY of every American woman to become pregnant at every opportunity, preferably with twins, at least, since the Babes of Today became Tomorrow's Grunts. (And if Rosie could not be with the one she loved--or to whom she was wed--her marching orders were to love the one she was with!) That way, Rosie could make tanks, and have her baby, too. In hindsight, this proved to be Overbirth, leading to the Baby Boom, but who wants to be a Monday morning quarterback?
phantom_tollbooth
Frank Tashlin's 'The Swooner Crooner' is a cartoon I never saw on TV as a child and seeing it on DVD now it's clear why it was kept off children's TV. The concept for the cartoon is one big dirty joke! Porky Pig is a farmer who wants to increase the amount of eggs that his hens lay. He realises that the sexual arousal they experience when watching a Frank Sinatra caricature rooster perform results in them laying eggs in enormous quantities. So Porky sets about auditioning singing roosters to keep the hens in a permanent state of arousal. 'The Swooner Crooner' is a bizarre and ever-so-slightly grotesque short which I've never warmed to in the least. Most of the gags consist of various images of swooning chickens or chickens laying piles of eggs in one go. It's scarcely the stuff of split sides. Nevertheless, the cartoon was nominated for an Academy Award. No doubt the Sinatra and Bing Crosby caricatures were funnier back in the heyday of both performers. Indeed, the funniest part of 'The Swooner Crooner' in the rooster auditions in which we see a variety of caricatures of such performers as Jimmy Durante and Cab Calloway. The plot on which these caricatures are hung, however, is paper thin and the final gag is particularly strange and grotesque.
ccthemovieman-1
This wartime cartoon features Porky Pig as manager of the "Flockheed Eggcraft Factory." Yes, nobody loves plays-on-words more than the writers of these cartoons.The hens clock in for their wartime assembly-line duties. The assembly is clever and funny, how they picture the eggs being dumped out of a bombardier, caught below with catcher's mitt, etc.The caricature of Frank Sinatra had me laughing out loud. If you've seen pictures of Frank when he was really young and the girls were screaming over him, you saw a real skinny guy with a bow-tie. The artists here had fun with that, and portraying the different ways in which all the hens "swoon."Later, we see other famous singers "audition" but no one makes the grade until "Bing" shows up....and the swooning starts all over again. The the two stars both sing and the egg production goes sky high!I grew up a decade later but I can still appreciate this fantastic cartoon, which was part of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume Three.
