Powerful

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Ben Hardaway and Cal Dalton's 'Porky and Teabiscuit' is an utterly pedestrian cartoon which, after Bob Clampett's barrage of amazing Porky Pig cartoons the previous year, seems like a step backwards. Casting Porky in his original role as a child, the clichéd plot unfolds slowly and uninterestingly as we follow Porky on an errand for his father which results in him being conned out of eleven dollars in exchange for a dishevelled old nag of a racehorse. Porky must enter a steeple chase to win back the money. The cartoon only picks up pace when the race begins and by then the cartoon is nearly over. It's far too little, too late and 'Porky and Teabiscuit' emerges as a misfire that seems unsure whether to go for cuteness or gags and ends up skimping on both. Unlike the majority of the Warner Bros. catalogue which is noticeably adult orientated, 'Porky and Teabiscuit' feels like a short made specifically for children and easily entertained children at that!

Following his debut in the 1935 Merrie Melody "I Haven't Got a Hat", Porky Pig mostly starred in hokey Looney Tunes until the early 1940s (Chuck Jones's "Old Glory" may have been Porky's only cartoon during this period that constituted anything more than a series of childish gags; I think that it was also Porky's only appearance in Merrie Melody during this period)."Porky and Teabiscuit" was one of the hokey ones. While it did follow the theme of casting Porky as the underdog, it doesn't have much clever. Not that it isn't worth seeing (there are a few neat gags). But I suspect that most people will agree that if Leon Schlesinger Productions hadn't started giving Porky roles with greater complexity, then that would have quickly been all for him, folks. This one is OK, not great.PS: directors Cal Dalton and Ben Hardaway headed what had been Friz Freleng's unit. Freleng worked at MGM from 1937 to 1939, returning to Warner Bros. when MGM canceled the series that he had been directing. Ben Hardaway's nickname was Bugs, and he submitted a drawing of a rabbit titled "Bug's Bunny". You can probably guess what happened from there.

"Porky and Teabiscuit" is a very good black-and-white Warner Bros. cartoon starring our favorite sweet-natured pig Porky. Porky's father Phineas (who stutters just as profusely as Porky does) sends Porky to a racetrack to deliver some feed and collect eleven dollars, which he inadvertently blows on a broken-down, half-starved horse named Teabiscuit. But Porky is determined to recover his money by entering Teabiscuit in the steeplechase and being the jockey.Although nothing about this cartoon really makes it stand out, "Porky and Teabiscuit" is still an entertaining film with at least a couple of memorable moments. Teabiscuit becomes fed up with a competing horse's rear end blocking his path, so he bites the horse's tail! And Teabiscuit has a peculiar attraction to trombones as he observes & listens with a funny smile on his face; when last seen, Teabiscuit tries to play a trombone himself! In closing, Carl Stalling's excellent music score for "Porky and Teabiscuit" bears mentioning. The popular song "Jeepers Creepers" can be heard when Porky delivers the feed to the racetrack and collects his money. (This may have been a direct reference to the live-action feature film "Going Places" [1938], in which the great Louis Armstrong sings "Jeepers Creepers" to a racehorse.) In addition, "She Was an Acrobat's Daughter" can be heard during the auction scene.

This short is one of the earlier Porky Pig shorts and falls into the "Porky as a kid" category, which was a fairly frequent gimmick in the first few years. There may be spoilers in my remarks below: In a few Porky shorts featuring Porky as a child, the plot device of "Porky is given money by his dad, with strict orders to do something specific, but something goes haywire" was used. This was one of those shorts, which are fairly predictable. Our hero winds up buying (by Standard Accident # 43 in the Cartoonist's Handbook) a horse which would fail the physical at a glue factory. Given that our hero doesn't relish the idea of returning home for a trip to the woodshed, he decides to enter a race to win the prize money, so he can go home covered in glory rather than fertilizer.Our hero lucks out, in spite of troubles, travails and trombones, passes "Go", collects his $11 and his horse is happy in the end as well and on his way to audition for John Philip Sousa.This short is on Looney Toons Golden Collection, Vol 3. Though it's largely a routine and by-the-numbers cartoon, it is worth seeing and the Collection is excellent. Recommended.