Highly Overrated But Still Good

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

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Bob Clampett's cartoons often were high in energy and fun and displayed a uniquely wacky visual style that one can recognise immediately. Porky Pig is often likable and amusing, if at times overshadowed by characters with stronger personalities.'Wagon Heels' is not Clampett or Porky at their finest, but it is very good stuff all the same. Its only real debit is the character of Sloppy Moe, whose inept stupidity is so overdone that the character is never funny, in fact calling him dumb isn't enough to describe how insufferably annoying he is.The animation is excellent. The colours are gorgeously vibrant, even nearly 80 years on, while also rich in detail and high in imagination. Carl Stalling's energetically high-voltage, luscious, rousing, dynamic and action-enhancing music score and inspired arrangements of pre-existing music shows off his compositional genius.As often with Clampett, 'Wagon Heels' often veers between very funny to hilarious, only really mis-stepping with Sloppy Moe. The closing gag and anything with Injun Joe are particularly good. Porky is very likable and hardly bland while Injun Joe is funnier and more interesting, he is a stereotype sure but he is an entertaining one.Mel Blanc does a superb job with the voices as always.On the whole, very good cartoon apart from Sloppy Moe. 8/10 Bethany Cox

. . . a billboard in the American Wastelands near the beginning of WAGON HEELS. When you stop and think about it, maybe it wasn't. A map shown just before the billboard pops up suggests that the United States consisted of the 13 Original Colonies in 1849, plus newcomers Florida and Maine. Hostile Native Americans controlled the remainder of the land, stretching from the Appalachian Range to the Pacific Ocean, WAGON WHEELS teaches us. Talk about a sweet set-up! Just think, the entire country was on EASTERN Standard Time. Sports results ALWAYS made the morning editions (since Thomas Edison had yet to install lights at Yankee Stadium, and football, basketball, and ice hockey had yet to be invented). Eastern ball clubs had no grueling West Coast trips to dread; even Chicago was in the Forbidden Zone, and the only Cubs there nursed on mama bear. If WAGON HEELS has it right, Tinsel Town could have been a Miami suburb, rather that a foothills slum. This is the sort of picture that could entice even Porky's friends into ordering BLT's!

"Wagon Heels" is a jolly Warner Bros. Western cartoon starring Porky Pig and directed by the wacky Bob Clampett. Plenty of great gags abound in this midforites caper, in which Porky, always the reliable hero, protects a wagon "train" (whose "engineer" has a voice similar to that of Sylvester the cat) from the clutches of the highly-stereotyped Injun Joe, the Superchief.My favorite scenes from "Wagon Heels" are: the closing ticklish gag, made even funnier by Carl Stalling's music score; the presence of Injun Joe splitting apart a mountain, putting a growling bear in its place, and taking care of a snare trap; and Injun Joe saying "Him screwball" in regards to the daffy Sloppy Moe, who is enthusiastic about a secret he won't tell.Don't forget to enjoy Carl Stalling's musical accompaniment for "Wagon Heels", particularly his version of the Stephen Foster classic "Oh, Susannah".

One of the many simultaneously racist and clever Warner Bros. cartoons, Bob Clampett's "Wagon Heels" lets everything all out. I seem to recall that there was an earlier cartoon with almost the exact same plot (it may have been "Injun Trouble"). Anyway, the plot has Porky Pig leading a wagon train through the Old West, called Injun Joe Territory. Injun Joe is probably the nastiest dude out there, but a silly pioneer knows a secret about Joe. Yep, it's all part of our cultural myth of manifest destiny...as an excuse for some crazy gags! So, more than anything, these cartoons serve to represent stereotypes about different people. On the Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVDs (this one appears on Volume 5), there's a disclaimer explaining that some of the cartoons contain racist images. And the depictions of American Indians were very likely the most negative. But even so, you can't deny that Bob Clampett had some truly ideas when it came to cartoons. I recommend it as a look at previously acceptable stereotypes. And of course for the clever tricks.