Porky in Wackyland is a 1938 Looney Tunes short film in which Porky Pig goes hunting through a surreal Salvador Dalí-esque landscape to find the Do-Do Bird.
In 2000, it was selected to enter the "National Film Registry" by Congress. A print will be buried in a time capsule, waiting for others to view it a few hundred or thousand years later.
The film is celebrated for its surreal humor, such as when Porky is chasing the bird, it disappears and suddenly the Warner Bros. shield emerges from the horizon's vanishing point, as it typically did at every cartoon's beginning, and complete with the standard stretched "boing" of the steel guitar. The Do-Do comes from behind the shield to bop Porky on the head and we see the shield immediately turn to return to the horizon with the bird riding it there (with, consequently, the boing sound played in reverse).
Among the crazy characters Porky encounters is a creature with three heads arguing amongst themselves. From the haircuts on the three heads, it is clear that this is a parody of The Three Stooges. The character then faces the camera and leans into it in such a way that their round heads form a triangle, and a small character explains to the audience that, "He says his mother was scared by a pawnbroker's sign!"
The long pan through Wackyland, as well as several other scenes, was remade in color by Clampett for inclusion in his 1943 short Tin Pan Alley Cats. A Cinecolor remake of Porky in Wackyland was supervised by Friz Freleng in 1949. This remake was called Dough for the Do-Do.
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When this cartoon aired on Nickelodeon, the brief scene of the big-lipped Al Jolson duck saying, "Mammy, mammy," as he passes by Porky was cut.
Versions distributed by Guild Films/Sunset Productions in the 1950s cut the part where the Do-Do pops into frame onto the Warner Brothers shield and hits Porky with a rock from a slingshot due to Warner Bros.' not wanting to be associated with television back in 1955, the time this cartoon was sold for television distribution.
Beck, Jerry and Friedwald, Will (1989): Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons. Henry Holt and Company.
