The Bugs Bunny Show on DVD and Blu-ray

[Mark Y]

Has it been discussed why Porky Pig didn't seem to exist for this show? My theory is they might have been planning to give him his own show if this Bugs Bunny show had been more successful. There was a daytime Porky Pig Show later in the decade. I remember watching it before I went to school.

It's possible, but I never heard or read anything that said they were planning a Porky Pig show that early.

But what certainly did happen was that the Porky Pig cartoons which had been on the Bugs Bunny Show were pulled and moved to the Porky Pig Show in 1964. And interestingly, when the Porky Pig Show ended, the 78 cartoons which had been on that show (featuring Porky as well as other characters) were released into syndication (as opposed to something like the Sylvester & Tweety or Daffy Duck shows later, where those cartoons were folded into the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show).

As a result, Porky Pig was largely absent from the Saturday morning Warner Bros. cartoon shows after 1967.

In Chicago, we had the Bugs Bunny Saturday morning shows in various incarnations over the years, while other Warner Bros. cartoons were shown locally on WGN-Channel 9. It always annoyed me how in contrast to the variety of characters featured on the Saturday morning shows, when WGN ran them in a half-hour timeslot as "Bugs Bunny And Friends," they had three cartoons and 90% of the time, it was Bugs Bunny, then Porky Pig, then Daffy Duck (and the Daffy Duck cartoon often also featured Porky Pig). In fact, I even called the station once to ask what the deal was with that.

What I didn't know until many years later was, even though WGN had hundreds and hundreds of these cartoons in their library, when I finally reviewed lists of which ones were in these syndicated packages (the station had three different packages of cartoons, including the two Warner packages and the pre-1948s from United Artists), as far as starring characters were concerned, the overwhelming majority of the cartoons in their library featured Porky Pig. Other characters such as the Road Runner, Foghorn Leghorn, Speedy Gonzalez and Sylvester would pop up here and there, but there weren't that many in these TV packages which featured those characters.

There were a boatload of early 1930s musical Merrie Melodies, but eventually, those were relegated to an early Saturday morning timeslot along with Mel-O-Toons, old Hanna-Barbera cartoons and other castoffs and played essentially as a time filler.

Porky Pig was certainly much more of a "star" in syndication than on network TV.

 

[moviepas]

Disney Stories Matter Initiative Flags Classic Toons for Racist Imagery | Animation Magazine

Disney+ will be adding warnings to several classic films from the Walt Disney Animation and live-action catalog, shining a light on some of the problematic characters and racist depictions that have not aged well in the animation vault. The Aristocats, Dumbo, The Jungle Book, Lady and the Tramp...

www.animationmagazine.net

Dated Fri Oct 16 2020

Not knowing where to put the link from Animation Magazine, the article from Disney is a good case for them to consider now issuing Song of the South on disc?