Who's Who in the Zoo is a 1942

1942 in film

The year 1942 in film involved some significant events, in particular the release of a film consistently rated as one of the greatest of all time, Casablanca.-Events:...

 Warner Bros.

Warner Bros.

Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...

 cartoon in the Looney Tunes

Looney Tunes

Looney Tunes is a Warner Bros. animated cartoon series. It preceded the Merrie Melodies series and was Warner Bros.'s first animated theatrical series. Since its first official release, 1930's Sinkin' in the Bathtub, the series has become a worldwide media franchise, spawning several television...

series. It was directed by Norman McCabe

Norman McCabe

Norman McCabe was an American animator who enjoyed a long career which lasted into the 1990s.-Early career:...

, story by Melvin Millar, musical direction by Carl Stalling

Carl Stalling

Carl W. Stalling was an American composer and arranger for music in animated films. He is most closely associated with the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts produced by Warner Bros., where he averaged one complete score each week, for 22 years.-Biography:Stalling was born to Ernest and...

.

Synopsis

This is one of the cartoons that Warner would occasionally produce that featured few or none of its stable of characters, just a series of gags, usually based on outrageous stereotypes and plays on words, as a narrator (Robert C. Bruce

Robert C. Bruce

Robert C. Bruce, Jr. was a voice actor, and the son of Robert C. Bruce who was also an actor. He was the narrator for a number of Warner Bros. cartoons in the 1930s and 1940s...

) describes the action. This one is somewhat different in that Porky Pig

Porky Pig

Porky Pig is an animated cartoon character in the Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons. He was the first character created by the studio to draw audiences based on his star power, and the animators created many critically acclaimed shorts using the fat little pig...

 (Mel Blanc

Mel Blanc

Melvin Jerome "Mel" Blanc was an American voice actor and comedian. Although he began his nearly six-decade-long career performing in radio commercials, Blanc is best remembered for his work with Warner Bros...

) appears, as the zookeeper of the "Azusa

Azusa, California

Azusa is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. The population was 46,361 at the 2010 census, up from 44,712 at the 2000 census. Though sometimes assumed to be a compaction of the phrase "everything from A to Z in the USA" from an old Jack Benny joke, the place name "Azusa"...

 Zoo". Some excerpts:

• In a comic "triple
  Triple
  Triple, a doublet of "treble" or "threefold" , is used in several contexts:* Triple metre, a musical metre characterized by a primary division of three beats to the bar...
  
  ", a timber wolf is shown, then a gray wolf, then a "Hollywood wolf" (a frequent reference in the 1940s WB cartoons).
• Other creatures include a "missing lynx", a "tortoise and the hair", "March hares" who march to a drumbeat, a down-on-his-luck "bum steer", an Indian elephant playing an American Indian, and a bald eagle wearing a toupee.
• There is also a running joke about a lion who is awaiting the arrival of the ice cream truck.

See also

• Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies filmography (1940–1949)
• List of Porky Pig cartoons

Source

• Jerry Beck and Will Friedwald, Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, Owl Books, Henry Holt, 1989.