the audience applauded

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

The movie is wonderful and true, an act of love in all its contradictions and complexity

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!

Little did these animators know how famous "Seabiscuit" would become almost 70 years later, thanks to a best-selling book and feature movie about the great horse of the '30s.Anyway, we see a fairly young Porky Pig in this cartoon, a kid who works for his dad Phineas (who stutters the same as Porky). The "kid" loves horse racing and races his little toy horse - yet he's old enough to drive a car! Oh, well.He goes into town to deliver feed to the stables at the track and collect $11 for it. Then, he accidentally winds up purchasing an old, broken-down horse, "Teabuscuit" for the 11 bucks. Oh, man, his pop is going to kill him when he finds out.However, you just know something will work out, that the old beat-up but face-liking likable horse will do something good to bail out Porky.This winds up being a "cute" cartoon, more than it is funny. The actual race was wild and insane, but not really anything that would provoke a big laugh. It's a passable animated short, decent but nothing great.

"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.