Porky the Rain-Maker (1936) User Reviews

A reworking of "Jack and the Beanstalk"

[planktonrules · 7/10 · 10 November 2019]

"Porky the Rain-Maker" is a short obviously inspired by the classic tale "Jack and the Beanstalk"...though the story has a lot of original content as well. When the story begins, Porky and his dad are concerned because there is a drought and the farm animals are suffering. So, Dad gives Porky money to go to buy feed for the critters...but instead he buys pills which control the weather. Dad is unimpressed and throws the pills away...and the animals eat them with expected results.

This is a cute short and I have no idea if you ever see Porky's dad again. The sight gags about the drought are clever and the film enjoyable. However, you DO wonder...why would they make FOG and CYCLONE pills in the first place?

The Pills Actually Work

[Hitchcoc · 8/10 · 2 September 2019]

In this variation on Jack and the Beanstalk, one would expect that the pills sold by the huckster would be useless. The thing is that they can make it rain. It's a series of sight gags which show the animals in the farmyard eating things like hurricane pills and exhibiting the result of them. It's quite good for its time.

Tex Avery, Porky Pig and weather pills

[TheLittleSongbird · 8/10 · 6 November 2017]

Love animation, it was a big part of my life as a child, particularly Disney, Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry, and still love it whether it's film, television or cartoons.

Also have much admiration for Tex Avery, an animation genius whose best cartoons are animated masterpieces and some of the best he ever did. 'Porky the Rain-Maker' is fairly early career Avery, but it's a good, very good even, early Avery cartoon. For Avery, 'Porky the Rain-Maker' is fairly tame with his uniquely wacky style being more obvious from the 40s onward, a sense that he was still finding his style. There is evidence of it though, especially when the pills start taking effect on the animals and the cartoon particularly starts picking up. Porky is fun and appealing, but there is a vast personal preference for Mel Blanc voicing Porky than Joe Dougherty, who didn't sound as natural as the character.

However, the animation in 'Porky the Rain-Maker' is characteristically great, crisp, detailed and fluid, the black and white holds up well. The music is energetic and lush, not Carl Stalling or Scott Bradley quality but it fits very well and is well composed.

'Porky the Rain-Maker' is timed beautifully and is very funny and inventive when things get chaotic. The story has shades of 'Jack and the Beanstalk' but with no beanstalk and giant, with the second half centring around the effects that the weather pills have on the animals and the consequences. Things don't get too predictable.

Tedd Pierce does a good job with his voice work. The father is suitably stern and the animals are great fun.

Overall, very well done if not one of Avery's best. 8/10 Bethany Cox

Rain They Need

[Michael_Elliott · 21 September 2017]

Porky the Rain-Maker (1936)

*** (out of 4)

Porky is helping his father on the farm but things aren't looking too good. The plants are dying off because of the lack of water and now the chickens are refusing to lay eggs until they get fed. Daddy sends Porky into town to get some food for them but instead he buys some magic pills.

Obviously PORKY THE RAIN-MAKER is a take-off on the Jack and the Beanstalk tale and it actually comes across pretty good and manages to be one of the best in the series up to this point. The animation itself was quite good but the real stand out here are the various laughs that it manages to get and especially towards the end when a variety of animals start taking the pills and sure chaos is breaking loose. Fans of the series will certainly enjoy this one and especially with the laughs and action.

weather these days does seem to be getting more erratic

[lee_eisenberg · 7/10 · 25 July 2007]

Back when Porky Pig was Warner Bros. top cartoon star - and before Mel Blanc was providing his voice - they made this cartoon about Porky buying weather-making seeds for his farm. Since "Porky the Rain-Maker" came out pretty early on, we shouldn't expect to see any of the really wacky gags that became a staple of Warner Bros. animation through the '40s and '50s. But one might interpret this cartoon as a preview of the erratic weather that we now see due to global warming. Of course, I see a lot of things that probably aren't there; I'm sure that they probably intended this as a silly cartoon, and it comes out like that. Worth seeing, if only once. As it's not currently available on video or DVD, you can find it on YouTube.

"Foul is fair and fair is fowl . . . "

[oscaralbert · 6/10 · 2 March 2017]

" . . . cauldron, cauldron, boil and bubble, hail Trump and prepare for trouble," Shakespearian scholars recently have been paraphrasing the prophetic witches scene which opens MACBETH, but there's no need to wade through 10,000-page lexicons of archaic Elizabethan lingo anymore, now that Today's cutting-edge Warnologists have discovered a more fully realized weather prediction for the next four years thoughtfully embedded in PORKY THE RAIN-MAKER by Warner Bros.' Animated Shorts Seers division (aka, the Looney Tuners), those clairvoyant scribes judged by independent experts to be 812% more accurate than the overrated Nostradamus in predicting America's upcoming Calamities, Catastrophes, Cataclysms, and Apocalypti. Just today San Francisco 49ers QB Colin Kaepernick announced that he will stand up for America's Beloved National Anthem next year because A)The advent of White House Resident Trump has brought change that Colin believes in, and B)the Red Commie KGB Chief Vlad "The Mad Russian" Putin is NOT slipping Colin $500 million under the table next season to persuade a couple hundred thousand Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania residents that had never even considered a Rich People Party Candidate before to vote for Trump and rig the election as a protest against what Colin did for 30 million pieces of silver. Representing Trump in PORKY THE RAIN-MAKER is "Dr. Quack," who controls the weather with "pills" symbolizing Trump executive orders. The "Sun" pill, for instance, denotes Trump's order to burn 10 times Obama's level of coal, to speed up weather chaos along America's True Blue Patriotic Loyal Real Americans' East and West Coasts as quickly as possible. The "Earthquake" pill alerts viewers that Trump will reward Oklahoma's Scott "The Mad Fracker" Pruitt for increasing his home state's earthquakes from an average of TWO per year to the current 800 by giving him a national stage to crack EVERY building foundation, highway bridge, driveway, and school roof with wall-to-wall fracking across the USA, insuring huge profits for Big (Re)Construction. The other seven pills in Dr. Quack's bag of tricks warn of SEVEN MORE TRUMP PLAGUES, which are all itemized in Chapter 74 of next month's book from Warnologist K.C. Jones, "Cartoons of the Coming Storm."