Meet John Doughboy is a 1941 Looney Tunes cartoon, directed by Bob Clampett and (somewhat) starring Porky Pig.
The cartoon is presented in a Mockumentary newsreel style, with draftee Porky presenting parodies of then-state of the art weaponry to an audience, with topical gags of the time period sandwiched in. Porky himself is barely present in the cartoon, and is only present to introduce the audience to the film.
Tropes:
- Animate Inanimate Object:
- One sight gag in the film involves a building humming—the narrator meant it as "humming with life", but the cartoon presents it as the factory spawning a happy face and literally humming a song.
- To say nothing of the Spitfire airplane, which involves it literally spitting fire and then coughing and hacking afterward.
- The cartoons topper gag has the Statue of Liberty coming to life to use a spray can on a fleet of airplanes flying towards New York.
- Bad Humor Truck: An ice cream cart randomly shows up riding alongside a compliment of tanks.
- Cartoon Bug-Sprayer: Used by the Statue of Liberty to send a fleet of attacking airplanes dropping out of the sky like flies.
- Drives Like Crazy: Used as a gag with a super fast new "military vehicle", which turns out to just be Jack Benny and his Maxwell car being badly driven by Eddie "Rochester" Anderson.
- Hurricane of Puns: A lot of the gags in the cartoon are silly sight based puns, including a building literally humming, a Spitfire plane that literally spits, a joke about Citizen Sugar Kane saying that Americans Open Door Policy is causing the Draft, a machine gun nest (where a machine gun becomes a chicken with chicklets), etc.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: While we do see an audience early in the cartoon, Porky is staged to seem like he's directly talking to the (real life) audience early in the film.
- Mockumentary: The newsreel Porky presents is done in the style of a faux-newsreel.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Jack Benny and Eddie "Rochester" Anderson appear for a gag midway through the cartoon.
- Out of Focus: It's technically a Porky Pig cartoon, but he barely gets any screentime—he takes the backseat after the opening while a narrator speaks over the rest of the film.
- Pun-Based Title: The title is a play on the 1941 film Meet John Doe.
- Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You: The very first shot of the film has the camera staring right down the barrel of a cannon, which fires a shell towards us.
- Shout-Out:
- The "Porky Pig Presents" logo is a parody of the original RKO Radio Pictures logo.
- One of the newspapers about the draft mentions a man named Citizen Sugar Kane.
- One gag involves two different sized cigarettes being held by a distracted soldier, with one of them chuckling to another that "Mine's longer than yours", a reference to an ad from the then popular Pall Mall cigarettes.
- Standard Snippet: The "humming" factory gag has the building humming "Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush".
- Stock Footage: A scene of a navy ship is reused animation from a 1934 Looney Tunes short, Buddy the Gob.
- Tank Goodness: Among the films sight gags is a blob of molten lead instantly forming into fully functional tanks.
- Vocal Dissonance: When a very short fellow and his tall friend get drafted despite the latter's insistence that it wouldn't happen, the short guy (walking on stilts) glares at him and snarls "You and your education!" in a surprisingly deep voice.
- Wartime Cartoon: While it was released several months before American entered World War II, its clearly meant to be a riff on home front conditions of the time.
