"Wholly Smoke" is a 1938 Looney Tunes animated short directed by Frank Tashlin and starring Porky Pig.
While walking to church on a Sunday morning, Porky, depicted as a child in this cartoon, is tempted to take up smoking by a street kid who takes Porky up on his nickelnote bet that he can do cigar tricks. When Porky ends up failing at them in spectacular fashion, he gets light-headed, stumbles into a closed tobacco store, and meets Nick O'Teen, a cloud monster who forces Porky to have all the smoking he can handle.
Needless to say, this cartoon drops a necessary anvil in regards to tobacco usage.
"Wholly Smoke" provides examples of:
- Anthropomorphic Vice: During his hallucination, Porky is bedeviled by anthropomorphized tobacco products and accessories led by a smoky spectre named Nick O'Teen.
- Banister Slide: Porky does it at the beginning, stopping just before hitting the vase on the finial.
- Bowdlerization: The computer-colorized and redrawn versions of this cartoon that aired on the syndicated Merrie Melodies Show, Cartoon Network, and Nickelodeon was edited to get rid of some of the racial stereotypes, such as recoloring The Mills Brothers matches so that they're red instead of blackfaced, cutting the part where the pipe cleaner sticks his head in a pipe and comes out looking like Cab Calloway, and the brief scene of Porky being tied to a stake while American Indian peace pipes dance around him.
- Cigar Chomper: The tough kid. Porky is tempted to become one, but it backfires miserably.
- Dark Reprise: The scene where the tough kid is doing cigar tricks is accompanied by a minor version of The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down.
- Deliberately Monochrome: The cartoon, like all the other Looney Tunes shorts of the time, was made in black-and-white, as that series didn't have the higher budgets that its sister series, the Merrie Melodies, had that allowed it to permanently upgrade to color.
- Eye Poke: At one point, smoke from the tough kid's cigar pokes Porky in the eyes.
- Furry Reminder: Porky's mother calls him down with the "soo-ee" call farmers use on pigs.
- Hurricane of Euphemisms: The bully when Porky bets him his nickel to smoke, saying them in a sissy-like manner.Bully: A nickel? One-twentieth of a dollar? Five cents? One half a dime? Did you say a nickel? Rah-ley?
- My Card: Nick O'Teen presents his card to Porky, which reveals his address as 1313 Tobacco Road.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Several celebrities of the 1930s are caricatured during Porky's nightmare.
- The four blackfaced matches are caricatures of the Mills Brothers.
- The stogie cigars are caricatures of The Three Stooges (the original trio of Moe, Larry, and Curly).
- The "crooner" cigars are based on Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee.
- A pipe cleaner sticks his head into a pipe and comes out looking like Cab Calloway.
- Ominous Pipe Organ: Parodied; Nick O'Teen plays the organ where he presses down on matches and the music comes out of pipes.
- Opinion-Changing Dream: Porky has a smoke-induced nightmare that convinces him never to smoke again.
- Public Domain Soundtrack: The "Little Boys Shouldn't Smoke" song number borrows its melody directly from "Mysterious Mose" (the music riff often used during scary scenes in a lot of the Looney Tunes cartoons), but completely changes the lyrics.
- Punny Name: Nick O'Teen (nicotine).
- Smoking Is Not Cool: The central message of this cartoon. The cartoon's strong anti-smoking message is likely why it wasn't banned in spite of its depiction of smokingnote .
- Three Stooges Shout-Out: Porky encounters three cigars that look like the Three Stooges (the original trio of Larry, Curly, and Moe; shown left to right in the page image).
- Visual Pun: Several in the nightmare sequence (a lot of which stretch the limits of pun humor to painful levels), including...
- Chewing tobacco that is seen chewing.
- The Three Stooges as "stogies" (a stogie is an old slang term for a cigar)
- Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee as Corona-Corona cigars (Crosby and Vallee were crooners, and their cigars are called "crooner-crooner" cigars)
- "Nite Howl" (Night Owl) brand cigars
- "Fat Emma" brand Turkish cigarettes (Fatima brand Turkish cigarettes)
