TheLittleSongbird
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. 'The Blow Out' is fairly early career Avery, but it's a good, very good even, early Avery cartoon. For Avery, 'The Blow Out' is fairly tame with his uniquely wacky style being more obvious from the 40s onward, a sense that he was still finding his style. 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 'The Blow Out' is characteristically great with the inventive and atmospheric use of shadow being particularly striking. The music score is energetic and lush.Only Avery could make something entertaining out of a very serious subject like terrorism. The material here is not as imaginative or as hilarious as the material when he properly found his style, but it's still well timed and funny while never including anything that will offend.The pace throughout is lively and the characters are a lot of fun. Dougherty as Porky aside, the voice acting is good especially Lucille La Verne (best known as the evil queen in 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs').All in all, good well-made fun but Avery is not at his best. 8/10 Bethany Cox
Vimacone
Tex Avery's early directorial shorts barely resemble the zany MGM shorts he's known for, but a lot of the gags and ideas are present in his earliest shorts but in embryonic form. Porky chasing the bomber foreshadows Droopy's ubiquity with the wolf in the short Dumb Hounded (1943) right down to the staging.I've always held the Technicolor Merrie Melodies in higher regard than the black and white Looney Tunes in the 1930's. Yet, in Avery's black and white shorts, he was able to inject more comedy than in his Merrie Melodies. This was due to the Merrie Melodies having to plug a popular song, which hindered gags. This short has held up pretty well over time. The WB cartoons didn't really get their edge until the 1936-37 season. Considering, this is one of the first cartoons Avery directed for Schlesinger, this would have been a strong indicator that the studio was heading in a great direction.
Michael_Elliott
The Blow Out (1936)*** (out of 4) A mad bomber is terrorizing the city by blowing up various buildings. Also in town, Porky Pigg wants an ice cream soda but he's five pennies short. He notices that doing good deeds gets him a penny so he goes around town being nice but soon he runs into the bomber.THE BLOW OUT is certainly the best film that Porky Pig appeared in up to this point. The idea of a kid's cartoon having a terrorist bomber might seem odd today but it was perfect for the time and there are actually a lot of nice gags here. The highlight of the film is certainly watching Porky do the various good deeds to get the penny. I thought it was rather funny seeing how excited he got when he was one penny closer to what he wanted. The animation was extremely good as well and the short ends on a high note with a great action sequence.
tavm
The Blow Out was an early Warner Bros. cartoon that was the second made by "supervisor" Fred "Tex" Avery as director. It also starred Porky Pig in his early incarnation with original voice Joe Dougherty (who stuttered in real life). Other voices featured were Sara Berner who was later gossipy switchboard operator Mabel on "The Jack Benny Program", and Lucille La Verne who later voiced the Queen on Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. She voices the bomber here. Porky is a kid here trying to buy an ice cream soda but finds he's five pennies short. So when he accidentally picks up a misplaced item from a passerby, he gets awarded one cent. After this gets repeated a few times, the pig finds the bomb-which he thinks is just an ordinary clock-and proceeds to give it back to the one who dropped it who of course keeps running away. Soon the cops follow. You may be able to guess what happens from here on but I'm not going to tell you. Needless to say, the ending is one you've probably expected from Tex Avery if you're familiar with his subsequent cartoons for both Warner Bros. and M-G-M. On that note, I definitely recommend The Blow Out.
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