Punch Trunk

Punch Trunk
Punch Trunk
Directed by	Charles M. Jones
Story by	Michael Maltese
Produced by	Edward Selzer
Starring	Mel Blanc; Robert C. Bruce; Marian Richman (uncredited)
Music by	Carl Stalling
Animation by	Ken Harris; Lloyd Vaughan; Ben Washam
Layouts by	Maurice Noble
Backgrounds by	Philip DeGuard
Color process	Technicolor
Production; company	Warner Bros. Cartoons
Distributed by	Warner Bros. Pictures; The Vitaphone Corporation
Release date	December 19, 1953;
Running time	7:01
Language	English

Punch Trunk is a 1953 Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoon written by Mike Maltese and directed by Chuck Jones.^[2] The short was released on December 19, 1953.^[3]

Plot

A five-inch-tall dwarf elephant stows away on a banana shipment to an unnamed city. Several skits follow showing the elephant appearing in random places, with people and other animals reacting to it with screams of terror. Mistaken for hallucinations, sightings of the tiny elephant lead to chaos. The short ends with a radio broadcast of a scientist trying to calm the public by dismissing its existence. But the elephant shows up at the station; the scientist fails to notice it, but the host faints in horror.

Legacy

The tiny elephant makes a cameo in 1959's Unnatural History.

The cartoon was edited into Daffy Duck's Quackbusters. Here, it begins from the bird bath scene and leaves out the scenes concerning the high-rise apartment, the circus, the cat, and the flagpole. The film's version of the bird bath scene has the bird bath owner phoning up Daffy to report the elephant, which leads Daffy to send the orderlies to pick the bird bath owner up having deemed him "definitely _non compos mentis_ "; the elephant's height here is also stated to be "5¼ inches tall". The newspaper headlines had been swapped around so that they are shown in this order; "Mass Hallucination Grips City", "Picayune Pachyderm Panics Populace", "Hundreds Claim To Have Seen Tiny Elephant" and "I Seen It". The last headline had been changed from "Noted Scientist to Take to Air to Calm Alarmed Citizenry" to "Sightings of Tiny Elephant Continue" to tie in with the story; Daffy, having read of the mass panic from the last headline, made a backfired attempt to disprove the tiny elephant's existence that resulted in him being "publicly disgraced on a coast-to-coast hookup!" when during his interview on Frightline with Zed Toppel, the elephant walked by Daffy (Daffy halfway noticing the elephant before the elephant trumpeted at him) much to Zed's amusement.^{[citation needed]}

Home media

This short is a bonus feature on disc 4 of Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 6 but unrestored. A restored print was later released on the Looney Tunes Collector's Choice Volume 3 Blu-Ray disc in 2024.

References

^ Ohmart, Ben (2012). Mel Blanc: The Man of a Thousand Voices. BearManor Media. p. 522. Retrieved 14 January 2021.
^ Beck, Jerry; Friedwald, Will (1989). Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons. Henry Holt and Co. p. 256. ISBN 0-8050-0894-2.
^ Lenburg, Jeff (1999). The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons. Checkmark Books. pp. 100–102. ISBN 0-8160-3831-7. Retrieved 6 June 2020.

External links

Punch Trunk at IMDb

[1] Ohmart, Ben (2012). Mel Blanc: The Man of a Thousand Voices. BearManor Media. p. 522. Retrieved 14 January 2021.

[2] Beck, Jerry; Friedwald, Will (1989). Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies: A Complete Illustrated Guide to the Warner Bros. Cartoons. Henry Holt and Co. p. 256. ISBN 0-8050-0894-2.

[3] Lenburg, Jeff (1999). The Encyclopedia of Animated Cartoons. Checkmark Books. pp. 100–102. ISBN 0-8160-3831-7. Retrieved 6 June 2020.

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