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.A relatively early cartoon from Friz Freleng, 'Porky's Bear Facts' seems to be a loose take featuring Porky Pig on the fable 'The Grasshopper and the Ants'. 'Porky's Bear Facts' may not be one of Freleng's best cartoons (his best period being the 50s, which saw a fair share of classics) or see him on the most top of forms, but it is not one of the finding-his-feet quality of his earlier cartoons, even if his style was stronger and more refined later. It's very nicely done, with amusing and well timed, if never hilarious, moments and also messaging that resonates still today. Porky is amusing and likeable but rather underused for a titular character. His foil is more interesting and funnier, but admittedly they do work well together. While a good one, the story is slight and occasionally lacks momentum.Mel Blanc's voice acting as ever shows how amazing and multi-talented a voice actor he was, showing a knack for bringing an individuality and different personalities to every character he voiced (a vast majority of the time being multiple characters in the same cartoon.Animation is excellent, it's fluid in movement, crisp in shading and very meticulous in detail. Freleng directs solidly.Ever the master, Carl Stalling's music is typically superb. It is as always lushly orchestrated, full of lively energy and characterful in rhythm, not only adding to the action but also enhancing it.Overall, very well done though falling short of greatness. 8/10 Bethany Cox

Edgar Allan Pooh . . . (from the pens of Warner Bros.' Extreme Early Warning System, those peerless prognosticators known as the Animated Shorts Seers division, aka The Looney Tuners, whose prophecies for We Americans of (The Then) Far Future have proved far more accurate than anything ever dreamed up by that over-rated clown, Nostradamus) Red Commie KGB Chief Vlad "The Mad Russian" Putin, who sings soothing stanzas of his "Working Can Wait" song to lull the shallow-minded minority of Americans making up the Repug Party into a false sense of lazy security. Porky Pig is tempted to give succor to this Bear-turned-wolf at his door under the precept of Christian Charity, but Warner warns we Viewers of the 21st Century that this would be a disastrous course of action. Warner subtly uses the Bear's Foodless ice-cold winter shack to suggest that ALL of Putin's Repug enablers, from teen KGB reform school recruit Don Juan Rump (and the rest of the gang including Flynn, Sessions, Price, DeVos, Gorsuch, Tillerson, etc., etc.) down to ALL of those who enabled Putin by Mis-spending their once-proud American Money on those bogus "Make America Great Again" hats be stripped of their U.S. citizenship for enabling treason, yield ALL of their mostly ill-gotten weapons, property, and financial assets to the U.S. Treasury under the Public Seizure Statutes, and be plopped down for the remainder of their Deplorable Lives on Antarctica's Larsen Ice Shelf B, which has just shed a chunk as large as Delaware for them!

CatTales an unremarkable and harmless toon, though one of my child/teenhood favorites since it was part of the local TV channel's afterschool repertoire. The story of two neighbors - a lackadaisical hillbilly bear who plucks a guitar and sings with a whiskey voice, and orderly middle class Porky Pig. Come winter, the bear is starving and Porky must feed him because his work ethic also comes with a social conscience. The bear decides to turn over a new leaf, but like the leopard that can't changes it's spots, he goes back to his lazy ways, singing his favorite song, "Working can wait/ this is paradise having no work to do/ and taking it easy too/ Working can wait." There's not much excitement since it's about inner conflicts, but it's still amusing to see both sides, and the song is perfect. A more humorous take on the lazy-animal-not-preparing-for-winter, also with a musical number (though more absurd), was made a year later in "Daffy's Southern Exposure."

Lee Eisenberg One of Porky's outings from the days when they gave him rather hokey roles depicting "normal" parts of life; as it is, Porky only appears in two scenes, so they could have easily made this a miscellaneous cartoon (those were the cartoons that didn't feature any of the stars). Laborious Porky does everything that one needs to do to get by in life, while his lazy neighbor believes that work can wait; this proves unfortunate for the poor sucker come winter.Back then, work actually worked for most people. Nowadays, with the economy like it is, people are lucky to find any work. Anyway, "Porky's Bear Facts" is an OK edition to the Looney Tunes series. Friz Freleng created a neater version of the grasshopper and ant story in 1942's "Foney Fables".