"Gold Diggers Of '49" (1936, Looney Tunes)
This is Tex Avery's very first Warner Bros. cartoon. Avery's wild style is already apparent, taking the cutesy "Beans Gang" concept and tweaking it to make it ripe for character development as well as sight gags. Unlike the Porky and Beans cartoons created by Friz Freleng and Jack King, this Avery effort makes the characters adults rather than "Our Gang"-like kids. The cartoon is set during the American gold rush of 1849. Beans the cat is a prospector who discovers gold in Red Gulch (he pulls a tree root and it acts like the lever to a slot machine.) He announces it in town, and soon everyone's racing to stake their own claim. Beans invites his girlfriend's father, Porky Pig, to come along. It is never explained how a pig could father Little Kitty, but let's not go there. Porky and Beans dig up a treasure chest in the desert, but it contains an old book called "How To Find Gold", the first page of which reads "Dig for it!". A bandit steals Porky's bag of gold, and he tells Beans that if he can get the bag back, he can marry Kitty. Beans chases the crook in a car (explain that if the cartoon is set in 1849). He shoots at the horse-riding brute, who has a washpan in his pants to deflect the bullets. The car starts running low on gas, so Beans pulls out a jug of liquor and pours it in the tank, making the car super-fast. Beans rounds up the crook, the bag, and Porky, and they race back to town. Porky keeps his promise about his daughter, but Beans is a little surprised to find that the sack wasn't full of gold at all. It was simply the fat Porky's lunch!
