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

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.

. . . exactly WHAT is Tex Avery prognosticating about as he leads Warner Bros.' primary warning division, the Animated Shorts Seers (aka, the Looney Tuners) during THE BLOW OUT blast into America's (Then) Far Future of the 21st Century? Instead of making the obvious choice of tapping 1930s voice artist Billy Bletcher to provide a soundtrack for the Trench Coat Mafia Man bringing his city to a standstill, Warner recruits a lady named Lucille La Verne to make her Looney Tunes debut in THE BLOW OUT, because she's a total sound-alike for the Red Commie KGB Chief's Puppet in the White House, Don Juan Trump. Anyone exposed to the American media during this past month--including CNN, USA Today, the NEW YORK TIMES, the WALL STREET JOURNAL, MSNBC, and TIME Magazine (but EXCLUDING such Racist Chaos-sowing Unamerican Putin organs as Fox "News" and Breitbart)--knows that most Americans (those on Medicare, the U.S. Jews, Medicaid recipients, U.S. Moslems, the LGBTQ community, women relying on Planned Parenthood, seniors struggling on Social Security, any woman possessing female genitalia, Journalists, Handicappers, teachers, immigrants, and anyone with a brain in their head) have felt totally threatened by the Putin-appointed Terrorist in Chief. It's like Don Juan has taken issue with BOYS DON'T CRY and dug up Brandon Teena to rape and kill him all over again by forcing him to Pee amid a mob of Confederate Flag-patched chortling bully jocks! While he's at it, don't be surprised if Putin orders Trump to let THE STATES decide whether Black people should be cotton-picking slaves, whether election ballots may list more than one party, and whether XL pipelines are allowed to spew oil into EVERY lake, stream, and aquifer--as long as it's less than 90% by volume!

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.