Three Little Pigs (film)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Practical Pig, Fiddler Pig and Fifer Pig sing "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?"

Three Little Pigs is an animated short film released on May 27, 1933 by United Artists, produced by Walt Disney and directed by Burton Gillett. Based on a fairy tale of the same name, the short's huge success also made the original tale known worldwide. It won an Academy Award for Best Short Subject: Cartoons.

1 Plot
2 Voice cast
3 Reaction and legacy
4 Censorship
5 Home Video
6 Sequels
7 External links

[edit] Plot

Practical Pig, Fiddler Pig and Fifer Pig are three brothers who build their own houses with bricks, sticks and straw respectively. All three of them play a different kind of musical instrument – Fifer Pig plays the flute, Fiddler Pig plays the fiddle and Practical Pig plays the piano. Fifer and Fiddler build their houses with much ease and have fun all day. Practical, on the other hand, works all day long to build his strong brick house, but his two brothers poke fun at him. An angry Practical warns them that if they don't build a better house, the Big Bad Wolf will threaten their lives. Fifer and Fiddler ignore him and continue to play, singing the now famous song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?".

One day, the Big Bad Wolf really comes by, and blows Fifer and Fiddler's houses down. The two pigs manage to escape from the hungry Wolf and hide at Practical's house. Unable to blow down the strong brick house, the Wolf disguises himself twice as an innocent sheep and a Fuller Brush man (a Jewish peddler in the uncensored version) to trick the pigs into letting him in, but fails. Finally, he attempts to enter the house through the chimney, but smart Practical Pig takes off the lid of a boiling pot filled with water under the chimney, and the Wolf falls right into it. Shrieking in pain, the Wolf runs away frantically, while the pigs sing "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" again.

[edit] Voice cast

Pinto Colvig ... Practical Pig
Billy Bletcher ... The Big Bad Wolf
Mary Moder ... Fiddler Pig
Dorothy Compton ... Fifer Pig

[edit] Reaction and legacy

The movie was phenomenally successful with audiences of the day, so much that theaters ran the cartoon for months after its debut. ^{[citation needed]} A number of theaters added hand-drawn "beards" to the movie posters for the cartoon as a way of indicating how long its theatrical run lasted.

Animator Chuck Jones said, "That was the first time that anybody ever brought characters to life [in an animated cartoon]". (Other animation historians, particularly admirers of Winsor McCay, would dispute the word "first.") The straw and stick pigs are frivolous and care-free; the brick pig is cautious and earnest.

The moderate, but not blockbuster, success of the further "Three Pigs" cartoons was seen as a factor in Walt Disney's decision not to rest on his laurels, but instead to continue to move forward with risk-taking projects, such as the multiplane camera and the first feature-length animated movie. Disney's slogan, often repeated over the years, was "you can't top pigs with pigs."

The original song composed by Frank Churchill for the cartoon, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?", was a best-selling single. When the Nazis began expanding the boundaries of Germany in the years preceding World War II, the song was used to represent the complacency of the Western world in allowing Hitler to make considerable acquisitions of territory without going to war.

A cartoon version produced by Warner Bros., "The Three Little Bops", featured the pigs as a jazz band, who refused to let the inept trumpet-playing wolf join until after he died and went to Hell, whereupon his playing markedly improved.

[edit] Censorship

One sequence in the cartoon, which showed the Big Bad Wolf dressing up as a caricature of a Jewish peddler, was excised from the film after its release and replaced with a less offensive sequence, with the Wolf pretending to be the Fuller Brush man instead, but still had a Yiddish voice.

[edit] Home Video

In the United States, the short was first released on VHS, Betamax and Laserdisc in 1984 as part of its "Cartoon Classics" Home Video series. The topical 'Fuller Brush Man' line was changed to the incongruous "I'm the Fuller Brush Man - I'm working my way though college" for this and all subsequent home video releases. It made its DVD debut on December 4, 2001, included in the Silly Symphonies set of the Walt Disney Treasures line. It was later included in Walt Disney's Timeless Tales, Vol. 1, released August 16, 2005, which also featured The Pied Piper (1933), The Grasshopper and the Ants (1934), The Tortoise and the Hare (1935) and The Prince and the Pauper (1990).

[edit] Sequels

Disney produced several sequels to Three Little Pigs, though none were nearly as successful as the original. The first of them was The Big Bad Wolf, also directed by Burton Gillett and first released on April 14, 1934. All four characters of the original film returned along with two new additions: Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother, originating from a different folktale which also featured a wolf as the villain. The plot was fairly simple. Practical Pig is seen building an extension to the shared residence of the three pigs. The added space is presumably needed as the residence was originally intended for a single occupant. Meanwhile, Fiddler and Fifer Pig offer to escort the Red Riding Hood to her grandmother's residence. Against the advice of Practical, the trio attempts to follow a shortcut through the forest. They encounter the dressed-in-drag Wolf and barely evade capture. He proceeds in running ahead of them to the residence of the old woman. The Wolf places her in a closet and then awaits her granddaughter to arrive. The young girl soon does, but also enters the closet with the assistance of her grandmother. Then Fiddler and Fifer Pig alert their brother to the situation. Practical arrives and soon manages to send the Wolf running by placing hot coals and popcorn into his trousers. The short contained several gags but at the time failed to repeat the commercial success of the original. Modern audiences have found it entertaining enough but still inferior to its predecessor.

In 1936, a third cartoon starring the Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf followed, with a theme more towards The Boy Who Cried Wolf. This short was entitled The Three Little Wolves and it was so called because it introduced the Big Bad Wolf's three cub sons, all of whom just as eager for a taste of the pigs as their father.

One more cartoon short featuring the characters, The Practical Pig, was released in 1939, right at the end of the Silly Symphonies' run.

A new character, Lil Bad Wolf, the son of the Big Bad Wolf, was introduced in subsequent Disney comic books. He was a constant vexation to his father, the Big Bad Wolf, because the little son was not actually bad. His favorite playmates, in fact, were the Three Pigs.