Directed by:
Charles M. (Chuck) Jones
While traveling through the country, Porky Pig (voiced by Mel Blanc) and his apprehensive pet puss / traveling companion Sylvester the Cat arrive in a ghost town and decide to spend the night at the sinister-looking Dry Gulch Hotel. Well, more accurately, Porky chooses to spend the night and Sylvester kind of has no say in the matter. Sylvester is immediately spooked by green, glowing eyes popping up all over the place and a silhouette of a giant spider, which is actually just a tiny spider whose shadow is amplified against the wall. Upon entering, they find no one working the front desk and just decide to sign the register and find a room. While Porky isn't looking, a noose emerges from the mouth of a stuffed moose head and attempts to hang him. Sylvester pushes him out of the way just in time. And then the moose head whips out a rifle and attempts to shoot Porky. Again, Sylvester saves his life. Seeing how Porky never sees any of these attempts at his life, he becomes convinced his cat is "a schizo-phre-schizo-phre-phre-schiz-eh-um-uh-eh-man, a man, a, a, uh, um, a, manic-depressive or something." I hope I got that right.
Once settled in their bedroom, the horrors don't stop for poor Sylvester, as he has to save a sleeping Porky from other attempts at hanging and shooting, plus a stabbing; all at the hands of murderous mice, who even stand on each other's shoulders under a sheet to impersonate a ghost at one point. Each time Sylvester saves his rind, an oblivious Porky awakens only to find the cat hovering over him and calls him things like "a psychopathic old pussycat."
Though Porky was pretty well-established as a persona by this stage, this is a different style of Sylvester the Cat than what was featured later. Here, he doesn't speak and plays the role of a "yellow cat," which is a far cry from his later arrogant, lisping villain persona which found him always trying to eat Tweety Bird and Speedy Gonzales.
I actually think I prefer the rarely-used, scare-prone and mute Sylvester to the later cocky one because he reminds me of most of the cats I've owned (or, who've owned me) thus far in life. While I've had a rare few who'd gladly go up to a complete stranger for a pat, most have been the types to run and hide at so much as a floorboard creaking. Scaredy cats also make the best pets when you're living in an apartment and kinda sorta tell your landlord a little fib about the amount of pets you own as scaredy cats are always kind enough to immediately hide under the couch or bed and not make a peep the entire time the landlord is doing a walk-through. Not that I'd know this from experience or anything.
Like most other classic Looney Tunes / Merrie Melodies shorts, this is amusing, well-animated, features great voice work from Blanc, is very colorful and has wonderfully Expressionistic design on the backdrops. It does somewhat recycle the premise from the earlier, similar (and more gag-packed) short Scaredy Cat (1948), which also features Porky and Sylvester moving into a "haunted" house where evil mice attempt to kill them. However, the aesthetic choices are quite different, with Scaredy opting for a more dark and dreary look while Claws goes the more vibrant and abstract visual route.
Parts of this short were combined with parts from at least eight other horror-themed Looney Tunes shorts to comprise the later TV special Bugs Bunny's Howl-Oween Special (1977), which was later released on VHS and then DVD. Parts were also folded into the theatrical release Daffy Duck's Quackbusters (1988). As far as home video availability is concerned, it's been included on numerous sets over the years: The 1993 laserdisc collection "Ham on Wry: The Porky Pig Laser Collection" and the Warner Bros. DVD collections "Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 3" (2005), "Looney Tunes Collection: Best of Porky, Volume 2" (2007), "Looney Tunes Spotlight Collection: Volume 8" (2014) and "Loooney Tunes Collection Volume 3" (2018). A large number of these shorts are currently being streamed on HBO Max as well.
★★★
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