BootDigest Such a frustrating disappointment

Chirphymium It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Portia Hilton Blistering performances.

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.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

Vimacone Tex Avery's early directorial shorts barely resemble the zany MGM shorts he's known for, but a lot of the gags and ideas are present in his earliest shorts but in embryonic form. Porky chasing the bomber foreshadows Droopy's ubiquity with the wolf in the short Dumb Hounded (1943) right down to the staging.I've always held the Technicolor Merrie Melodies in higher regard than the black and white Looney Tunes in the 1930's. Yet, in Avery's black and white shorts, he was able to inject more comedy than in his Merrie Melodies. This was due to the Merrie Melodies having to plug a popular song, which hindered gags. This short has held up pretty well over time. The WB cartoons didn't really get their edge until the 1936-37 season. Considering, this is one of the first cartoons Avery directed for Schlesinger, this would have been a strong indicator that the studio was heading in a great direction.

Michael_Elliott 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.

Robert Reynolds This is an early Tex Avery, with Avery still feeling his way. The cartoon is actually more cute than menacing and Avery seems to have more fun with the villain than with our hero, the rather hefty Porky (this was a formative cartoon, when they were still fiddling around with character design and Porky carried a good deal more weight then), with Porky's role limited to one running gag and the payoff at the end. This is a cute cartoon and there are quite a few sight gags, but pacing is slower and the gags are more repetitive in nature and form than later Avery shorts. Avery taking baby steps. But I like this one a lot, personally. The original black and white is far superior to the later colorized version (usually true, but in this case, the use of shadows originally makes colorizing this one an especially bad idea), so try and catch the black and white. Well worth watching. Recommended.