Page 61 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

Porky Pig and donald duck

Commercial cloud seeding even found its way into the cartoons. The Warner
Brothers Looney Tune Porky the Rain-Maker was shown in theaters in 1936.
During a devastating drought, Porky sends his son to town with his last dollar to
buy feed for the starving animals. There, next to the feed store, Dr. Quack is sell-
ing an assortment of “rain pills” for $1 from the back of his wagon. As part of his
presentation, Quack hands out umbrellas to the crowd and launches a rain pill
into the sky with a peashooter. The pill bursts like Dyrenforth’s ordnance, and
rain begins to fall immediately.
Convinced, Porky Jr. buys a box of the pills with the family’s last dollar, but
his angry father, in a scene reminiscent of Jack and the Magic Beanstalk, throws
them on the ground. This gives rise to a series of comedic shticks. A barnyard
chicken eats a lightning pill and is instantly electrified; the old gray mare eats a
fog pill and is shrouded in cloud; the goose eats thunder and wind pills and all
hell breaks loose. When, in the melee, one of the rain pills reaches the sky, clouds
form instantly and the rains fall. As the cartoon credits roll, all ends well on the
farm and everyone is happy. “That’s all Folks!”
In Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories (1953), Donald Duck, M.R.M. (Master
Rain Maker), has perfected the science of rainmaking. In the opening sequence,
a farmer orders 2 inches of rain on his barley field. Donald, wearing an avia-
tor’s helmet and pointing to his bag of M-3 “rain seed,” offers him 2.5 inches
for the same price. Donald fulfills his contract with extreme precision “to the
millimeter” by seeding the farmer’s X-shaped field with an X-shaped cloud he
has “bulldozed” into position. The farmer and his wife are delighted, since none
of the rain falls on his hay field next door: “That duck shore is a Jim Dandy! It’s
raining right up to the fence row! And the drops that fall on the line even have
one flat side!”
of course, Donald eventually loses his temper in every cartoon, and this one
is no exception. Daisy has gone to the Idle Dandies picnic with Donald’s cousin,
Gladstone. Donald, jealous and angry, takes off in his cloud-seeding airplane,
this time loaded with “snow starter,” to gain retribution. Flying over the picnic
site in Greenwood Canyon in a clear blue sky, Donald’s agitation with his rival
increases until he admits, “I feel mean enough now to do anything!” After herd-
ing some ominous rain clouds together, Donald declares, “I won’t give ’em . . .
anything as common as a cloudburst—I’ll give ’em a blizzard!” In a memorable
image, he pulls the control lever beyond “rain,” “hail,” and “snow” all the way to
“blizzard,” but he miscalculates and “overseeds” the clouds, turning them into a
solid dome of ice.

44 | StorieS of Control