The Sylvester and Porky Trilogy of Terror was a unique and enjoyable although obviously short addition to the Looney Tunes roster. For several years, Scaredy Cat (1948) had been the sole entry, but in 1954 Chuck Jones revived it for a second installment, Claws For Alarm. The two shorts were effectively variations on the exact same story (Sylvester and Porky spend the night in some ominous location, where repeated attempts are made on their lives by a swarm of inexplicably bloodthirsty mice, of whose presence only Sylvester is aware) with radically different outcomes (although both involve unpleasant surprises for an ostensibly triumphant Sylvester). Claws For Alarm, though, was an inventive and distinguished enough remake not to suffer terribly by comparison. A third short, Jumpin' Jupiter, which dropped the killer mice altogether and pitted Sylvester and Porky against a new, extraterrestrial threat, followed soon after in 1955. Having let Scaredy Cat stand on its own for several years, I wonder if Jones was only now giving consideration to developing the Sylvester/Porky dynamic into its own ongoing series. To that end, Jumpin' Jupiter can only be deemed a failure - an attempt to expand the formula of fearful/alert Sylvester and oblivious/scornful Porky into a whole new set-up, that basically ends up confirming just how much the success of its two predecessors depended upon the specifics of their very narrow circumstances. Jumpin' Jupiter is the last of the trilogy, and certainly the least.
Having said that, the one innovation retained from Claws For Alarm - both revolve around Porky and Sylvester making an overnight stop while on the road - does make me regretful that there wasn't more life left in this series, if this is an indication of how they all would have been bookended. Although there is no direct continuity between the shorts, the idea that we are watching Porky and Sylvester on some continuous, increasingly fraught journey into disorientation, having taken the wrong turning a long way back, is certainly an appealing one. I'm intrigued to see more from Sylvester and Porky on The Road Trip From Hell. Truth be told, Jumpin' Jupiter is not, on its own, a bad short. It's an extremely good-looking cartoon (the celestial backgrounds are beautifully rendered), and the visual wit is as sharp as ever (there is one particularly good sequence where Sylvester comes close to accidentally smothering Porky by grabbing him from the outside of the tent). But the killer instinct of the preceding mouse shorts is very much missed.
As ingenious as those killer mice were, it was probably for the best that Jones retired them after Claws For Alarm, as I doubt the scenario offered infinite possibilities and Jones had probably already pushed his luck far enough in trying to repeat the trick once. In their place, Porky and Sylvester are menaced by an alien from the planet Jupiter (who bears a striking resemblance to the Instant Martians commonly allied with Marvin The Martian), who has travelled to Earth to collect samples of Earthling life, presumably for scientific purposes. He happens on a desert where Porky and Sylvester are camped out for the night, harvests the patch of ground they've pitched their tent upon and whisks them off into the depths of space. As before, Sylvester quickly realises that the situation is staggeringly wrong, while Porky remains entirely oblivious. It's a sinister scenario, for sure, and it takes us to a fairly unsettling conclusion, but what's missing throughout Jumpin' Jupiter that was all over Scaredy Cat and Claws For Alarm is that overwhelming sense of malevolence. Those shorts succeeded because the mice were genuinely scary. They were as understated as they were omnipresent, and their horror arose from the fact that you could never be totally certain where they were going to strike from next. Here, I don't detect any ill-will on the part of the antagonist, just a clinical coldness (which, honestly, could have been colder). Other than separating Sylvester and Porky from everything they knew and loved, there's no indication that he intends to harm them in any way. The most troubling narrative blind spot is that we never actually find out what's in store for Porky and Sylvester once they reach Jupiter (spoiler: they never even make it that far), but the alien responsible for the abduction process is not in himself all that intimidating. To the contrary, he seems bewildered by the terror he invokes in Sylvester and spends the latter half of the short with his back turned in the control room, attempting to make sense of his abductees' behaviours through a book penned by one Dr. Sig Mundfre Ud.
Since the antagonist is so uninterested in dishing out physical damage to his captives, a key element of the previous cartoons - Sylvester would endeavour to protect the ungrateful swine who would typically abuse him in return - here becomes redundant. Instead, Sylvester spends most of his screen time running and cowering from the alien terror (as it were). Nor does he do anything to attempt to reverse the course they're on. Which leads me to possibly my biggest quibble with Jumpin' Jupiter - whereas the previous shorts were clearly constructed to engender sympathy with Sylvester, here I'm not convinced that this one has any wider agenda than to have fun at the expense of a chicken-hearted cat. The tell-tale moment would be when Sylvester blanches, on noting that they are hurtling ever further from the Earth, panics, and then turns yellow upon realising that he's leapt straight into the arms of his alien abductor (with cowardice, I presume). The short, therefore, attaches much the same stigma to Sylvester's anxieties as does Porky. This is in contrast to the earlier cartoons, where, for as rampantly as Porky scorned Sylvester and branded him a coward, Sylvester's fear, and his willingness to sleep with one eye open (or not at all), was clearly the only thing keeping the two of them alive. Whether Porky realises it or not, Sylvester is an extraordinarily useful companion to have by his side. Not so here. Besides a predictably unsuccessful attempt to communicate the situation to Porky, Sylvester's contribution is so minimal, to be quite honest, the short could easily be rewritten as a solo Porky affair. At times, Jumpin' Jupiter does appear to be veering toward an interesting new idea - the suggestion that, with the right amount of paranoia and agitation, Porky and Sylvester could potentially pose a greater threat to one another (Porky explicitly threatens to kill Sylvester, if he does not stop clinging to him, and we have that aforementioned moment where Sylvester nearly suffocates Porky with the tent) - but this isn't explored either.
Where Jumpin' Jupiter does finally start to pick up is in the closing moments, and the ending is so inspired that I'm almost tempted to disregard every word I've said against it up until now. As the short irises out, we appear to be seguing into a direct inversion on the previous two shorts, where Sylvester and Porky were menaced by creatures significantly smaller than themselves, with the implication that they may soon be facing jeopardy of gargantuan proportions. Due to their abductor's negligence (and the general lack of gravity), Porky and Sylvester go adrift and end up being stranded on some other planet (which is unidentified, but it can only be Mars). Naturally, Porky fails to distinguish between the desert he was camping on and the Martian terrain, and has them resume their journey to (where else?) Albuquerque, believing that they'll make it there by evening. As they go, they drive past a pair of giant Martian avians, who exchange glances suggesting that they intend to create trouble for our protagonists. It's a memorable ending, but what's particularly harrowing is the moment preceding it, when Porky spies the Earth in the distant sky and remarks that it is a "funny looking planet", and that he has never noticed it before. Naturally, this is intended to illustrate how astoundingly oblivious Porky remains to their desolate situation, but there's something faintly poetic in it too, as if Porky is subconsciously acknowledging how little time he took to appreciate the world he's been stripped away from. Now inaccessible to Porky and Sylvester, the Earth hangs hauntingly in the distance, every lifeform and every landmark situated upon it too far away to be discerned. And there's despair in that disconnect. It's a funny looking planet indeed, but without it we are nothing but lost.
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