I’m reviewing episode number seven today for a couple of reasons. On the surface it may seem like just another episode, but there are a handful of interesting anecdotes surrounding it. This is going to be a fairly long post.
First of all, it has two English episode titles: “Ping Mamma Leaves Home” (or “Momma Peggy Leaves Home” as I’ve renamed it to make it a little less confusing), and “Porker Problems” (it’s title card from the VHS release of the same name).
This episode is included on the HALLO BOES DVD from the Netherlands. It’s called “Mama ping loopt weg”. What’s interesting about this is it actually contains five scenes that were cut from the U.S. release. I had read somewhere that the U.S. distributor, Celebrity Home Entertainment, was known for editing imported cartoons, and “Momma Peggy Leaves Home" was a major victim of this.
At first I’m going to present the regular review, then following that I’ll go into the missing scenes.
Peggy the pig is feeding her four piglets. Ollie fills up her trough with a bucket of slop and calls her over to eat. The four piglets get there first and eat it all. Peggy gets mad and jumps into her empty trough, destroying it. They continue to bother her so she just leaves their father, Peter, to look after them.
Peter finds mud to wallow in and is soon joined by his four young piglets. Unfortunately, once they’ve dived in they stay submerged. Ollie calls for help and Edward the elephant fishes them out with his trunk.
Fresh from their rescue, the piglet quartet are soon back to their annoying ways, bothering a cow and a hen. Jack takes the initiative of taking off his shell and turning it into a see-saw. All four end up on top of it at once and the shell breaks under the weight.
Meanwhile, Peggy is enjoying her newfound freedom. She’s wearing makeup and has a belt tightly wrapped around her waist to hold in her belly. She trips over a rock and tumbles head over heels, turning herself into a giant pink bouncy ball. She rolls down a hill and bowls over a group of storks. An alligator hits her with his tail as if she were a baseball. Gaylord the gorilla and fellow gorilla Bongo play football with her. She then ends up down a hole. A bear emerges from the hole with her and balances on her as if he was performing in a circus. He flattens her under his weight and he tosses her away. An elephant then bats her around with it’s trunk and Peggy ends up in a river.
Farther up stream, Peter is taking a bath. As soon as he’s finished, he’s back wallowing in the mud. Unattended, the piglets are back bothering animals. Sammy and Rodney are their protagonists.
Ollie finds Peggy dripping wet on the river bank so he wrings her out like a towel. He lays her flat on the grass. The piglets find her and look to be drinking from her nipples, but it actually turns out they were re-inflating her.
The cartoon concludes with Peggy once again in makeup, wearing a belt, being chased by her four piglets.
Thoughts: This was a strange one! The idea of a pig turning into a giant pink bouncy ball was truly surreal. It was a nice little episode but weirdness truly oozed from it’s pores! The pig family plays a fairly big part in some of the earlier episodes and I thought this was a good pig episode.
And now onto the missing scenes. As I said earlier there are five in all. Two of them are fairly morbid gags. The remaining three are nipple gags.
1. When the piglets are bothering Peggy at the beginning of the cartoon, she walks away from them, dragging them behind her by her nipples. They stretch out for several feet.
2. When Peter takes the piglets walking, they all follow him in a chain with each piglet holding the preceding piglet’s tail in it’s mouth. They all bump into one another and collapse in a heap. When Peter turns his head to look at them he see’s them as joints of roast pork.
3. When Peggy is out walking, she passes another mother pig who is being followed by dozens of piglets. The mother has dozens of nipples all over her body to compensate for her many young.
4. When Peggy becomes a giant pink bouncy ball and the elephant is playing with her, after bouncing her on it’s trunk a few times the elephant begins to blow air into her as if she were a balloon. She eventually pops and the camera cuts to the sky where we see a floating Peggy shaped cloud, complete with halo and wings, accompanied by harp music in the background.
5. At the end of the cartoon when the piglets are once again trying to drink from her nipples, it’s revealed that they’ve all been tied in knots at the end to prevent them from doing so.
So there you have the deleted scenes. Seeking out those are going to add an entirely different dimension to the episode reviews.
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