Claws for Alarm is a 1954 Merrie Melodies cartoon short directed by Chuck Jones. It is the second in his “horror vacation” trilogy starring Porky Pig and Sylvester, following Scaredy Cat (1948) and preceding Jumpin' Jupiter (1955).
Driving his battered old car through the desert en route to Albuquerque, Porky decides to check into the abandoned – and decaying – Hotel Dry Gulch for the night, seemingly oblivious to the fact that its "quaint and picturesque" location is, in reality, a Ghost Town (something the terrified Sylvester figures out immediately).
Despite encountering such threats as a nest of apparently murderous mice, the huge shadow of a spider, a moose's head sporting a noose and then a shotgun, a kitchen knife down the back of his fur, a bedsheet in motion, and another opening in the bedroom wall for the shotgun, Sylvester can't seem to convince Porky of anything.
Still suspicious, Sylvester spends the wee hours of the morning standing guard and marching around with the shotgun he wrestled out of the wall. Even after dawn breaks, he stares bleary-eyed out the window, while Porky cheerfully proposes extending their stay at the hotel. Sylvester will have none of this, however, and settles the matter right then and there with one good wallop of the shotgun butt.
Edited largely intact into 1988's Daffy Duck's Quackbusters, with the vacation plot reworked into an assignment for Porky as a ghost hunter. Excerpts were also included in 1977's Bugs Bunny's Howl-oween Special, where clips from both it and Scaredy Cat were combined and re-arranged into one sequence and the events were shown as being caused by Witch Hazel as part of her Halloween trickery.
"Claws for Alarm" provides examples of:
- Alien Geometries: the bedsheet goes glides by in the outside hallway, but Porky finds the sheet inside his bedroom when he points it out to Sylvester.
- The Alleged Car: Porky drives an old Model T-style jalopy in both this and Jumpin' Jupiter.
- Agent Scully: Porky remains willfully oblivious to the mice's attempts on his life; at several points he clearly hears gunshots and witnesses other pretty obvious clues, but dismisses them all while repeatedly insulting his cat for trying to point out the dangers.
- Bedsheet Ghost: Revealed to be made up of a trench of mice running through the hallway. When Porky sees the “bogeyman,” he rips away the sheet to reveal a chair — much to Sylvester's dismay.
- Big Shadow, Little Creature: As they enter the town, Sylvester is scared by a huge spider shadow, cast by a very small, harmless spider.
- Broken Record: Porky is cracked over the head in the middle of singing "Home on the Range", and is left endlessly repeating the line "and the deer and the antelope pl-pl-..."
- The Cassandra: Sylvester is characterized this way throughout the cartoon.
- Cobweb of Disuse: The old hotel is covered in these.
- Cranial Eruption: One of the outcomes of the blow Porky sustains when he gets mashed with the shotgun.
- Failed a Spot Check: Apart from not noticing the attempts on his life, Porky is completely unaware he and Sylvester are in a ghost town.
- Finger in a Barrel: How Sylvester deals with the barrel of the shotgun in the bedroom wall while Porky is sleeping. The bullet goes right out his tail and leads to Sleeping Cap Damage.
- Hanging Around: The mice make two attempts to hang Porky: once at the front desk, though Sylvester knocks him over before the noose can go around his neck; and once in his bedroom, leading to Not What It Looks Like.
- Hat Damage: Porky pays no mind to the bullet hole in his sleeping cap."Uh, tell me, Sylvester, i-is there any, insanity in your family?"
- Here We Go Again!: As the cartoon ends, we see the eyes of the mice glaring out from behind the gauges on Porky's car.
- Pistol-Whipping: It's not actually shown, but it's clearly implied by the way Sylvester is wielding the shotgun (by the barrel) as he marches over to Porky.
- Possession Presumes Guilt: When the mice try to hang Porky while he's asleep, Sylvester quickly grabs a razor to cut the rope. Porky then wakes up, and immediately sees Sylvester holding both the noose that's around his neck and the razor, making it look like he's trying to murder him.
- Pun-Based Title: Of the phrase “cause for alarm” (and, perhaps, the 1951 film of that name). It’s not an artifact title, however — at least not on Sylvester’s end.
- Rage Breaking Point: When Porky states he think they should stay in town for a week, Sylvester decides he's had enough and gives him a Pistol-Whipping.
- Reused Character Design: The mouse that tries to attack Porky by swinging across the room with a knife looks more than a little bit like Wile E. Coyote.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Having subdued Porky with a Pistol-Whipping, Sylvester loads him and all of their luggage into the jalopy and hightails it out of the area in record time.
- The Voiceless: Sylvester never makes a peep throughout the cartoon.
- Wingding Eyes: As Porky is loaded onto the jalopy replaying "Home on the Range" like a Broken Record, we see the other outcome of the blow he sustained from the shotgun: star-shaped pupils in his eyes.
- You Have to Believe Me!: The entire trilogy is built around this trope, replete with Porky continually accusing Sylvester of being mentally unbalanced (especially in this specific short).
