This is not going to work...
Little 'Tinker is a 1948 cartoon short by Tex Avery. One fine morning, B.O. Skunk gets up, showers, douses himself with perfume, and goes walking through the woods in search of a mate. From a distance, he seems to have quite a bit of sex appeal, but anytime he approaches a girl up close, his smell drives her away in revulsion. Then Cupid appears and gives B.O. a self-help book entitled Advice to the Love-Worn by Beatrice Bare Fax. B.O. tries out the tips inside it with some effect, but one by one, they ultimately fail to produce the desired effect. Doing a Frank Sinatra impression is particularly successful and drives an enormous flock of rabbit fangirls crazy, but attraction invariably turns to repulsion when they sense his odor. Is the poor little skunk doomed to stay single and repulsive forever?This work provides examples of:
- Aesop: Essentially, it's "Birds of a feather flock together". Find a partner with whom you will be compatible.
- Ass in a Lion Skin: Near the end when B.O. Skunk tries to woo a female by painting his fur like a fox. The girl fox he meets turns out, after they fall into a creek and their paint washes off, actually to be another skunk in disguise. Cue them kissing.
- Balcony Wooing Scene: One of the things that B.O. tries is to woo a raccoon standing on her balcony up on a tree by serenading her in a Romeo costume.
- Cupid's Arrow: Played with. Cupid appears and attempts to help B.O. find a mate, not with a literal arrow, but by giving him a self-help book. Initially, this book is of little use, for most of it fails to address the main problem – B.O.'s terrible smell. Finally, Cupid points out the advice in the book to camouflage yourself. B.O. paints himself to look like a fox and meets a lady skunk who has also painted herself to look like a fox. Having finally found a mate with mutual compatibility, the cartoon closes with B.O. throwing away the book.
- Casanova Wannabe: B.O. romances every cute female he sees, mostly rabbits and also two squirrels and a raccoon. They do reciprocate...until they smell his odor.
- Driven to Suicide: After several failed attempts to attract a mate, B.O. is desperate enough to put a bottle of poison to his mouth. Cupid snatches the bottle away and points out the only tip in the self-help book that comes close to being relevant: CAMOUFLAGE!! This brings about the denouement: B.O. paints himself to look like a fox. He spots a lady fox and they instantly fall in love; they end up falling in a creek, the paint washes off, and it turns out that she is actually a skunk who had had the same idea.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: Everyone is repulsed by B.O. Skunk's odor no matter what he tries, and he is almost Driven to Suicide. He tries one last trick and paints himself to resemble a fox, but then both he and his mate fall into a creek and he is exposed for the skunk he is, only to discover that his mate was also a skunk trying the same thing... cue the Big Damn Kiss.
- Expy: B.O. would be a composite of Flower the Skunk from Bambi and Pepé Le Pew from Looney Tunes. He may also be based on the main character on the Happy Harmonies short "Poor Little Me".
- Eyelash Fluttering: A bunny bats her eyelashes at B.O. One of said eyelashes even takes on the shape of a beckoning finger.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: No matter what disguise or stunt that B.O. tries, girls always get scared off once they're close enough to smell his inherent odor. Viewers may thus figure out the final twist when the female "fox" doesn't react the same way the other girls did.
- Forgotten Trope: The short reaches its zenith in a sequence where B.O. impersonates Frank Sinatra and croons to a big group of female rabbits. He puts on a suit that he shrinks with water on himself to make it – and himself – thin as a rail, then starts crooning on a stage to great appeal. As he sings, various things appear around him, such as a scale on which he is lighter than a feather, an oxygen mask and tank, an iron lung, and finally an undertaker who has come to measure him. All this is a parody of Frank Sinatra's cult and image, including in particular a jab at the latter's supposedly unhealthy thinness.
- Ghibli Hills: The woodland setting of the short is very much this. There are flowers everywhere. Evidently, we have a parody of Bambi here.
- Instant Gravestone: An elderly rabbit, in a fit of mad lust for B.O. Skunk's Frank Sinatra impression, jumps out of her wheelchair, does cartwheels, jumps into the air and lands in the ground. A tombstone then appears that reads "Oh Frankie!". Think she ever got out of there? Apparently, Tex Avery couldn't even make a cute cartoon without being morbid.
- Kiss Up the Arm: B.O. thinks he's doing this to a female rabbit he's trying to woo, but she runs off because of his smell and he ends up kissing along a tree branch before kissing an owl on the beak, who promptly passes out.
- Literally Falling Through the Cracks: The skunk disguises himself as Frank Sinatra, and as with many cartoons about Sinatra in the forties, there are a lot of jokes about how rail-thin he was, which includes falling through a knothole in the stage.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed:
- The name of the author of the self-help book, "Beatrice Bare Fax", is a parody of Dear Beatrice Fairfax, the name of the first newspaper advice column (which was actually written by a Marie Manning).
- B.O. disguises himself as Frank Sinatra. Most of the jokes on this section revolve around how thin Frankie was in the '40s.
- The black rabbit saying "Love that man!" is based on Beulah, the black maid from Fibber McGee and Molly.
- Punny Name: B.O. Skunk (B.O. being a vernacular abbreviation for body odor).
- Shrunk in the Wash: To disguise himself as Frankie Sinatra, B.O. Skunk puts on an oversize suit and pours water over it from a watering can, causing it to shrink until his body is squeezed into a stick=thin shape.
- Smelly Skunk: B.O. in spades. Presumably the lady skunk with whom he hooks up at the end, had a similar problem.
- Stuffed Into A Trash Can: A tall, odd-looking female rabbit hits on B.O. She then smells him and promptly stuffs him into a trash can.
- Wild Take: But of course. Notably, Tex has transferred the horny reactions of his Wolf character onto a horde of cute little girl bunnies.
- Wilting Odor: When B.O. leaves the tree in which he lives, the flowers lining his front path instantly wilt.
- Woodland Creatures: Played with and parodied.
