My Boy, Johnny is a 1944 animated short film (7 minutes) directed by Eddie Donnelly, produced by Paul Terry at the Terrytoons studio.
The short does not have any particular story. Rather, it's a look forward to what will happen after the war is over and all the boys have come home from overseas. Husbands will come home to wives (and roosters will come home to an entire hen coop), fathers will come home to children. After the men come home they'll go back to work. Industry will boom, crops will be sown, and new technology will revolutionize how people live.
Tropes:
- All Women Are Lustful: The rooster coming back to the farm is immediately mobbed by a crowd of hens. He runs in terror.
- The Face of the Sun: The optimistic nature of the cartoon is established by the sun beatifically smiling in one of the first shots.
- It's Raining Men: Unusual example in that parachutists (namely, ducks) are jumping out of airplanes to come home. A mouse jumps out of a plane and parachutes to earth using a woman's bra.
- Living Statue: The Statue of Liberty does a backflip of joy when seeing the ships and planes bringing American soldiers home.
- Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: Long eyelashes and lipstick on the duck's wife as she greets him.
- Unwanted Harem: The rooster is horrified when he comes home and sees a whole coop full of hens, who promptly swarm down upon him.
- Wartime Cartoon: An unusual one in that it anticipates what will happen after the soldiers come back home.
- Weddings for Everyone: The cartoon ends by anticipating that "the pin-up girl" will become "the loving wife". That part came true, as evidenced by the massive post-war baby boom.
- Zeerust: A good chunk of the cartoon is devoted to fanciful predictions of the future. They start out wacky, with visions of an automated home where robot arms reach out to brush the homeowner's teeth. Then they get wackier, with a scene that has a plane like a cruise ship with an outdoor pool in the sky, and a scene where people fly around with individual tiny helicopters tied to their waists.
