Ali Baba Bound is a 1940 Looney Tunes cartoon, directed by Bob Clampett and starring Porky Pig.
In it, Porky Pig is serving the French Foreign Legion in the Sahara Desert.
While strutting and singing The Girlfriend of a Whirling Dervish outside of a bar one night, he meets an informant who sends him on a mission to warn a nearby fortress that notorious desert bandit Ali Baba and his gang of "dirty sleeves" plan to attack it.
Porky arrives to find the fort deserted, and must hold off the villain's assault all by himself.
Tropes:
- Adaptational Villainy: The original Ali Baba stole from the Forty Thieves, but he wasn't a villain. In this cartoon, Ali Baba is the leader of the "Dirty Sleeves" and wages a full-on attack on a desert fortress.
- Big Damn Heroes: Baby Dumpling's mother is instrumental in saving both him and Porky from Ali Baba in the end.
- Boss Subtitles: Ali Baba is introduced to us with on-screen words as "The Mad Dog Of The Desert".
- Bowdlerise:
- There are two edits done on the redrawn colorized version of this cartoon, which aired on the compilation show Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon. The first occurs when Porky is riding on his camel and spots Ali Baba's men running towards him. He exclaims "O-O-Oh, goodness gracious!" and rides his camel to the fort. In redrawn print, Ali Baba's men are omitted from this sequence. The second cut occurs when the mother camel kicks Ali Baba. In the original black and white version, Ali flies out of the fort, falls to the ground, and his men ask "what's the matter?" In the redrawn print, we only see Ali fly out of the fort. The portion of the sequence where he falls to the ground and his men question him is gone.
- Cartoon Network and Boomerang initially ran this short unedited. After the September 11th attacks, however, the scenes referring to one of Ali Baba's men (who has a bomb strapped to his head) as a member of the "suicide squad" was omitted, along with the scene of the bomber sitting next to a building.
- Door Judo: When the "Suicide Squad" guy charges, Porky and the camels open the front and back doors of the fort, so he ends up bypassing it and crashing into Ali Baba and his men instead.
- Mickey Mousing: When Porky rides on a baby camel, it walks right in sync to the beat of "The Streets of Cairo".
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: The informant Porky meets early in the film is a caricature of George Raft.
- Public Domain Animation
- Pun-Based Title: On Ali Baba and His Forty Thieves and Alabama Bound.
- Shout-Out:
- The bar Porky leaves is called the Brown Turban, a play on the then-popular Brown Derby chain of restaurants.
- The gag of George Raft flipping a coin with his feet is a reference to his role in Scarface1932.
- The letter Porky receives from Raft is headlined with "Confessions of a Nasty Spy", a reference to the film Confessions of a Nazi Spy. The letter is signed by "Tattle-tale Gray," a reference to a phrase popularized in ads for Fels Naptha Soap.
- Porky jokingly thanks Raft by saying "Ya nahaaaaasty spy!", a reference to comedian Joe Penner's catchphrase "You naaaaaasty man!".
- The baby camel is named Baby Dumpling, which is a reference to a character from Blondie.
- Standard Snippet: "The Streets of Cairo" plays when Porky is riding a baby camel.
- Stock Footage: A scene of the thieves running towards Porky is repurposed animation from the 1934 short Buddy of the Apes.
- Use Your Head: When Porky is defending the fortress, one thief uses another thief as a battering ram, with another thief feeding him headache pills between each strike.
- Visual Pun: Ali Baba is introduced by having him spy on Porky through literal Beer Glasses (as in, two beer bottles being used as binoculars).
- After he's identified as "The Mad Dog of the Desert", Ali Baba barks.
