The short starts with a man at church ringing the bell to signal the beginning of the service. The scene shifts to the house of Porky Pig whose mother is calling to him to come downstairs. A younger Porky comes flying down the handrail of the stairs just stopping before crashing into a vase. His mother proceeds to give him a nickel for the collection plate at church including a disclaimer about not spending the money on candy. Porky reassures his mother and leaves. Along the way he runs into a bully standing alongside a wooden fence. The bully is practicing smoking tricks with a cigar when Porky arrives and chides him for smoking while underage. The bully then gets in Porky's face sarcastically accusing him of being a tough guy. After a few moments of arguing Porky offers a bet to prove he is not a wimp. The deal being the cigar for the nickel. Enticed by the proposition, the bully quickly gives up his cigar. Porky in turn tries to repeat the same set of tricks — with disastrous results. Porky soon goes into a haze and stumbles into a smoke shop. An anthropomorphic cloud shrinks Porky in size and then introduces himself as someone all smokers were well acquainted with, "Nick O'Teen". Nick then offers Porky all the smoking he can handle, and suddenly, a wide variety of tobacco products and smoking devicescome to life to force feed Porky everything from chewing tobacco to cigarettes, all set to the song "Little Boys Shouldn't Smoke". At the culmination of the nightmare Porky awakens and rushes to church. As he is sitting reading his hymnal the collection plate starts coming towards him when he starts to panic. He races out of the church and grabs the nickel from the bully. He thrusts the cigar into the bully's mouth as it promptly explodes. He hurries back to church just in time to give his offering and the cartoon ends with himself promising to never smoke again, for the rest of his life.
Edited versions
The version of this cartoon that aired on Nickelodeon, the syndicated Merrie Melodies Show, and Cartoon Network was a colorized version that had the following edits from the original black-and-white version :
*The beginning of the "Little Boys Shouldn't Smoke" song where four matchsticks strike themselves and burn out to form blackface was cut on Nickelodeon and The Merrie Melodies Show. On Cartoon Network, the scene was left intact, but the blackface was changed to red during the colorization process.
*The part where a pipe cleaner sticks his head in a dirty pipe and comes out looking and singing like Cab Calloway was cut on The Merrie Melodies Show and Cartoon Network. It was left uncut in the early 1990s on Nickelodeon, but by the mid-to-late 1990s, the scene was edited out, though in the flashback after the "NO SMOKING" cigarette march, one can see the part that was cut on Nickelodeon.
*The short shot of Porky tied to a post while a tribe of Indian pipes dance around him was cut on Cartoon Network.
Availability
Wholly Smoke can be seen uncut and digitally remastered on the ' DVD set, and the ' DVD and Blu-ray set.
