Jerry and David Zucker have a rep for borrowing material from old films to make new ones. So it should come as no surprise that David’s forthcoming An American Carol, the conservative fantasia opening on 10.3, is, according to a certain guy in the loop, based on a 69 year-old Porky Pig cartoon called Old Glory.

Carol uses the same basic idea as Old Glory — i.e., a character deemed insufficiently patriotic changes his tune after being “turned” by some ghosts from American history. In Zucker’s film it’s an unpatriotic documentarian based on Michael Moore who needs to be aroused; in the 1939 cartoon it’s a chubby pink (pinko?) pig who can’t be bothered to memorize the pledge of allegiance.
As summarized more than once on this site, An American Carol is about a fatty named Michael Malone (Kevin Farley) undergoing a political change-of-heart after being visited by patriotic ghosts in the form of George S. Patton (Kelsey Grammer), George Washington (Jon Voight) and John F. Kennedy (Chriss Anglin), and coming to see the correctness of right-wing thinking.
In Old Glory, Porky Pig is visited in his sleep by Uncle Sam, who explains why the tiny little animal should respect the U.S. enough to learn the pledge. Sam provides a quick inspirational run-through of U.S. history (Nathan Hale, the Declaration of Independence, pioneers on the trail, Abraham Lincoln), which, sure enough, wakes Porky up in more ways than one.
David Zucker has previously helped create two projects that cribbed from older films so ripping off Old Glory (along with Charles Dickens‘ A Christmas Carol) wouldn’t be out of character. Airplane! (’80), which the Zuckers co-directed and co-wrote with Jim Abrahams, used the plot of Zero Hour (1957). And Brain Donors! (’92), which Jerry and David exec-produced, was “suggested” by the George S. Kaufman-Maury Riskind screenplay for A Night at the Opera.