Exit, Pursued by a Stork

When the 1930 Hays Code banned pregnancy in film, birds took over the business of birth.

by Victoria Sturtevant via HNN on December 17, 2024

Book

It's All in the Delivery: Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy

Victoria Sturtevant

2024

Pregnancy, or expected “blessed events,” should never be discussed as such in screen stories. Most censor boards not only frown upon, but almost always delete any such references. Any direct or crude reference to pregnancy is considered out of place exactly as it would be in any normal society where children are present. It is entirely acceptable, of course, to refer to the baby that is expected, but any reference to conception, childbearing, and childbirth is considered improper for public discussion.

So wrote Olga J. Martin in Hollywood’s Movie Commandments: A Handbook for Motion Picture Writers and Reviewers (1937), designed to help film studios interpret the Production Code of 1930. In force until the late 1950s, the Production Code (commonly called the “Hays Code” after Will Hays, president of the agency tasked with enforcing it) provided content guidelines for U.S. film studios to avoid direct censorship from state and local film boards around the country. Though the code itself had little to say about pregnancy — only that “scenes of actual childbirth” were banned — officials like Martin made clear that neither the word “pregnant” nor the appearance of a “baby bump” would be permitted on screen.

During this era, then, films used a variety of euphemisms to communicate pregnancy: a character seen knitting little garments, fainting, craving pickles, or visiting a doctor, for instance, was almost certainly pregnant. A man buying or distributing cigars was a father-to-be. The stork who delivered babies by dropping them on doorsteps or down chimneys was less easily integrated into live-action narrative, but quickly became a staple in animated stories of marriage and childbearing.

Stork/baby folklore is quite ancient and ambivalent (it may originate with the Greek goddess Hera turning a rival into a bird), and travels through Hans Christian Andersen’s dark fairy tale The Storks (1839), but contemporary stork discourse in the U.S. is heavily sanitized: storks have largely been reduced to a handy tool to divert curious children wondering how babies are made. But in the hands of unruly code-era animators, the stork also provided a means to reference the facts of life without drawing the ire of industry censors.

Though even roundabout references to birth control and reproductive choice largely disappeared from live-action films of the code era, those discourses survived through the euphemism of the stork. The stork was rather perfect as a replacement for the figure of the pregnant woman, precisely because it produced a complete separation between the woman’s body and the expected baby. And in this space of the safely hygienic, the stork also made room for some discourses of childbearing that were heavily repressed in live-action features.

A familiar scene from Dumbo (1941), for instance, shows an elegant squad of delivery storks under a bright moon flying in formation like synchronized swimmers. They drop their bundles to the circus animals below, and every mother animal is delighted with her new offspring. The stork method of reproduction is uniquely painless and convenient. It is strange, then, that the lyrics to the accompanying song, “So look out for Mr. Stork / And let me tell you, friend / Don’t try to get away / He’ll find you in the end,” sound almost menacing, as if the stork is an FBI agent on the trail of a supercriminal. Playful as they are, the lyrics acknowledge an alternate reality, where childbearing may not be joyful or individuals may fairly long to “get away” from the burdens and expenses of pregnancy and parenthood. Stork stories of the 1930s–1950s, particularly in animated form, frequently made room for ideas that were suppressed in code-approved comic representations of pregnancy, including the desire for contraception and anxieties about adoption.

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The acknowledgment that not all reproduction is wanted referenced a social attitude that was spreading during the difficult years of the Depression, when even middle-class families felt the burdens of widespread economic hardship. Both Mickey’s Nightmare (1932) and the later Beau Ties (1945) are animated shorts featuring male characters dreaming about marriage, happy fantasies that turn into nightmares when the stork goes berserk, delivering dozens of mischievous children who bring chaos and destruction to their homes. Another animated short, Puzzled Pals (1933), dramatizes a stork’s dilemma when faced with a town where no one is willing to accept delivery of a baby. First the stork flies over the town and finds that his official destination is blocked, with the chimney covered, all windows boarded up, and a Detour sign posted on the roof. The stork then flies around town, looking for an alternate destination, but finds that every resident has taken precautions to prevent a new delivery: all the chimneys are covered over, and signs on the houses announce increasingly ludicrous reasons for quarantine, including measles, scarlet fever, leprosy, and seven-year itch. The stork soon finds an uncovered roof and is about to drop the baby down the chimney when five children run out of the house and begin shooting at it with toy guns and arrows. They are quickly joined by fourteen infant siblings and two parents. The father uses a hunting rifle and the mother a tommy gun to defend their home from the unwanted delivery. The cartoon is not subtle and boldly jokes about a rational desire for birth control in overstretched American families and neighborhoods.

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All’s Fair at the Fair (1938), on the other hand, includes a birth control joke so sly you can barely catch it. A couple of country bumpkins, Elmer and Miranda, stroll around the world’s fair exclaiming, “Wonderful!” as they gawk at all the fantastical modern innovations. A knitting machine? “Wonderful.” A machine that makes furniture from logs? “Wonderful.” Eventually, they approach a machine that produces prefab houses. As the houses roll off the production line, a stork approaches and drops a baby in each chimney. “Ain’t that wonderful?” muses Miranda. “Nope,” replies Elmer, at which his wife covers her mouth and giggles. The idea that not all couples want children was still a little bit naughty and particularly funny coming from this wholesome and naive pair. They may be baffled by the wonders of modern technology, but they understand storks perfectly well.

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Storks were useful surrogates for the concept of birth control in the studio era because they drove a small wedge into the idea of reproduction’s inevitability and divine predestination. Animated stork shorts of the 1930s–1950s show the process of delivery as something that does not always run smoothly — rather than being messengers from some daunting higher power, cartoon storks are often all too fallible and introduce chaos, obstacles, transgression, and choices into the story of reproduction.

While live-action films of the same period largely erase non-white reproductive practices, stork narratives also make room for a playfully diverse perspective on reproduction. A 1933 Warner Bros. cartoon, Shuffle Off to Buffalo, shows storks arriving in a sort of baby factory in heaven, where elves diaper and feed preborn babies and then dispatch them to earth. The popular song referenced by the title provides a rhythm for the factory and refers to the tradition of honeymooning at Niagara Falls, in upstate New York. So although all the action is set in the chaste baby factory, the excitement of marital consummation happening down on earth is always exuberantly present.

With sexuality thus relegated to a supporting role, much of the film’s visual humor is based on ethnic jokes: a Jewish baby is stamped on the bottom with a “Kosher for Passover” seal of approval; Father Time pulls two babies out of a freezer to send in reply to a request from “Mr. and Mrs. Nanook of the North.” These brief and stereotypical appearances relegate nonwhite reproduction to a marginal and humorous position, while white babies predominate, rolling by on a conveyor belt to be diapered, fed, and prepared for delivery. Though it was certainly a labor-saving device for the animators to render the white babies identical, this technique also produced a text that supports the idea that white babies are standard and normal, while minoritized babies are marked out as unusual and “funny.” Very much in the tradition of vaudeville ethnic play (singer Eddie Cantor makes a cameo appearance), Shuffle Off to Buffalo is a sly, messy, ambivalent celebration of sexuality and reproduction that could exist only in the world of animated fantasy.

As the economic troubles of the 1930s gave way to the baby boom of the late 1940s and 1950s, animated storks reversed course a bit and frequently came to represent national fertility in overdrive. The Farm of Tomorrow (1954) is a faux newsreel touting innovative animal crossbreeding. The narrator explains, “Here, we’ve crossed the old reliable stork with a big-horn elk to accommodate you impatient newlyweds, who are in a hurry for a big family.” The image shows a stork with a giant rack of horns, babies hung from each branch like Christmas tree ornaments. Baby Bottleneck (1946) starts with a drunken stork at the Stork Club complaining about its hectic delivery schedule. Labor conditions at the bustling baby factory are so excessive and chaotic that Porky Pig is installed as the new production chief, with predictably disastrous results.

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Drunken storks are everywhere in animated films of the 1950s, mirroring the reproductive recklessness of the baby boom. These untrustworthy reproductive agents frequently deliver babies to the wrong houses, resulting in cross-species adoption narratives that work through stories of unwitting parents doting on genetically unrelated babies. A Mouse Divided (1953) sees a drunken stork bringing a mouse baby to a family of cats. Goo Goo Goliath (1954) shows a stork too drunk to carry a giant baby all the way to its new home at the top of a beanstalk. Giving up, the stork instead takes the baby to a human-size couple, who raise it as their own. Lambert the Sheepish Lion (1951) sees a stork leave a lion cub for sheep parents to raise. In Apes of Wrath (1959), a drunken stork loses an ape baby, so the stork kidnaps Bugs Bunny and delivers him to the ape parents instead.

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These twin concerns, birth control and adoption, showcase the flexibility of the stork narrative in surfacing the hidden features of American reproductive practice. A final example dramatizes both ideas. In Stork Naked (1955), when a drunken stork delivers an egg to Daffy Duck and his wife, Daffy tries unsuccessfully to fight him off. Stuck with the egg, Daffy is delighted to see that the hatchling is a baby stork, not a baby duck. He immediately wraps up the chick and flies it back where it came from, muttering triumphantly, “For once, that stork is gonna get a taste of his own medicine.” A bit of the subversive birth control logic of 1930s storks combined with the wrong-delivery excesses of the 1950s result in a portrait of the stork’s role as a sly avatar of reproductive ambivalence.