Finding and Watching the 1958 Chuck Jones Cartoon
The Great Piggy Bank Robbery is a 1958 Merrie Melodies short directed by Chuck Jones, produced by Warner Bros. Cartoons. It stars Marvin the Martian and his dog K-9, who get involved in a scheme to rob a piggy bank. The cartoon ran for about seven minutes and featured the usual Jones-style subversion of the characters' established personas — Marvin here is less the dignified threat from Marvin the Martian segments and more of a scheming, bumbling anti-hero trying to pull off a heist that goes wrong. If you are trying to track this down, you are going to run into a few practical problems. The cartoon is in the public domain. That sounds like good news, but it means it is also scattered across dozens of low-quality YouTube uploads, DVD bootlegs with no real commentary or context, and a handful of streaming services that may or may not have the rights at any given time. Warner Bros. has not made it a centerpiece of their catalog, so availability fluctuates.
The Great Piggy Bank Robbery — Where to Find It
The most reliable source is the Internet Archive. There are multiple uploads of it there, mostly scanned from older DVD pressings. One particular rip, sourced from a Warner Home Video DVD release, is about 540p and passes the quality threshold for casual viewing. Another upload from the same era has the original theatrical aspect ratio intact, which matters because some later re-releases were cropped to 16:9. I spent about two hours comparing three different uploads last year to figure out which one was closest to the original broadcast version, and the difference was only noticeable if you were actually looking for it. There is no official high-definition remaster floating around. Warner Archive has this title on their CD-free DVD service for purchase, but it is sold as a standalone disc and you are paying around $15 for a single seven-minute cartoon. It is technically the cleanest legal source I know of, but it is not exactly a good value unless you are building a specific collection. YouTube remains the easiest route despite the quality complaints. Search for the full title and sort by upload date to find the better scans. Avoid the ones with "LOFI" or "ASMR" in the title. Those are people who have taken public domain content and added their own audio over it, which muddies the original soundtrack. The audio on this short is by Milt Franklyn, and it is worth hearing as it was mixed originally.
One thing most people miss when looking for this cartoon is that it was originally released as part of a package with another short, Speedy Gonzales. If you find a DVD that lists the programming block rather than individual titles, you might actually be getting the full theatrical pairing. The pairing itself is not particularly meaningful — these two shorts have nothing to do with each other — but it is useful context if you want to understand the release structure of late-era Warner Bros. theatrical cartoons. The main difficulty with this cartoon is not finding it. It is figuring out which version you are actually watching. Different distributors have edited different aspects. Some remove the opening title card. Others compress the audio. One 2004 DVD pressing had the color timing shifted enough that the blues in Marvin's uniform looked almost purple. That was fixed in a later pressing, but if you are doing any kind of serious comparison work, you need to know which pressing you are using. I ran into this exact problem when I was putting together a reference list of Chuck Jones-directed Marvins for a personal project. I had three versions open on separate screens and the color grading was so different between them that I could not accurately compare the character design evolution across his work. I ended up going straight to the original negative elements through the UCLA Film and Television Archive, which gave me a clean 2K scan. That is the version I use now as my reference, and I will not trust any other source for accuracy work on this short.
Get the Full Details
For most people, the Internet Archive rip is fine. It is not perfect, but it is the best free option that stays reasonably close to the original theatrical presentation. Just check the aspect ratio and make sure the audio is the original mono track and not a later stereo remix.
