Sing Me A Cartoon 3: More Mickey Mouse
By 1929, the Mickey Mouse shorts had attained a theme song – a deliberately corny, purposefully rustic opus called “Minnie’s Yoo-Hoo”.
By 1929, the Mickey Mouse shorts had attained a theme song – a deliberately corny, purposefully rustic opus called “Minnie’s Yoo-Hoo”.
By the end of 1929, the Mickey Mouse cartoons were enormously popular, not only with the general public, but with high-falutin’ film critics …and song-writers.
In 1923, British lyricist Ed Bryant and composer Hubert David found a new subject for a song which had been brought over from the States–Felix the Cat.
Disney is not usually associated with celebrity-caricature cartoons. But one of their Silly Symphonies included a Cab Calloway spoof with the same white suit …and the same degree of energy.
Cab Calloway could enliven a movie–whether feature-length or a musical or cartoon short–with the same energy he displayed on stage.
As most of us know, Cab Calloway did three shorts for Max Fleischer. They are familiar–old friends–to many of us animation buffs.
W’ere On Our Way To Rio was the third of the Technicolor Popeye’s – and one could argue the most lushly-animated cartoon Famous Studios ever produced.
Cartoons discovered the appeal of the Conga Dance, as demonstrated by its appearance in shorts from Warner Bros.. Terrytoons… and yes, Max Fleischer.
By the early 1960’s, theatrical Hollywood cartoons still found occasional inspiration in the idea of the game show–which was gong through its own crisis at the time.
During the late 1950’s, Warner Bros. released several cartoons spoofing individual television shows. It is these cartoons – Wideo Wabbit (1956) and People Are Bunny (1959) – that concern us here.