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I Love to Singa

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I Love to Singa is a Merrie Melodies cartoon that was released on July 18, 1936 and directed by Tex Avery.

Plot[]

A young owlet named Owl Jolson, born in a family of classical cantor music-loving, anti-Jazz owls, wants to sing jazz instead of indulging in his parents more traditional and stodgy tastes, such as "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes" to piano accompaniment. The fact that Owl Jolson sings jazz as opposed to classical cantor music unlike his three older brothers makes his mother faint out of disbelief and frustrates his Jewish-accented disciplinary father, Fritz Owl.

Soon enough, Fritz Owl gets fed up of his son singing jazz which goes against the family values despite the family's best attempts to make him sing classical cantor like the rest of the family, and kicks his son Owl Jolson out, where he runs off to enter a radio amateur contest. While kicking his son out of the house, Fritz Owl rants "You hotcha! You crooner! You falsetta! You jazz singer! You...you...you...!" He angrily slams the door, then suddenly reopens it to add "...phooey!", which Owl Jolson admits how neglectful his father is ("That's my....pop!"). Fritz Jolson's kinder and more sympathetic wife gets worried of their youngest owlet Owl Jolson, claiming that Fritz's actions to be too hasty, and starts tearfully calling the police to find Owl Jolson. While listening to the police band radio broadcast, Fritz's wife worries aloud "I wonder if they found my little boy," to which the policeman heard on the radio replies, "No, we didn't, lady!"

Meanwhile, over at the a radio amateur contest, there is a series of comical radio audition gags, all which were rejected by the contest's radio host, Jack Bunny (a rabbit caricature of Jack Benny);

  • A green canary playing a few bars of "Listen to the Mockingbird" on the harmonica.
  • A blackbird in the blue jacket playing a few bars of "Nola", composed by Felix Arndt, on the saxophone.
  • The bluebird with the accordion briefly playing "Turkey in the Straw" on the accordion.
  • The black, operatic bird singing a line from the silent film Laugh, Clown, Laugh, even though the lyrics to the theme song don't have those actual words (this version was later used in "Yankee Doodle Daffy" when Porky Pig opened the door and saw Daffy Duck dressed as the clown singing, then shut the door).[3]
  • The overweight female hen (voiced by Berneice Hansell) got only a few notes of "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" sung in an impossibly high-pitched voice before being rejected. But due to the hen's chubby appearance, she is much too wide to fall all the way through the trap door, so she continues singing while stuck in the trap door at the midsection. Jack Bunny takes the matter into his own hands, and swiftly conks the hen across the head with a mallet, knocking her down the trap door. Once she falls into the trap door, a loud crash is heard.
  • The country bird stuttered through the first and almost all of the second verse of the nursery rhyme Simple Simon before rejecting himself.

Fritz's wife hears her son on the radio, and she and the rest of the family go to see their son. When the owlet finds out about his family's presence, he starts singing badly "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes". The radio show host is then about to activate the trap door, until Fritz suddenly realizes his son's true potential and allows him to freely sing jazz, which is soon followed with the entire family joining Owl Jolson singing and dancing to jazz. The owlet receives first prize for the contest. As the cartoon irises out, the first place trophy still remains on the black screen, but not until Owl Jolson reopens the screen using the iris-out and takes it back.

Availability[]

Streaming[]

Censorship[]

When this cartoon was shown on TNT's short-lived series, The Rudy and Gogo Show, two scenes were edited for time constraints (other airings of this cartoon outside TNT's The Rudy and Gogo Show were instead shown uncut, including on TBS, Cartoon Network and Boomerang) [4]:

  • Owl Jolson being forced to sing "To Cilia" and interjecting it with "I Love to Singa" before his parents catch him and he gets thrown out of the house.
  • Some of the failed auditions for Jack Bunny's radio program.

In Popular Culture[]

The cartoon has, in recent years, taken on something of a cult following:

  • In the "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" episode of the adult cartoon South Park, Eric Cartman and Officer Barbrady lapse into Owl Jolson's odd song-and-dance routine whenever they get hit with an alien beam. In general, the excessively rounded faces of the South Park characters echo those of early cartoon characters, including the owls in "I Love to Singa".
  • In Warners' 2003 film Looney Tunes Back in Action, Owl Jolson's dance sequence from I Love to Singa repeatedly appears on the ACME chairman's video screen, since he cannot properly operate his remote control.
  • The song also appears as a Merrie Melodie sung by Gossamer in The Looney Tunes Show episode "Gribbler's Quest". In addition, Owl Jolson appears only in The Looney Tunes Show opening.

Gallery[]

References[]

  1. ↑ I Love To Singa at The Big Cartoon DataBase
  2. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX0F3FkIuUY&feature=youtu.be
  3. ↑ "My Time is Your Time". The Odd Couple. Retrieved on 2012-09-19.
  4. ↑ http://www.intanibase.com/gac/looneytunes/censored-i-j.aspx


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