Why is Frank Sinatra portrayed the way he is in Looney Toons short “Book Revue”? Wikipedia’s entry describes his characture as being “gray, blanketed, emaciated” and he was pushed around in a wheelchair. Just by looking at him, I wouldn’t have guess that it was Frank Sinatra, especially the part about being in a wheelchair. And was it common at the time for him to be called “Frankie”? Along with the fainting girls?
Sinatra, in his teen idol days, was very, very slender. That kind of slender used to be called “sickly” then. He looked kind of like he was going to fall over any minute from hunger.
I remember a Warner Brothers “celebrity” cartoon where Sinatra kept slipping through the cracks in the floorboards of the stage…
One of the more interesting uses of the old-time Frankie caricature in old WB cartoons is a wartime cartoon called Swooner Crooner (which appears on the recently released Golden Collection Volume Three). Porky Pig runs the Flockheed factory, which makes eggs for the war effort. One day, his hens all stop laying eggs- they’re too busy listening to a chicken Frank Sinatra (again portrayed as being thin- in one scene, he can’t be seen behind his microphone). To retaliate, Porky hires a Bing Crosby rooster. There are also poultry caricatures of Cab Calloway, Jimmy Durante, and other celebrities of the day. Warner Brothers cartoons are full of celebrity caricatures.
They seemed to love poking fun at his physique (just as they enjoyed poking fun at Bing Crosby’s stable of unsuccesful racehorses)- in one Bugs Bunny cartoon where Bugs visits a Hollywood restaurant, Sinatra has a drink and sucks himself through the straw!