In that weird way that a conversation can sometimes go, my cubicle-mate and I went from The Thompson Twins to Owl Jolson. On the way there we found out that “Drink to me only with thine eyes” has its own wiki page.
Which bought us right back to I Like To Singa. I asked him where he first saw the cartoon short. He said, “On TV. As a kid. On some. . . show.” Since we are around the same age and grew up in the same area, I wondered which show. I first saw it as an adult. My father bought my then pre-school children a 12 hour(!) videotape (remember those?) filled with very old cartoons. Little Audrey was on it as was Little Lulu. Very, very early versions of Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd and Daffy Duck. And tons and tons of Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes with the bouncy sing-a-long bal. Man, I wish my kids hadn’t watched that thing till it broke.
When I was young I watched The Bugs Bunny Show (with this theme song) but I do not remember them showing cartoons from the '20s and 30s on it. Nowadays the whippersnappers have Cartoon Network and Boomerang.
Do you remember seeing really old cartoons on TV? Do you remember when and where and the name of the shows? I’d love to peek at them.
Cartoons were generally shown on local kiddie shows, who would buy packages of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies (like I Like to Singa). The names of the shows would vary by area. Back then, one of the New York City stations would have Terrytoons’s “silent cartoons,” with Farmer Al Falfa, many dating from before sound.
Nearly all the cartoons on the air were theatrical ones that were syndicated. Crusader Rabbit was the first one produced for TV (children’s shows made for TV before that used puppets – Time for Beany, Diver Dan etc., and both types were being produced into the mid-60s).
The tape you’re talking about probably contained theatrical cartoons that were getting one more recycling.
As a kid (in the 70s) I saw cartoons on TV, both on The Bugs Bunny Show that the OP mentioned, and in the mornings when the local station and/or cable superstation showed half-hour blocks of cartoons as “Bugs Bunny and Friends” or something like that.
I don’t remember seeing the Owl Jolson cartoon, but there are plenty of other specific cartoons that I do remember seeing. I saw the Owl Jolson cartoon that the OP refers to, maybe for the first time, relatively recently as an adult on one of the “Looney Tunes Golden Collections.”
I grew up watching those old cartoons. One thing I only caught onto recently was that the father owl in I Love to Singa says what sounds like “You think you’re Chrysler?” But he isn’t referring to the car company or its president – he’s really talking about violinist Fritz Kreisler, who was famous back then. (How many famous violinists can you name today?)
Kreisler was particularly interesting because (as I’ve read the story) he couldn’t find enough solo violinist pieces, so he wrote his own in the style of other composers. The Wikipedia page calls these “pastiches”, but other sources say that he passed them off as the real compositions of famous composers
I watched all those great cartoon shorts on TV in the late 1950s and early 1960s–and can even sing the lyrics to the Loony Tunes and Merry Melodies themes!
I know I saw the Owl Jolson cartoon on TV in the late 70s/early 80s. There were a couple of stations that played blocks of those old cartoons in the morning and in the early afternoon after school let out. The old Merrie Melodies, Tom & Jerry, Looney Toons…
Looking around, I found this. “Time for Spring, I say!” Boy, they made cartoons beautiful back then.
I remember originally seeing the Owl Jolson cartoon, among many other Warner Brothers shorts, on “The Ray Rayner Show”, a weekday morning kids’ show on WGN in Chicago during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
I moved from Chicago to Green Bay in 1975; there, WBAY had a weekday afternoon show (ISTR it ran at 4pm). It was a half-hour show, enough time to show 3 WB shorts, with lots of commercials crammed in between them.
At that same time, ABC had a Saturday morning show in which they’d show WB cartoons (that’s the last link which the OP mentions). They would intersperse the older theatrical shorts with little bits featuring Bugs, Daffy, etc. appearing as sort of vaudeville performers. That show, as I recall, only ran the later WB shorts (from the 1950s and 1960s – you got lots of Road Runner and Speedy Gonzalez).
I was at work one night playing the second selection here, when my considerably-younger-than-me, twenty-something coworker was passing by. She heard the music and stopped to ask me if it was the same song from “that cartoon”. She’d never heard of Al Jolson but she knew the singing owl. This just tickled me no end for some reason. Generations connected by cartoons.
I remember seeeing I Like to Singa but can’t remember specifically when.
Let me pull up my rocking chair grab some prune juice and explain.
Back in the day, the Saturday morning kid-vid line-up was more more rigidly set. In the 70’s the classic era of Loonie Tunes (called the Bugs Bunny / Road Runner Hour) was a staple feature and there were the newer offerings such as Fat Albert, Hong Kong Fooey, Scooby Doo among many others. Each year featured a different line-up and Saturday mornings were spent in front of the tube alternating between the three big network channels.
Sunday mornings were a complete hodgepodge. The quality cartoons were reserved for Saturday network TV and Sundays were a vapid serving of leftovers. You got Johnny Quest which nobody really liked, Popeye and Sinbad cartoons mixed in and older versions of Looney Toons (the ones where Bugs and Elmer look decidedly different) with some Three Stooges occassionally thrown in. These you had to find on the auxillary channels as the big three would run their Sunday morning news programs.
My guess is that I must have seen I Like to Singa during one of the Sunday free-for-alls that offered the occassional bright spot amidst a sea of dissatisfaction.
I mentioned above that some of the local stations would offer those old cartoons as morning and afternoon fare. I believe that we saw them on WPIX, a NYC station, even though we were in central PA. WPIX was carried on our cable line-up, and I do remember that after school was Magic Garden, that PIX!PIX!PIX!PIX! video-game-by-phone thing, and the old cartoons.
I got sick of watching Scooby Doo movies and Milo and Otis with my 4-year-old granddaughter, so I bought one of the the Looney Tunes collection CD’s so we could watch something I liked. And to think, she didn’t even know who Yosimite Sam was. I feel so proud that I’m responsible for imparting some culture to the next generation.
Surprisingly, she also loves Princess Bride. I thought she’d be too young.
I don’t remember ever seeing I Like to Singa, but I have it on my iPod and this thread made me get it out and listen to it! From this CD set. I want more, more, more.
For what it’s worth, that song was used in a South Park Episode, in the first season. I think it’s the one where Cartman gets probed by aliens and, among other side effects, it causes him to change his appearance and sing that song.
That could be where some of the younger dopers remember seeing it. I’m not that young, but I don’t remember the original cartoon.
Now that I think about it, we got WOR on our cable, too, so it was probably both of those stations we watched the cartoons on.
(Both of them also had the Broadway ads, too…I remember ads for Cats, Evita, La Cage aux Folles…hmmm. I wonder if I can blame turning out gay on WPIX?)
About this same time (guess it must have been around 1997), Cartoon Network ran a “100 Greatest Cartoons of All Time” weekend, and I Love To Singa was on it. That was the first time I recall seeing it, and Mrs. Wheelz and I both fell in love with it. I happened to have a videotape rolling so we watched it multiple times.
No more than a month later, we watched South Park for the very first time, and both busted a gut when the song came up. My wife’s exact words were: “NO WAY!!!”
