I like to watch old Warner Brothers cartoons from the '40s and '50s, but I’m always finding myself confounded by some kind of pop culture reference that made the original audience cracks up and leaves me thinking “What the heck was that about?”
The one that’s bugging me most at the moment has to do with a specific song, apparently titled “Carolina in the Morning” according to a Google search I ran on what I remembered of the lyrics. (“Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina in the moooooooooooooooooooooorning…”) It’s showed up in at least three cartoons that I’ve seen, one with Bugs Bunny, one with Daffy Duck and one with characters that I’ve since forgotten. When they sing it, it always ends with an identical string of scat/babble that doesn’t seem to belong with the song itself, but maybe that’s just another reference I’m missing.
The really perplexing one is the cartoon featuring Daffy Duck. In the 'toon there are a bunch of books which come to life, with characters stepping out and interacting. One of the books spawns a sickly caricature of Frank Sinatra, who sings a typical pointless string of "ba-ba-ba-boo"s and attracts flocks of fawning, fainting females. This incites the jealousy of Msr. Duck, who dons a powder blue zoot suit and a yellow “conk” hairstyle and takes the stage himself. (You can see the outfit here on the cover of the tape where I saw this cartoon, at Amazon.) He sings with a (Mexican?) accent and acts, of course, absolutely daffy. “Nossing could be feener than to be in Caroleener in ze maaaaaaawning…” Followed, of course, by the scat, which I think he did while somebody tried to drag him off stage/arrest him/something like that.*
Who, what, where, when, why? What’s the reference here?
- In the Bugs Bunny cartoon in which this song is sung, the scat portion is also during some sort of struggle. If there’s a significance, I dunno.