Yeah, you really need a scorecard with this one! I’m sure it had audiences rolling in the aisles in 1941, though.
One line I found kinda creepy as a child: “What for you bury me in the cold, cold ground?”
Gotta be a reference.
All aroun’ de ol’ plantation, hear dat mournful sound!
All de d—ies am a-weepin’,
Massa’s in de cold, cold ground!
Stony Curtis. STONY CURTIS!!
I was listening to the '40s station on Sirius XM recently, and to my delight I heard “Open the Door, Richard” for the first time. I also recently heard on the same station “What Do They Do On a Rainy Night in Rio”, which Bugs is playing on the banjo in Long-Haired Hare.
I’m imaging this as a twilight zone episode, and a looney toons fan is the only one that hears this oldies station that only plays songs used in cartoons.
Perry Masonite.
Rock Quarry
James Bondrock
Alvin Brickrock
Superstone!
And my favorite TV show, Adamstone-12
^ Perry Gunite – “Rocks on the rocks. Bartender! put that in a dirty glass!”
(No one agrees on the spelling of Gunnite.)
Rock Roll – “And Rock is gonna roll with all his might in Bedrock, Twitch! Twitch!”
The one that confused me was an early Porky Pig cartoon where a strange figure emerges from a pond and says to Porky “Wanna buy a duck?”.
It wasn’t until the age of Google that I finally learned about Joe Penner.
I never understood the popularity of obscure actors like Hugh Herbert in 40’s cartoons. But I suppose it makes as much sense as the popularity of Lego commercial memes on YouTube.
They were hardly obscure back then. You might not have known their names right offhand, but you would certainly recognize them as bit players from Three Stooges shorts or tough guys in gangster movies, f’rinstance.
From post #1:
This note appears under that video:
The phrase “Don’t you believe it!” uttered ghostly a bass voice - a quote from of popular American radio broadcasts of the 1940s. Tom also pronounces the her in a series of “Mouse Trouble”.
Extremely explosive little mouse is a parody of the atomic bomb.
I take mild exception to calling stuff that’s before your time “weird.” 
“Come up and see me sometime” didn’t mean anything to my seven year old self in the mid 80s.
Most weren’t even that obscure during the 70s when I first saw the cartoons. A lot of them (e.g…, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and James Stewart) were still alive and active. Others that weren’t like Bogart and Gable, were still recognizable since their movies were still frequently shown on TV. (Keep in mind, these films and cartoons were “only” 30 to 40 years old during the 70s. They were as far removed to me then as stuff from the 80s and 90s is now.)
I didn’t know at all who Hugh Herbert was…until I googled. As soon as I saw his face --“Oh, that guy.”
A slightly different example: Carroll O’Connor was a relatively unknown actor in 1963, when he was cast as a Roman senator in Cleopatra. Audiences watching the movie ten years later invariably laughed when they saw Archie Bunker wearing a toga.
I used to drive my mother crazy watching TV in the '70s by always saying “Oh, that guy/chick. He/she was in Star Trek!” whether or not I knew their names.
I recall a couple of cartoons that revolved around auto races, in which one of the vehicles was a bathtub on wheels being rowed by one or more people*. The bathtub carried the caption “Floating Power;” it wasn’t until years later that I realized it referred to an innovation which was introduced by Chrysler in the 1930s that reduced engine vibration.
*ETA: Or perhaps the engine was in a bathtub; my recollection is not necessarily crystal-clear.
But this is where I think WB and others made a misstep. If they hadn’t featured “current” celebrities, the cartoons would be timeless. (side note: I remember the first time I heard ‘contemporary’ rock music in an animated movie. My first thought was ‘THIS is not going to age well.’)
NARRATOR: “Nooo, it didn’t.”
You don’t see Disney having a George Clooney cameo in Moana, or interrupting SOUL by drawing a so-detailed-it-doesn’t-fit-the-style Kim Kardashian in the afterlife…
I think I might have seen a pop culture reference in an episode of “Family Guy”, though.
For my 7 year old self, if I knew who they were, they weren’t celebrities so much as one liners. Al Jolsen sang Mammy (in blackface no less) and that’s all he ever did. Jimmy Cagney says “you dirty rat”, and that’s it. Jack Benny plays the violin and is a miser. Cary Grant says “Judy, Judy Judy”.
Watching too much Rich Little on Hollywood Squares didn’t help my lack of historical knowledge of these former celebrities. 
Humphrey Bogart shows up in a Bugs Bunny cartoon right out of Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and if I wasn’t for wikipedia I still wouldn’t know what he was doing, because I still haven’t see it.
Then you probably didn’t get the line “We don’ need no steenkin’ badges!” in Blazing Saddles either.
After she saw Airplane! for the first time, I had to explain to my daughter that she got only half the joke when she laughed at “The old woman who spoke Jive.”