I Love to Singa
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"I Love to Singa" is a song written Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg for the 1936 Warner Bros. film The Singing Kid. It is performed three times in the film: first by Al Jolson and Cab Calloway, then by the Yacht Club Boys and Jolson, and finally again by Calloway and Jolson.
During this period, it was customary for Warners to have their animation production partner Leon Schlesinger Productions make Merrie Melodies cartoons based upon songs from their features. The resulting short subject, I Love to Singa, was directed by Tex Avery and released by Warners on July 18 1936.
Plot
The cartoon, one of the earliest Merrie Melodies produced in Technicolor, is recognized as one of Avery's early masterpeices, depicting the story of a young owl who wants to sing jazz instead of his parents' preferred genres of classical music and opera (in this respect, the cartoons is inspired by Al Jolson's film The Jazz Singer). The young lad (voiced by Tommy Bond, best known as "Butch" of Our Gang (Little Rascals) fame) is kicked out of the house by his disciplinarian violinist father (voiced by Billy Bletcher), and runs off to enter a radio amateur contest. The boy (billing himself as "Owl Jolson") wins the contest, but only after his strict father sees his son's potential and allows him to freely sing jazz.
The cartoon is loaded with throwaway jokes, a technique which would soon become Avery's trademark:
- While kicking his son out of the house, Papa Owl rants "You groaner! You hotcha! You falsetta! You...you...you...!" He slams the door, then suddenly reopens it to add "...phooey!"
- The radio show host is a rabbit named "Jack Bunny", an obvious reference to Jack Benny.
- One of the amateur show contestants is a rather rotund hen. She steps to the microphone, and immediately begins singing in an impossibly tiny voice (provided by Bernice Hansen). The buzzer is rung on her and the trap door that ejects losing contestents is activated, but 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 concks the hen across the head with a mallet, knocking her down the trap door.
- While listening to the police band radio broadcast, Mama Owl worries aloud "I wonder if they found my son", to which the policeman heard on the radio replies, "no, we didn't, lady!"
Cultural influence
The I Love to Singa cartoon has taken on something of a cult following in recent years. In the "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" episode of the infamous adult cartoon South Park, Eric Cartman lapses into Owl Jolson's odd song-and-dance routine whenever he gets hit with an alien beam. 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.
