"Birds Anonymous" and "Three Little Bops"
This review was fast lane comissioned by @krinsbez
In 1930, the Warner Bros cartoon series "Looney Toons" started playing, and pop culture history was made.
One year later, another Warner Bros cartoon series called "Merrie Melodies" started playing, and pop culture history, erm... well it kinda get slightly more complicated I guess.
Originally, Looney Toons was a series of black-and-white cartoon shorts featuring a mostly fixed cast of characters. Merrie Melodies was meant to be a slower-releasing, higher-effort companion series in full color. Over the years though, Looney Toons started releasing in color, and its characters started appearing in Merry Melodies, so by the time 1950 rolled around the two series were pretty much indistinguishable. Most of the same people working on them. Most of the same characters and conventions. Eventually, the WB animators started making episodes and then randomly assigning them to one series or the other, and in common parlance "Looney Toons" came to refer to both.
Both Looney Toons AND Merrie Melodies, incidentally, had their names playing off of WB competitor Walt Disney's own animated short series that came out just a year prior, "Silly Symphonies." In the years that followed, Disney would abandon Silly Symphonies and sink most of their efforts into full-length animated movies, leaving WB to dominate the "zany 7 minute cartoon skit" niche, Mickey Mouse being a partial exception.
But, that's just historical background. These two Merrie Melodies episodes are both from 1957, long after LT and MM had become interchangeable and Disney's SS had been discontinued. Just, I thought the naming scheme merited some explanation. Additionally, both of these episodes were helmed by Fritz Freleng, one of WB's top animators who is known for - among other things - creating the characters of Porky Pig and Yosemite Sam, and for refining Bugs Bunny, Tweety, and several other Looney Toons mainstays into their final appearances and personalities.
"Three Little Bops" is a musical episode (many more of them were back in the thirties, hence the naming motif started by Disney, but by the fifties this was more of a rarity). It purports itself to be a sequel to the tale of the Three Little Pigs, but it's really more of a remake. Reimagining. Soft reboot. Whatever you wanna call it. The lyrical narrator explains that after their most famous exploits, the three little pigs became jazz musicians, and played at a range of venues under the band moniker "Three Little Bops."
The Big Bad Wolf is still harassing them. But now, instead of trying to eat them, he just wants to join their band despite his very limited musical skills. And he doesn't take no for an answer.
They end up replaying a version of the original story, with the Three Little Bops playing at a rural dance hall made of straw, a smalltown pub made of sticks, and then an urban nightclub made of bricks. At each location, the wolf tries to infiltrate their performance, ruins it with his mediocre wind instrument skills, gets tossed out, and spitefully blows down the building with a blast of his trumpet. Failing, as per the original, against the sturdy brick building, and thus being forced to attempt other methods. And, since it's Looney Toons, he ends up blowing himself up with dynamite and going to hell.
It does have a happy ending, in that hell makes the wolf's music "hot" enough to reach par with the pigs' own. His ghost, astrally projected from perdition, joins them onstage at their own invitation.
The visuals are fine. Upper average for golden age Looney Toons. The soundwork, as you'd expect from a musical episode about a musical troupe, is where it truly shines. The jazz tune runs for all seven minutes pretty much without interruption, and the narrator has a great voice and pretty clever lyrics to describe the onscreen events with. The occasional transitions from narrator to characters (who keep up the verse without missing a beat or altering the melody, while still channelling distinctive personalities into their deliveries) are all really smooth. If anything, this is a voice acting performance with music and cartoon accessories hanging off of it.
The characters are, in a bit of a throwback to Merrie Melodies' roots, one-offs rather than recurring Looney Toons cast members (well, maybe they did recur, but if so then not often enough to stick). Fritz Feleng definitely showed his hand with the design of the pigs (who all look a lot like Porky, even though none of them are him), and the wolf definitely has shades of Wile E. Coyote in his look, but they're still distinctly themselves.
On the down side, there was one period-typical moment of discomfort, when the wolf is trying to sneak his way into the brick nightclub:
Out of context, this could be innocently silly. For a cartoon produced in the 1950's USA though...yeaaaaah. Not cool. Typical of mainstream American comedy at the time, unfortunately.
Other than that though, I'd say "The Three Little Bops" aged pretty well.
"Birds Anonymous," released that same year and directed by the same man, is a Tweety & Sylvester sketch that goes places you wouldn't typically expect a Tweety & Sylvester sketch to go. This one actually won a bunch of awards, and has kept its place in a Loony Toons "top 100" list for over half a century. Even more remarkably, voice actor Mel Blanc - the man who voiced Tweety, Sylvester, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, Elmer Fudd, Tasmanian Devil, and Speedy Gonzalez for a period of several decades - is on record saying that this episode contains the best performance of his entire career.
So. Yeah.
Surprisingly given its reputation, this episode starts out almost completely voiceless. Just dramatic music accompanying a really artful bit of animation, showing Sylvester stalking Tweety by their shadows alone.
The visual storytelling they manage to pull off with just monochrome shadows moving from one small patch of sunlight to another is really obviously the animators pushing their limits, challenging themselves, and perhaps showing off a bit. And it is legitimately impressive.
The plot of the episode kicks in after we go from shadows to normal POV and Tweety breaks the silence with his iconic "I tought I taw a puddy tat!" line before getting nabbed from his cage. Tweety gets saved not by his own cunning or by the intervention of a dog or a human or the other usual saviors, but by the intervention of another cat. This (one-off character) orange feline has a posh accent, a paternalistic demeanor, and a desire to not see Sylvester destroy himself with his own addiction.
Yes, that's right. Chasing birds is an addiction, for cats. And this guy wants to be Sylvester's sponsor for a rehab group that will help him lose his dependency and start putting his life back together.
I'm kinda squinting at the name of the titular rehab group, though. Shouldn't it be "bird-catchers anonymous?" Or "Birdaholics anonymous?" Maybe "birders anonymous?" "Birds anonymous" sounds like a program for birds who are trying to stop being birds.
The voice acting highlight that Blanc was almost certainly referring to comes when Sylvester comes back from his Birds Anonymous meeting and tries to go about his daily life without chasing Tweety. Unfortunately, everything from the cooking show on TV to the music playing on the radio (with Blanc doing even more one-off voices for the TV chef and the radio host) reminds him of birds and how edible they are. Which prompts him to start suffering heroin-like withdrawal symptoms.
And this is what the voice actor was REALLY talking about. Sylvester the cat - with his usual spitting, stuttering, and excessive use of S-sounds - as a struggling junkie trying to go cold turkey. Or maybe "no turkey" in this case.
...
Alcoholics Anonymous was apparently blowing up in popularity when this short came out, so it was being topical. Whether it was being topical in a good way or in a bad way, I'm much less sure of.
...
Sylvester tortures himself for what appears to be at least a 24 hour period, doing everything he can to deny the urge while Tweety watches with mixed bemusement and trepidation as he tries to decide if this is genuine or not. There's one point where it's heavily implied that Sylvester is hallucinating Tweety asking him to eat him (at least, I don't think Tweety would have actually said that, so it was *probably* a hallucination. Bugs Bunny would play with fire like that, but that's not Tweety's schtick). Sylvester's sponsor occasionally returns to pull him back at the last second (including in one case giving Sylvester an alum pill to shrink his mouth, only for Sylvester to then unsuccessfully try to drink Tweety through a straw). Sylvester does everything from howling in primal hunger, to wallowing in self-loathing for his own weakness, to rambling in rage at society for judging him, to insistently trying to bargain with himself. All in his usual stuttering, spitting, silly cat-voice.
The episode ends with Sylvester's sponsor having a relapse of his own, and Sylvester suddenly shaking his own urges and rising to the occasion of protecting Tweety from him (or perhaps, protecting him from killing Tweety). Tweety, before the credits role, turns to the camera and reminds himself to never, ever let himself be tricked into thinking that "puddy tats" can change. Which is pretty fucking dark, considering the allegory here.
Yeah. Really not sure how to feel about this one, in terms of concept. The production values (voice and visuals, but especially voice) were out of this world for a fifties cartoon, but the treatment of addiction...yeah, I don't know. I like the absurdity of bird-chasing being literally drugs for cats, but there's a fine line between that and making real life addicts the butt of the joke. Which, again, 1950's. That was just good old fashioned family-friendly comedy back then, I guess. Still, as a technical masterpiece it earns its reputation.
So, that's a look at where American cartoons were at in the mid-to-late 1950's. "Johnny Quest" and its imitators would come a few short years after this, albeit from different studios.
