It's Valentine's Day and nothing is more romantic than a crooner. The very personification of the word would be Our Gang's Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer.
Alfalfa's inspiration, without a doubt, was Bing Crosby. Alfalfa wasn't alone in that assessment - none other than Mel Tormé recorded "Learn To Croon."
And Frank Sinatra Jr. waxed the definitive version of the Gumby theme song.
The Brits were most inspired by the English Bing - the gifted and uber-romantic tenor Al Bowlly.
Even Bing may concede that Mr. Bowlly waxed the killer version of "The Very Thought Of You." The April 17, 1941 death of Mr. Bowlly in a airstrike on St. James's, London would be an incalculable loss to the arts and the world - as were the untimely World War II related passings of Carole Lombard and Leslie Howard.
Crooners started appearing in movies practically the moment talkies sent silents into the rear view mirror. The popular crooner and radio star Rudy Vallee was featured in the 1929 Eddie Cantor vehicle Glorifying The American Girl.
Rudy Vallee received the ultimate tribute: to appear in a Max Fleischer Screen Song cartoon starring Betty Boop.
Rudy and Bing Crosby inspired Cartoonland in no uncertain terms!
Taking cues from Bing, Cubby Bear was a singing radio star and one-bear band in the Van Beuren cartoon Croon Crazy!
Der Bingle was such a popular recording artist and movie star in the mid-1930's that Friz Freleng made a series of Merrie Melodies starring preening, narcissistic Bing Crosby roosters preying upon naive backwoods country hens and behaving like cocks (as well as knaves, scoundrels, rapscallions and cheeky bounders). This may have been a response to a mid-1930's trend in poultry-based animated cartoons that Disney's Silly Symphony Cock O'The Walk - an extended Busby Berkeley production number starring a cast of chickens - initiated with considerable style and a musical nod to "La Carioca" from Flying Down To Rio.
Not at all thrilled about these characterizations, Bing, with Paramount Pictures sued to get the Leon Schlesinger studio to stop making cartoons starring rapacious albeit cowardly crooners.
Bing and Paramount didn't win their court case, but the last of the trio of cartoons Friz Freleng and crew produced on the "city slicker seducing a star-struck country hen" theme, A Star Is Hatched, featured a movie director, not a crooner. It was also, due to the additions of music director Carl W. Stalling and voice characterization wiz Mel Blanc to the studio, a much snappier and funnier cartoon.
Crooners still would permeate music in 1930's movies, TV, radio and cartoons - none more than in I Love To Singa, the jaunty Merrie Melodie cartoon directed by Tex Avery.
With the unprecedented popularity and rise to entertainment superstar of Frank Sinatra just a few years later in the early 1940's, crooners soon were everywhere in cartoons.
EVERYBODY made cartoons inspired by "Frankie" - and this went on for a few years.
Without a doubt, the best of the best spoofs of crooners and the hysteria surrounding them (not at all surprisingly) were made by the comic geniuses as Warner Brothers animation.
As usual, getting the last word on the swooner crooner phenomenon, Tex Avery made a cartoon at MGM that combines a Sinatra spoof with a romantic polecat very much unlike Chuck Jones' over confident Charles Boyer skunk, Pepe LePew. The parody of 1940's bobbysoxers includes a bit with crooner-obsessed bunnies hitting each other over the head with other crooner-obsessed bunnies. Lil' Tinker is also, most uncharacteristically for Mr. Avery, a rather sweet and romantic cartoon, in addition to being ROFL hilarious.
Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog must finish this post by noting that our favorite crooner of all time, hands and microphones down, remains Bill Murray as "Nick the Lounge Singer" performing music from the movies!
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