Celebrities that you're surprised were never caricatured in a classic cartoon.

[Brandon Pierce]

Is there a famous celebrity that you were surprised was never caricatured in a Loony Tune or any other classic cartoon? I for one at first was shocked that the British singer/actress Petula Clark was never caricatured, as she was very popular during the late 50s/ early 60s. Or perhaps I was hoping for too much. Anyway, you guys?

 

[Sogturtle]

A few woefully neglected biggies...


Brandon~

Also one of the things that's interested me... Intriguingly enough Pet Clark was a British CHILD star back in the Forties and even entertained the troops in WWII!!

During the Fifties though it is very surprising that Marilyn Monroe didn't find herself caricatured frequently in Warner cartoons ('course she came close once). Jayne Mansfield though a much less stellar entity also would have made a verrrrrry ummm "attractive" addition to any cartoon.

The Marx Brothers turned up briefly a number of times, but Groucho's superb comic foil, Margaret Dumont failed to ever appear with them in any of those appearances (or ever).

Ever notice Jane Russell never showed up despite her beauty and slight notoriety ("How'd you like to tussle with Russell??")

From his major breakout in 1939's "Stagecoach" and onwards John Wayne should have turned up at least once... (Red Skelton and his sayings turn up in Warner and MGM cartoons, why not the greatest cowboy star/tough guy ever??)

How about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz??? (If McKimson could do multiple Honeymooner toons, why not "I Love Lucy" one???)

The one appearance by Elvis as hound-dog likely serves to tell us how little importance the Warner directors attached to the most important rock singer (I believe that they fell for the story that "it would all blow over soon..."). This would likely also explain the non-appearance of ultra-important Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Carl Perkins (hate to say it but Perkins likely would have been gruesomely caricatured...). It is equally surprising that Ricky Nelson never turned up, since America had heard and seen him grow up on radio and TV from childhood to solo-rock-stardom.

Ifffffff the studio had lasted into the mid-Sixties (with Stalling aboard) then the Beatles should have turned up at least once in a major appearance...

 

[lislebartman]

I've never seen Joan Crawford caricaturized. SHe was a pretty big start in her own right - an Academy Award winner in 1946. Maybe if people knew about her 'wire hanger' hang-up, she would have been fair pickin's.

 

[Matthew Hunter]

I'm surprised we never saw any caricatures of the allied force leaders in WWII (like Presidents Roosevelt and Truman or Winston Churchill.) I suppose this was just "not done", but still surprising considering how many war references they crammed into the 40's toons. We also don't see Fidel Castro show up into the 1950's, nor any mention of the threat/fear of Communism. I'm surprised too, SogTurtle, that Lucy and Desi didn't show up....you'd think the influence "I Love Lucy" had would've crossed the radar screen of Warner Bros. cartoons, particularly McKimson. After all, he was already doing "The Honey-Mousers", ("The Honeymooners") and Sylvester Jr, who was said to be a derivative of "Father Knows Best".
-Matthew

 

[Jon Cooke]

Re: A few woefully neglected biggies...

Originally posted by Sogturtle
The one appearance by Elvis as hound-dog likely serves to tell us how little importance the Warner directors attached to the most important rock singer (I believe that they fell for the story that "it would all blow over soon...").

Don't forget there was also Elvis Pretzel (singing "Hound Camel") in "Hare-abian Knights".


-Jon

 

[Thad Komorowski]

Bugs Bunny also did an impersonation of ["Frankie doing an imitation of Rickie doing an impersonation of"] Elvis in an episode of the Bugs Bunny Show.


Thad K

 

[Cartman]

Originally posted by Matthew Hunter
I'm surprised we never saw any caricatures of the allied force leaders in WWII (like Presidents Roosevelt and Truman or Winston Churchill.) -Matthew

Roosevelt was shown (at least his picture was shown) in "Bosko in Person."

 

[Sogturtle]

Jon Cooke and Thad...

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by Sogturtle
The one appearance by Elvis as hound-dog likely serves to tell us how little importance the Warner directors attached to the most important rock singer (I believe that they fell for the story that "it would all blow over soon...").
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Don't forget there was also Elvis Pretzel (singing "Hound Camel") in "Hare-abian Knights".

-Jon Cooke __________________

Excellent point Br'er Jon! Completely slipped my reptilian brain. Never ceased to amaze me that it turned up in Ken Harris' only directorial effort rather than in an authentic Jones' or Freleng. The implication would seem to be that Michael Maltese managed to get Elvis in here with a newbie director instead of the gag possibly being cut by the real directors.

Bugs Bunny also did an impersonation of ["Frankie doing an imitation of Rickie doing an impersonation of"] Elvis in an episode of the Bugs Bunny Show.

Thad K

Thad~

You're darn tootin'!!... And Bugs even rocked out on acoustic guitar, bopping around the stage, while doing so to boot!! The song lyric (for the curious) was "Gee whiz, whillikers, golly gee, I got a gal, and she loves me"!!! Yosemite Sam as the disturbed formerly sleeping neighbor was not amused (likely representative of all parents of teens of the day) and of course resorted to violence (something that crossed the minds of some parents ). By-the-way Bugs as... sounded not one-whit like himself or even Mel Blanc (indeed much more like Ricky Nelson). Ahhhhh the foolish things locked away in a turtle's brain...

 

[Sogturtle]

And a couple I overlooked...


...The stars of an exceedingly zany, long-lived radio show and equally zany TV program, the very looney Gracie Allen and George Burns (okay Burns and Allen )

 

[Greg Method]

Although the occasional "Rosebud" joke was done here and there, but did Orson Welles ever appear in one?

 

[Bobby B]

Originally posted by lislebartman
I've never seen Joan Crawford caricaturized. She was a pretty big star in her own right - an Academy Award winner in 1946. Maybe if people knew about her 'wire hanger' hang-up, she would have been fair pickin's.

Isn't Bugs imitating Crawford in "Mildred Pierce" in the "Bette Davis is gonna hate me for dis" scene in "The Big Snooze"?

 

[Sogturtle]

Originally posted by Matthew Hunter
I'm surprised we never saw any caricatures of the allied force leaders in WWII (like Presidents Roosevelt and Truman or Winston Churchill.) I suppose this was just "not done", but still surprising considering how many war references they crammed into the 40's toons. We also don't see Fidel Castro show up into the 1950's, nor any mention of the threat/fear of Communism. I'm surprised too, SogTurtle, that Lucy and Desi didn't show up....you'd think the influence "I Love Lucy" had would've crossed the radar screen of Warner Bros. cartoons, particularly McKimson. After all, he was already doing "The Honey-Mousers", ("The Honeymooners") and Sylvester Jr, who was said to be a derivative of "Father Knows Best".
-Matthew

Matthew~

There really was we might call a conspiracy of silence on the part of Warner's (and MGM) not to make fun of any of the Allied leaders of WWII. To do so would have almost certainly brought in the Hays/Breen office and possibly even the U.S. government itself on grounds of harming the public morale. (Depicting the wheelchair-bound Roosevelt would have provoked outrage in all quarters, in fact newspaper photographers and editors never published photos showing FDR being lifted out of his car). Additionally, would Schlesinger have done anything to endanger his contract for Private Snafu and Hook cartoons...?? Noooooo...!! Clampett of course was about to test these limits with production of "For He's A Jolly Good Fala" the film about Roosevelt's dog, Fala, but then FDR's death scrubbed the whole idea. Tex over at MGM for a brief moment in the early Fifties flirted with depicting Truman but then pulled the old-switcheroo and showed us Droopy playing the piano in the White House. Of course during WWII we DID see our war-time ally Stalin a couple of times as a fearsome image to Adolph Hitler. These were the only evidences of the existence of Communism though in the whole-sum-total of the Forties and Fifties. I don't believe any of the Warner directors would have had the stomach to risk investigation by HUAC for the sake of a Commusnism gag or two.

**[Animaniac's depicting Stalin bouncing on Churchill's belly doesn't count either, so there, n'yah...!!!]

And who knows, maybe the invisibility of Lucy and Desi is due to Warner's not wanting their cartoon studio being mistaken for the moonlighting MGM director (and designer) who were making the animated "I Love Lucy" titles at the time...

 

[J Lee]

Also, don't forget on the TV front that J.L. was the mogul most ademantly opposed to any imposition at all of television into the up-until-then exclusive ability of motion pictures to put stars on screen. Warner even banned televisions from the studio lot in the early 1950s, when Lucy and Desi became stars, so you really don't see much TV influence in Warner cartoons until about 1956 when McKimson and Pierce really started in with the TV parodies(and of couse a year later J.L. did an about-face and became the first major studio head to sign a contract to create television programs for ABC -- an agreement which three years later produced a show for 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday nights starring a certain rabbit and his cohorts).

Just as a side note, even though Sam was the one that busted up Bugs' rendition of "Gee Wizz Wilikers..." in the original BBS it reminded Bugs of an incident just like that one, which then dissolved into Jones' "Long Haired Hare"

 

[PlopKat]

A couple of stars that did not turn up caricatured & cartooned:

1) John Wayne. I could easily see him pop up in a cameo in a Porky Pig short like "Wagon Heels" or "Nothin' But The Tooth."

2) Milton Berle. The first major TV star made his feature film "Always Leave Them Laughing" for Warner Brothers in 1949 to capitalize on his newly found TV fame, so it's hard to imagine Berle being off limits but he could have been covered under J.L's television ban mentioned by J. Lee.

Re: FDR in cartoons. Roosevelt makes an appearance in the Oswald the Rabbit short, "Confidence." He is shown walking around and singing even. I've never seen the whole short, just an excerpt in a documentary on Walter Lantz that was on the first volume of Woody Woodpecker cartunes that MCA/Universal put out in the eighties.

Sogturtle wrote:

...The stars of an exceedingly zany, long-lived radio show and equally zany TV program, the very looney Gracie Allen and George Burns (okay Burns and Allen )

I've wondered about that myself. Their show was popular enough for a supporting character to be used (Mel Blanc's "Happy Postman" character in Bugs Bunny's "Easter Yeggs") but not the stars themselves. I wonder if that might be that, at least in the mid to late 1940s, the general audience may not have been familiar with George & Gracie's appearance. The last film they appeared in as a team was 1939's "Honolulu," and Gracie's last film appearance was in 1944's "Two Girls & A Sailor."

What makes me think this is that one of the running jokes on the last years of their radio show was about their appearances. Many jokes were made about how old George look. Conversely, Gracie often made jokes that placed her age in her teens. Both of these types of jokes were dropped when the show moved to television and the audience could see that George wasn't that old and Gracie wasn't that young.

-PlopKat
excited to see Gracie Allen on A&E Biography a couple of weeks ago

 

[Mibbitmaker]

Don't forget, during the Korean War, the leader of the red ants in one cartoon was a caricature of Harry Truman. Also, during WWII, the Allied leaders names were used as names for baby ducks.

The "Hare-abian Nights" Elvis bit showed the older generation's hate for rock and Elvis, getting the singing (and maybe the music, not sure) all wrong. I like McKimson's from "Dog Tales" much better; just a basic, silly joke about "Hound Dog", and the music is authentic '50s Elvis-like rock'n'roll.

I think the WB cartoon studio was a bigger fan, collectively, of "The Honeymooners" (maybe something about that show's "blue-collar-ness" appealed to them). As far as comedy preferences, in the older days, they did far more Abbott and Costello and Jerry Colona than other comics they parodied. Not too much Laurel and Hardy, for example.

I know this doesn't qualify as surprised, but, if LT/MM were produced in the '70s like during the '30s-'60s (An "invisible sheild" toothpaste ad reference was made as recently as 1964), they might've had fun with Richard Nixon, an easy caricature. I doubt time would've hurt putting in Watergate into cartoons that could have come out after the resignation, because Watergate was so basic; Tricky Dick as ultimate scandal/political villian as Hitler was a wartime villian, albeit as much for propaganda as Averian satire. Nixon WAS a reference point for some cartoons later, from Daffy's Nixon pose during his birthday/anniversary special in the '80s, and a Watergate tape among the trash dislodged from a trash bin when Ren & Stimpy were guarding the Lincoln monument.

 

[Mibbitmaker]

Oh, almost forgot...

Although a campaign propaganda cartoon instead of a regular cartoon short, the Chuck Jones non-WB "Hell-bent For Election" caricatured FDR as the front of a locomotive... and a very pro-FDR cartoon, too.

 

[Sogturtle]

Originally posted by Mibbitmaker
Don't forget, during the Korean War, the leader of the red ants in one cartoon was a caricature of Harry Truman. Also, during WWII, the Allied leaders names were used as names for baby ducks.

The "Hare-abian Nights" Elvis bit showed the older generation's hate for rock and Elvis, getting the singing (and maybe the music, not sure) all wrong. I like McKimson's from "Dog Tales" much better; just a basic, silly joke about "Hound Dog", and the music is authentic '50s Elvis-like rock'n'roll.

I think the WB cartoon studio was a bigger fan, collectively, of "The Honeymooners" (maybe something about that show's "blue-collar-ness" appealed to them). As far as comedy preferences, in the older days, they did far more Abbott and Costello and Jerry Colona than other comics they parodied. Not too much Laurel and Hardy, for example.
....

Mibbitmaker~

Very good points... The ant-President Harry Truman was in "Ant Pasted", which due to the tremendous Warner backlog didn't come out till 1953--after Eisenhower had been elected!

We can really only wonder about the Warner directors musical likes (Chuck Jones was into square-dancing meaning country music, this despite his superb operatic toons). Without a doubt they (like all adults of the day) hoped that rock would wither and go away. But they also doubtlessly didn't want the toons to be instantly dated as they wended their way over to TV.
The dead-on caricatures of "Frankie" and Bing as bobby-socks-ers "dreamboats" were incredibly dated by the time they got to television.

They appear to have viewed Laurel and Hardy and Chaplin as being almost impossible to successfully caricature and parody (Tex commented on the impossibility of anybody doing a cartoon series of Laurel and Hardy). They may have put Lucy and Desi in the same boat. Annnnnd they MIGHT have seen Abbott and Costello and the Honeymooners as simply interesting/amusing characters but who were not classics by any stretch of the imagination and thus fair game.

And I deliberately left "Hell-Bent For Election" out of the previous posts due to its non-WB (or MGM) release status. Even though it was directed by Chuck and animated by his Warner animators...