I've Got to Sing a Torch Song

Love animation, it was a big part of my life as a child, particularly Disney, Looney Tunes, Hanna Barbera, Studio Ghibli and Tom and Jerry, and still love it whether it's film, television or cartoons. With significantly broader knowledge of different directors, animation styles and studios, actually appreciate and love it even more now.

'I've Got to Sing a Torch Song' may not one of my favourite cartoons or an amazing one, there are funnier, more inventive and livelier cartoons about. Not that 'I've Got to Sing a Torch Song' is devoid of any of those things, just that other cartoons do it better. It is a lot of fun still and is very charming with a lot to like. Deserving to be more widely known, having come from a period with stiff and more well known competition from major pioneers in animation.

It is very flimsy in story sure and is fairly familiar, it is not hard to figure out how the cartoon was going to end.

Did feel that the cartoon was slightly over-cluttered and it is agreed that familiarity is in order with the caricatures, references and their antics. This was a case of recognising some and having no clue what others were, making the content/humour somewhat hit and miss.

On the other hand, the animation is great. Full of attractive shading, meticulously detailed backgrounds, smooth movement and crisply drawn character designs, one is convincingly immersed in the bugtown world. The music is lush and full of energy, with an infectious song. Many of the things shown here is impressive in how it synchronises with the music and animated dazzles and amazes.

Much of 'I've Got to Sing a Torch Song' is amusing, despite the content being hit and miss, with some wit and it never tries too hard to be cute. The charm factor is high and the caricatures and references that were recognised by me were really fun to spot and well incorporated.

All in all, worthwhile for a look of what it was like in the 1930s, and very interesting in that aspect, but didn't blow me away and it is dependent on how one is familiar with what is being referenced. 7/10 Bethany Cox

They didn't have videos way back in the 1930s, and they didn't have television, either. However, you can still do aerobics from a voice on the radio encouraging and instructing you. That's what we see in the opening minutes as people of all ages are seen exercising in unique and clever ways. One guys is doing pulleys from the girdle on his fat wife! An old rich guy is doing arm exercises while reading ticker tape on the stock market quotations. There are a lot of these type of things, all in a short space of time.

Then the story, if you want to call it that, switches from aerobics to celebrities as we see movie stars and others on the radio and people listening to it from all over the globe, from Shanghai to Alaska. Some of the celebrities I couldn't recognize, making this a cartoon more for folks back in the that era.

This cartoon was a showcase by Warner Brothers for some of its stars and the title song comes from "Gold Diggers Of 1933," one of their films.

This Merrie Melodies cartoon, released on September 23, 1933 in theaters with I Loved a Woman and the first Merrie Melody from Termite Terrance, is the most soulless, pointless, plotless and repetitive cartoon I've ever seen. Buddy's Day Out is also pure garbage (ironically both cartoons have the same director Tom Palmer) but at least that cartoon has a story to go along with it. This cartoon though has no story at all, it's literally 7 minutes of random stuff happening and that's about it. The "humor" if you want to call it that, is painfully unfunny, slow and just cringe. The animation is mediocre, sometimes smooth but mostly choppy though out, the characters all only have one trait and the song is just absolutely stupid and absurd. Just, what even is this thing?! This is the absolute worst WB cartoon and although I'm not done binging all cartoons, I highly doubt that future cartoons will overtake this one in terms of abysmalness.

Way back long ago, before Bugs, before Daffy, even before Porky - heck, they weren't even filming anything in color yet - Leon Schlesinger Studios tried various and sundry ideas in their cartoons. "I've Got to Sing a Torch Song" shows several people around the world exercising to a radio broadcast, with a few gags along the way, and caricatures of famous people from the era.

If you're wondering why they named the cartoon after the song, that was the policy with Merrie Melodies cartoons. You see, when Leon Schlesinger Studios started releasing Bosko cartoons in 1930, all the cartoons carried the Looney Tunes tag. Before too long, they created the Merrie Melodies tag (playing off Disney's Silly Symphonies). While the Looney Tunes cartoons continued showing off Bosko - and later Buddy, and then Porky - the Merrie Melodies cartoons would have the names of songs, and the characters would sing the song in one scene. Such was the case not only with this one, but also "I Haven't Got a Hat" and "I Love to Singa", among others. Eventually, they stopped having characters sing title songs. When the Looney Tunes switched to color, the two series became indistinguishable.

Overall, this is a look into Warner Bros. animation's very early days. Within ten years, their cartoons didn't look the same at all. Hell, within five years, the combination of stars Porky and Daffy, plus directors such as Tex Avery, had totally changed the look. But this one is still worth seeing. Because Greta Garbo did want to be let alone.

I never knew that Bing Crosby was already famous in 1933. Of course, I have no kind words for him.

Merrie Melodies started as something like animated music videos. Leon Schlesinger sold Warner Brothers on the idea of a series of animated shorts that would feature songs from Warner Brothers movies, serving partially as ads for the movies. This one features the titular song from "Gold Diggers of 1933".

It's a pretty straightforward series of blackout gags featuring (then) famous folks singing the song ... George Bernard Shaw, James Cagney, Joan Blondell, Benito Mussolini (yes, indeed), Bing Crosby (identified as "Cros Bingsby"), Greta Garbo, ZaSu Pitts, Mae West and Ed Wynn all show up. It's very very thin, but hey ... I was amused.

It also unfortunately has a string of really unpleasant racial stereotypes in the middle that were cut when in aired on TV in the 1980s.