Behind the Tunes: Looney Tunes Go Hollywood

There are a bunch of cartoons from the 1930s and 1940s mimicking Hollywood celebrities of the period and this documentary examines them. Those cartoons are part of this Volume Two DVD set of Looney Tunes Golden Collection.

Al Jolson, W.C. Fields, Katharine Heburn, Laurel & Hardy, Carmen Miranda, James Cagney, Groucho Marx, Edward G. Robinson and a ton of others were all part of several '30s cartoons while other celebrities would pop in, lets say, in a '40s Bugs Bunny cartoon.

As it is pointed out in this short feature, a lot of it, too, was to help promote the Warner Brothers movies of the day. In other words, they would do a parody of Humphrey Bogart just when Bogie had a new film coming out.

And, yes, you have to know these old "stars" to really appreciate the cartoons, but the people who made these cartoons, as someone points out here, had no idea people would still be watching them 50 years from that time. They thought "topical humor" was fine because it would only be seen for a year or two at most. Interesting.

This 9 minute featurette, which can be seen as an extra on Disc 4 of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 2, focusing on the parody of films and Hollywood personalities in the Looney Tunes shorts. It includes interviews with notable people associated with the shorts as well as showing clips from the actual films alongside the cartoon that parodied it. I found it all very interesting, if a bit on the long side. The clips from the shorts are as great as always and there's a pretty good chance that every Looney Tunes fan will enjoy. Overall I didn't find it as great as say "Behind the Tunes - Crash! Bang! Boom!: The Wild Sounds of Treg Brown" though.

My Grade: A-