In his Bobby Sox days, there were some standard jokes about Frank Sinatra. One of them was how unhealthily thin and anaemic he was. Tex Avery and his uncredited writer tossed some into
Little 'Tinker (released 1948).
The Sinatra disguised skunk is so thin, he falls through a hole in the wooden planks on stage. Notice how he looks down at his predicament.
He’s as thin as the microphone stand.
He’s lighter than a feather.
The other gags are self-explanatory.
The Sinatra singing voice, according to Keith Scott who knows this stuff, is Bill Roberts, who you will best remember from the Warner Bros. cartoon
One Froggy Evening. Oddly, MGM layout man Dick Bickenbach had done a Sinatra-esque singing voice in other cartoons but wasn’t called on for this cartoon. Bick was an accomplished amateur singer.
Louis Schmitt provided layouts for this cartoon (at least he designed the characters), while the animators were Bill Shull, Grant Simmons, Walt Clinton and Bob Bentley.
Avery was a little late to the game here -- not as late as, say, Famous Studios doing a jitterbug cartoon with Popeye in 1950, but the wire-thin Sinatra gag riffs had been done four years earlier at Warners, with Frank Tashlin's 'Swooner Crooner' (I believe with Bickenbach also handling the Sinatra vocals).
ReplyDeleteI'd have to double-check, but it seems to me story work on this cartoon started in 1946. The Jack Benny radio show was still doing "thin" Sinatra jokes at the time; they pretty much petered out on comedy/variety shows by the end of the '40s.
DeleteYeah, JL, the Sinatra/bone gag appeared on the Jack Benny "Dreer Pooson" radio episode in Jan. 1950. So people were still doing scrawny Sinatra jokes when this came out.
DeleteThe movie "Guys and Dolls" made a skinny Sinatra joke as late as 1955. Nathan Detroit (Frankie) steps on a scale in a barber shop; when he removes his coat, the scale registers a much lighter weight.
ReplyDeleteAs for that Popeye cartoon, "Jitterbug Jive," the director listed was Bill Tytla, who had left the studio some years back, Maybe it was an old storyboard that had been lying around for, say, five years. Besides, there's an episode of "I Love Lucy" where Lucy learns to jitterbug from a dance teacher in a zoot suit (in 1953, yet).