tadpole-596-918256 Review of I Love to Singa

I Love to Singa (1936)

Not necessarily the funniest cartoon ever animated . . .

[6/10 · 7 May 2013]

. . . but whooooooever thought that owls were humorous in the first place? I suppose it IS refreshing to find a cartoon from the 1930s in which Mel Blanc is not supplying nearly ALL the voices. According to this page, you have Billy Bletcher, Tommy Bond, Johnnie Davis, Joe Dougherty, Bernice Hansen, and Martha Wentworth supplying the voices of the primary members of the I LOVE TO SINGA cast. Though I must admit none of these names rings much of a bell in my head, I assume that they denote a half dozen DIFFERENT people and not just six degrees of Mel. An essential aspect of this parody's target, the feature film THE JAZZ SINGER starring Al Jolson from nine years earlier, is pretty much glossed over in this spoof, which is too bad in a way. A cartoon owl in Blackface could have been a hoot. Jolson himself would have been in big trouble if Hitler successfully added America to the Third Reich, and in Michigan alone he had Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Father Charles Edward Coughlin (a.k.a., "Hitler's priest") on his side. Possibly when I LOVE TO SINGA was made in 1936, with Hitler so much more powerful than in 1927, the cartoon's producers were afraid to risk being on the Gestapo's hit list in the near future by making light of the double whammy of combining Jewishness and Blackness into one character as the more courageous Jolson did in the source material.