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.