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10 Looney Tunes shorts that parodied other movies!
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!
In the early days at Termite Terrace, the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons served as another way to promote other Warner Bros. ventures, namely the Warner Bros. music catalogue. The initial agreement between Leon Schlesinger and Jack Warner was that each cartoon needed to include at least one Warner Bros. song. From there, Looney Tunes developed a culture of spoofs and references, and the Warner Bros. references grew to include radio shows and movies. Some references just stayed in the title or a moment in the cartoon, and some cartoons developed into full blown parodies.
Here are 10 Looney Tunes shorts that parody other movies.
Katnip Kollege
1938's Katnip College began as a landing pad for songs cut from the 1937 movie musical Over the Goal, a comedy about a college football team. Looney Tunes directors Cal Howard and Cal Dalton had the job of building a cartoon short around the pre-recorded songs and they came up with a story of college cats studying swing-ology.
Page Miss Glory
The 1936 cartoon Page Miss Glory is a spoof of the Warner Bros. 1935 film also titled Page Miss Glory. Both works use the first film's songs and take place in a hotel - but other than that the plots could not be more different. The cartoon is about a bellhop at a country hotel falling asleep on the job and dreaming about working at a big fancy city hotel, while the live action film is about two con artists who create a fake photograph of a beautiful woman (Dawn Glory), accidentally win a beauty contest, and convince a hotel chambermaid to pretend to be Miss Glory so they can cash the prize money.
Boulevardier from the Bronx
This cartoon parodies a few things - the name is a spoof of a song from the 1936 Warner Bros. film Colleen and the main character, Dizzy Dan, is a parody of St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Dizzy Dean. Fun fact! This is also the first Merrie Melodies short to include the Merrily We Roll Along theme song.
The Case of the Stuttering Pig
After Warner Bros. released the Perry Mason mystery The Case of the Stuttering Bishop, Looney Tunes released their parody that same year starring Porky Pig. There is an extra twist to the animated version, the attorney overseeing Porky and his siblings' inheritance takes a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde potion to turn into a monster.
Thugs with Dirty Mugs
Angels with Dirty Faces is a 1938 Warner Bros. crime drama that Looney Tunes parodied as Thugs with Dirty Mugs. Tex Avery directed the parody and later used it as inspiration for his cartoon crime drama Who Killed Who? Unlike the other parodies on this list, Thugs with Dirty Mugs was banned in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Censors decided that the cartoon was an excuse to show criminal activity.
Pigs in a Polka
While this isn't a parody of a Warner Bros. cartoon, it is a parody of another animation studio's work: Disney's Fantasia and Three Little Pigs. This Merrie Melodies story of the three little pigs is set to Brahms "Hungarian Dances".
A Corny Concerto
Like Pigs in a Polka, A Corny Concerto was another attempt at parodying Fantasia. This time, Looney Tunes takes us to the theater where Elmer Fudd plays the maestro for two of Strauss's waltzes with Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, and Daffy Duck dancing their way through them.
Stage Door Cartoon
The title of this cartoon is a parody of the 1943 film Stage Door Canteen. That is where the similiarites end, the cartoon is a classic Bugs Bunny/Elmer Fudd chase, this time through a theater where both characters inadvertently end up in the acts.
Gorilla My Dreams
In this cartoon, Bugs Bunny becomes stranded in the jungle and a female gorilla mistakes him for a baby. While this isn't a parody of any film in particular, it parodies elements of jungle movies which were popular in the 1940s and heavily featured gorillas.
The Apes of Wrath
The title of this short is a parody of The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck but aside from that, this short recycles the same story as Gorilla My Dreams. The only change in the cartoon is that this time, a stork loses a baby gorilla and kidnaps Bugs Bunny instead and delivers him to the gorilla's parents.
