I've Got to Sing a Torch Song (The Trouble is Not Your Radio Set...)

 

Director: Tom Palmer (planned and credited); Isadore “Friz” Freleng (finished and uncredited)

Summary: The antics of a radio station run by Ed Wynn, featuring many racial and ethnic caricatures enjoying the broadcast worldwide and the title song sung by caricatures of Greta Garbo, ZaSu Pitts, and Mae West. As far as Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies fans are concerned, this one is under-the-radar for good reason. It was made when Harman and Ising finally left Warner Bros. Studios and Leon Schlesinger was desperately scrambling for replacement talent. Tom Palmer (the original director) was supposed to be that talent, but his original versions of this and “Buddy’s Day Out” were so bad that Friz Freleng (back when he was credited as either “Isadore Freleng” or “I. Freleng”) was called to salvage the trainwrecks.

The Channel: Nickelodeon (Nick@Nite version of Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon)

Part(s) Edited:

The old Censored Cartoons Page listed this short’s edits as, “Scenes of the Chinese police and African cannibals were edited out of this cartoon's black-and-white print.” 

And, they are right: there was a scene featuring Chinese police officers sleeping in a rickshaw and tying up the police radio transmitter so they won't be bothered by their boss when he calls for all cars to report to an unknown crime that was cut when Nickelodeon aired this as part of their Nick@Nite version of Looney Tunes on Nick (original airdate: August 4, 1991. The Nick@Nite Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon came on between 1988 and 1992 while the installment show itself lasted until 1999, though I never saw Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon after 1996, mostly because the cable wasn’t on much at my house and mostly because this was when Nickelodeon was airing more of its original programming rather than what they had imported from other countries and syndicated domestically), but there was only one scene featuring an African cannibal (just one, not a group of them), and that was the scene of the African cannibal tuning in to a cooking show on his skull radio and adding mustard and salt to his stew of white explorers (shown as caricatures of 1930s vaudeville and film comedians Bert Wheeler and Robert Woosley) before stirring them.

And th-th-th-that’s not all, folks! The good people who used to run the Censored Cartoons Page forgot to mention two more edits that Nickelodeon did:

• The scene of the Bing Crosby caricature Cros Bingsby crooning, "Why Can't This Night Go On Forever?" cut the brief shot of college coeds (some of which are shown in skimpy lingerie) listening to the broadcast, though the old spinster hugging and kissing her radio while listening to the broadcast as well wasn’t censored.
• The sequence of the radio show reaching international audiences had a scene of an Arab sheik shooing away his belly-dancing concubine and switching over to a broadcast of Amos 'n Andy in the uncut version. Nickelodeon’s version redubbed the Amos ‘n Andy broadcast with music from the beginning of the short.

How It Plays Edited:

1) The Cros Bingsby/coed part: Other than a mildly obvious audio skip (and the hypocrisy of leaving in the old spinster making out with a radio when the college coed part wasn’t as sexually provocative as Nickelodeon’s cut makes it out to be), this isn’t too bad.

2) The Chinese police/cannibal part: Okay, the hypocrisy of this cut is starting to annoy me. They left in the Inuit/Eskimo man listening to the radio and nearly getting swallowed by a whale. I can only handle one instance of selective censorship at a time.

3) The Amos ‘n Andy redub: Eh, the music makes the scene feel a bit off. Why would the sheik shoo away his concubine just to listen to some music when he was already listening to music? I guess it can be written off as, “He was sick of the music from his country and wanted to listen to something different, since this is a sequence showing Ed Wynn’s radio show hitting international audiences,” but even that’s pushing it.

And what’s odd about all of this is that I was given the edited Nickelodeon copy from a tape trade and a few years later, the cartoon itself was released on DVD (see “Availability Uncut” below), so I did what every amateur animation critic should do: I watched them side by side to see what was cut and what wasn’t. The old Censored Cartoons Page, sadly, didn’t correct the mistake, so I had to make do with the Looney Tunes Fandom wiki and, of course, this blog here.

Video Comparison: The video was too big to load on the blog, so click here to see for yourself.

Availability Uncut: This under-the-radar short surprisingly has been released on physical media. It’s on the DVD and Blu-ray version of the film Gold Diggers of 1933 (since the title song is also heard in the movie) and it’s on the fifth volume of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD set. Archive.org has it online (for now), but it’s not on YouTube, unless you want to see clips of how it was censored on Nickelodeon or one of the audio commentary reviews from Anthony’s Animation Talk.