Book Revue
From Freepedia
Book Revue (alternate title: Book Review) was a 1946 Looney Tunes cartoon short featuring Daffy Duck. It was directed by Robert Clampett, written by Warren Foster and scored by Carl Stalling. An uncredited Mel Blanc and Sara Berner provided the voices.
The loosely-drawn plot was a send-up of Warner Brothers' own "books come to life" cartoons of the type that frequently appeared under the Merrie Melodies banner. In fact, Book Revue did such a masterful job at lampooning the studio's own genre that Warner Brothers never made another. The short started out in the same, pastoral "after midnight at a closed bookstore" fashion of previous versions to the strains of Moonlight Sonata. When an inebriated "cuckoo bird" pops out of a cuckoo clock to announce the arrival of midnight, the cartoon's first lampoon and pun appears, namely a book cover called "COMPLETE WORKS of Shakespeare". The title is taken quite literally; Shakespeare is shown in silhouette while his "works" are clockwork mechanicals set to My Grandfather's Clock.
The cartoon immediately cuts to a book titled Young Man with a Horn upon which a pastel-colored caricature of Harry James breaks loose with a jazz trumpet obbligato that resolves into the Warner Brothers standard, It Had to be You. The song is counterpoint to a striptease about to begin on the cover of a book called Cherokee Strip. Book covers with the names of The Whistler and The Sea Wolf show their characters shouting and whistling at the off-screen action. The now-smiling Shakespeare silhouette's inner workings explode in a shower of gears and clocksprings.
The catcalls continue with a purple and orange-clad Henry VIII howling like a wolf and barking like a seal. The cartoon then falls back on an old Warner Brothers cliché in which the king's "mother" calls out, "Hen-REEEE! Henry the Eighth!" "Coming, mother!" is the king's reply and he runs to the book cover where Mother waits. As she begins to discipline her son, a new singng voice and caricature appear, namely that of Frank Sinatra. The gray, blanketed, emaciated character, overemphasizing Sinatra's real-life physique, enters the cartoon on the cover of a book called The Voice in the Wilderness. A large, male orderly pushes the Sinatra character across the screen in a wheelchair...one with a ribbon microphone into which he begins to croon the lyrics of It Had to be You.
Female characters, including Henry's mother, bobby-socked versions of Little Women and even Whistler's Mother and Mother Goose (and her hatchling) begin to swoon and faint at the sound of Sinatra's voice.
Next, Book Revue breaks loose with a hyperactive swing version of It Had To Be You played by book cover caricatures of Gene Krupa, Benny Goodman (as "The Pie-Eyed Piper") and Glenn Miller who join in with the Harry James caricature. Annoyed by the revelry, Daffy Duck steps out of the cover of a Looney Tunes comic book, dons a zoot suit and curly, blonde wig, shouts for the celebration to halt from in front of a book cover called Danny Boy and launches into a Russian-accented imitation of Danny Kaye, saying "phooey" to jazz and swing and instead reminiscing about the "the happy peoples sitting on their balalaikas, playing their samovars." The quiet doesn't last for long as Daffy launches into La Cucaracha and another Russian-accented song, Carolina In The Morning while teasing the Big Bad Wolf, who at this point is still in the window of "Gran'Ma's House." A Little Red Riding Hood based on Margaret O'Brien appears; when she does, Daffy Duck launches into a scat to warn her off...later chewing on her leg for emphasis. A full-throated scream by Red Riding Hood isn't aimed at Daffy Duck but instead at the Wolf who, in turn, is now outside the house and is sprinkling salt and pepper on Daffy's leg. In what may be one of the funniest double-takes in animation history, Daffy turns into a giant eyeball - complete with lashes and blood vessels - when first coming face-to-face with the Wolf before running for his life.
A chase between the Wolf and Daffy Duck ensues, but the Wolf is captured by the "long arm of the law" where he is sentenced to life, as in Life Magazine. He escapes, only to be tripped up by the gigantic nose of Jimmy Durante which nearly causes him to fall along the cover of a book called Skid Row into Dante's Inferno. The Wolf manages to scramble to the top of the book cover, but the Sinatra caricature reappears, held in the orderly's hands as if he were a doll. The Wolf swoons at the sound just as the female characters did and skids head first into the inferno. As the book cover characters loudly celebrate to a swinging Carolina In The Morning, the Wolf makes one final appearance to shout, "Stop that dancing up there...ya sillies!" Clampett's famous "bee-yoop" vocalization ends the cartoon on a sort of "shaggy dog" note.
The original title was a pun on a Danny Kaye feature, while the Wolf's final shout was the actual title of a song (less the lisped "sillies" part) by Harry "The Hipster" Gibson. Later releases of the short had the title card replaced with Warner Brothers' "Blue Ribbon" title card on which the title was misspelled. The original title card has since been located and the fully restored short can be seen on the Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Vol. 2 four-DVD box set and the Looney Tunes Spotlight Collection: Vol 2 two-DVD set.
In his book The 50 Greatest Cartoons of All Time, author Jerry Beck places Book Revue at number 45.
