BOOTLEG FILES 765: “Tin Pan Alley Cats” (1943 Warner Bros. animated short).
LAST SEEN: On DailyMotion.com.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: Withheld from release due to politically incorrect humor.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Not likely.
In today’s woke environment, the possibility of giving a second chance to the long-banned racially insensitive Warner Bros. cartoons collectively known as the “Censored Eleven” is nil. At least one of these cartoons, the 1943 “Tin Pan Alley Cats,” is certainly deserving to be kept out of circulation – but not so much for its broadly demeaning caricatures as for the laziness and sloppiness that went into its creation.
The central focus of “Tin Pan Alley Cats” is an anthropomorphic feline meant to be a parody of the legendary singer/songwriter Fats Waller. The character – who is not given an on-screen name – is drawn to resemble Waller’s rotund physique and trademark derby and cigar, and it carries a gravelly voice that is eerily close to its inspiration. (There are no voice actors cited in the cartoon’s credits, and the texture of the Waller imitation does not sound like something Mel Blanc would have created.)
The Waller-cat (as he will be known in this review) is out for a night on the town, and he finds himself choosing between two very different venues located side-by-side: Kit Kat Klub, with a neon pink exterior and a jumping crowd bouncing to a loud jazzy beat, and Uncle Tomcat’s Mission, where a Salvation Army-style band offers a dour rendition of “Give Me That Old Time Religion.” When the leader of the mission urges the Waller-cat not to “go into that den of inequity or you will be tempted with wine, women and song,” the hep feline looks at the audience and says, “Wow! What’s da motta wid dat?”
Up until now, “Tin Pan Alley Cats” consists of original animation. But then, director Bob Clampett and producer Leon Schlesinger decided to recycle the animation from the 1937 short “September in the Rain,” which also offered racially exaggerated stereotypes including a character riffing on Waller’s distinctive appearance. In “September in the Rain,” the novelty song “Nagasaki” is performed by a piano pounding faux-Waller, a takeoff on Louis Armstrong, a large Black woman dancing a wild shimmy and a trio of smiling Black men singing the chorus stanza. “Tin Pan Alley” repurposed these characters, reanimating them as jazzy cats but otherwise retaining the same physical movements and scene framing.
If that isn’t bad enough, the Waller-cat tells the Armstrong-caricature “Send me out of this world!” And with a few blasts of the trump, the Waller-cat goes out of his world and into another highly recognizable world – the surreal lunacy from the 1938 animated classic “Porky in Wackyland.” Much of the footage featuring the Wackyland denizens is recycled here, with a new addition featuring Dadaist caricatures of Hitler and a stereotypical depiction of a World War II-era Japanese soldier – and Stalin shows up to kick Hitler in the butt.
The Waller-cat is agitated by his surroundings and screams “Get me out of here!” He is suddenly propelled back to the Kit Kat Klub, floating amid a jazzy trumpet beat while moaning “Gabriel, blow dat horn!” Coming back to his senses, the Waller-cat speedily exits the club, goes next door to the mission, grabs the drum and takes the lead in singing “Give Me That Old Time Religion.” The mission members look in astonishment at their unlikely new recruit and turn to the camera to ask in unison, “What da motta wid him?”
Of course, the exaggerated depiction of Black characters is not the least bit funny today, but what is truly striking about “Tin Pan Alley Cats” was the blatant cheapness in taking recognizable sequences from two very well-known earlier cartoons and haphazardly trying to get new life from them in this context. This is probably the least original work of the Warner Bros. animation studio during its halcyon days – and it is all the more baffling, considering the studio was at its peak of creative innovation when this work was dropped.
Clampett would later insist that “Tin Pan Alley Cats” and an earlier work also in the Censored Eleven, “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs,” were not racially insensitive, claiming, “Everybody, including Blacks, had a good time when these cartoons came out. All the controversy about these two cartoons has developed in later years merely because of changing attitudes towards Black civil rights that have happened since then.”
It is not certain if Waller was ever aware of “Tin Pan Alley Cats” – the cartoon came out in July 1943 and Waller passed away from pneumonia five months later.
“Tin Pan Alley Cats” and the other Censored Eleven cartoons were removed from television syndication in 1968 and have never been broadcast again. Ten years ago, there was talk of restoring these films for DVD release, but nothing came of that. This film can easily be found in unauthorized postings of faded prints on DailyMotion.com. While animation aficionados might want to seek this out for the sake of curiosity, this is clearly one elusive film that is best left forgotten.
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