During the 1930s, several animated shorts presented silly caricatures of celebrities in unlikely situations. The 1933 Warner Bros. offering “I’ve Got to Sing a Torch Song” is among the most interesting of this mini-genre, with some genuinely amusing gags involving the big names of the day.
Among the prominent figures lampooned in this cartoon are the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini riding a hobby horse while practicing his fascist salutes in a shabby room and George Bernard Shaw as a pugilist whacking a punching bag that resembles a globe – if you look closely, you’ll see a flower bouquet in the corner of the screen with a card that reads “To Shaw, from Shaw.’
The cartoon revolves around the then-popular addiction to radio broadcasting, with several benign racial gags showing Chinese police listening to a radio show while being driven in a coolie-powered rickshaw, an African tribal chief with a radio made from a human skull preparing a meal in an oversized cauldron with comics Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey as the main ingredients, an Inuit fisherman whose radio is swallowed by an angry whale, and an Arab sultan who prefers listening “Amos ‘n’ Andy” to a harem girl outfitted in pre-Code-style finery.
There is also some unexpected knockabout with caricatures of James Cagney and Joan Blondell smacking each other, Bing Crosby singing from his bathtub to an audience of infatuated women, and an unlikely torch song trio of Greta Garbo, ZaSu Pitts, and Mae West. The Statue of Liberty shows up doing a brief imitation of Jimmy Durante, and a parody of Ed Wynn’s Fire Chief character ties the mayhem together.
“I’ve Got to Sing a Love Song” is the second and last Warner Bros. cartoon with direction credited to Tom Palmer, a one-time Disney animator who was hired and promptly fired by producer Leon Schlesinger. An uncredited Friz Freleng reportedly finished the short after Palmer got the boot.