Cartoon Caricatures of Cab Calloway

Cab was regularly caricatured in animated cartoons, beginning with the Fleisher brothers' Betty Boop classics Minnie the Moocher (1932) The Old Man of the Mountain (1933), & Snow White (1933) in which Cab is caricatured respectively as a ghost-walrus, a cave hermit, & a transmogrified Koko the Clown.

In Swooner Crooner (1944) we're taken down at Porky Pig's chicken farm, where egg production is down because the hens are too busy adoring a crooner rooster who is a caricature of Frank Sinatra.

To perk up the hens, Porky arranges auditions for an Al Jolson rooster, Cab Calloway rooster, Rudy Vallee rooster, Nelson Eddy rooster, Jimmy Durante rooster, & Bing Crosby rooster. Cab's flopping hair becoming the rooster's comb. Rooster Cab sings "Blues in the Night" & is underutilized compared to Rooster Frank & Rooster Bing.


Porky at the Crocadero (1938) regards a jazz club called the Crocadero. Porky Pig has just graduated from Sucker Correspondence School of Music & believes he'll soon be leading a band. He turns up at the Crocodero to meet who he believes are his soon-to-be-peers, including he hopes Cab Calloway.

Finding out how expensive it to eat in the joint, he takes a job as a dishwasher just to get close. When the bandleaders are all delayed on the same airplane, it's up to Porky to fake his way through a night of entertainment.

Porky impersonates Guy Lumbardo & Cab Calloway, providing the only caricature ever of lanky Cab as short & dumpy, singing & scatting Cab's hit "Chinatown." Quite wonderful really. Porky Cab's drummer is an octopus.


In the Technicolor Merrie Melodie Have You Got Any Castles? (1938), characters are brought alive from sundry classic books, as caricatures of Hollywood actors.

One of the books in question is Green Pastures, which provides a big musical number, "I've Got Swing for Sale," performed by caricatures of Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, & the Mills Brothers. We also see Bill Bojangles Robinson dancing down & out of The Thirty-nine Steps, & Clark Gable from The House of Seven Gables.

Many other books are spoofed, but they are all books that had been adapted as movies. These cartoons were shown in cinema houses after all, & were very much for film fans rather than librarians.

It could well be great party-fun even today for a film club, as many of the films & actors referred to are not as well known now as in 1938 & it'd be a good trick to name every one of them now.

In retrospect it seems sad that such charming fun-poking films could've been banned in the 1960s & have never really bounced back, being unlikely to show on television even today.

Cab vanishes entirely from the cartoon as shown on TBS, so too does a little joke on Uncle Tom played by Rip Van Winkle.

Certainly African Americans were recurringly stereotyped in the worst ways like watermelon-obsessed Jasper in George Pal puppetoons, & a whole slug even worse. But these spoofs of great jazz singers like Cab tended to be lovingly done & did not merit censorship.

Children exposed to caricatures of Cab in cartoons won't grow up racists; they'll grow up already finding familiarity in the the actual gentlemen when their music is eventually encountered for real.


Another technicolor Merrie Melody & one of the "Banned Eleven" removed from circulation in 1968 by United Artists was Clean Pastures (1937).

United Artist had obtained a vast cartoon library & was responding to the sensitivity of African Americans, then shelved those which might offend African Americans.

In some cases the black caricatures were no more or less demeaning than the caricatures of whites, but the endless singlemindedness of how African Americans are caricatured justified concern. Still, by now, it's time to respect whatever achievement such films possess, & to assess more fairly those which offend, & those which poke far less hateful fun at beloved figures.

This one might indeed still offend. Clean Pastures is a spoof of the all-blackl-cast film Green Pastures (1936), as well as Al Jolsen's blackface performance in The Jazz Singer (1927).

In this retelling, angels visit Harlem intent on saving souls for Heaven, which is an entirely negro-run affair called Pair-o-Dice. The Stepin Fetchit angel's attempt to attract souls, but other angels are more interesting to the earthlings, including angel-caricatures of Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, etc., & earthly caricatures of Al Jolsen doing "I Love to Singa" & Bill Bojangles Robinson dancing down the street past a poster for the Savoy.

Black critics of the 1930s helped raise a controversy about the movie Green Pastures but voiced no complaint about the animated parody. Rather, Clean Pastures initially came up against the Production Code, which faulted the cartoon for satirizing religion.

White censors were appalled by the idea that heaven might be run by negroes. One of the critics' specific demands was that the halo be removed from such figures as Cab Calloway, since Cab was no angel.

Some of the footage was reworked & recycled a year later in Have You Got Any Castles? to get around the censors & delete the religious satire.

The film was again assaulted by censors when in 1968, to appease Civil Rights activists, classic cartoons with insensitive portraits of African Americans being removed from circulation. To this very day have only unofficial circulation, without regard for the fact that some of these banned cartoons are authentic works of art.

Longstanding rumor had it that Cab Calloway voiced his own material in this film, but that's ridiculous. The majority of the uncredited vocals are by Los Angeles-based African American jazz quartet The Four Blackbirds, & by Steve Gibson & the Basin Street Boys.

The Four Blackbirds quartet consisted of first tenor Geraldine Harris, second tenor David Patillo, bariton Leroy Hurte, & bass Richard Davis. They recorded for Columbia subsidiary labels Vocalion & Melotone, & were also a component of The Original Sing Band which vocally imitated musical instruments. The Four Blackbirds can also be seen in the musicals The Music Goes Round (1936) & Memories & Melodies (1935). As part of the Original Sing Band; aka, the Jones Boys Sing Band they appeared in musical shorts Hollywood Handicap (1938) & Streamlined Swing (1938).

The Basin Street Boys of the 1930s (there was another harmony group by that name in the 1940s) were a close harmony quartet, sometimes quintet, headed up by guitarist Steve Gibson, well known as part of the Red Caps. With him were Louis Dandridge, Joe Walls, Lloyd Mitchell, & Pods Hollinsworth.

Unlike their namesake of the following decade, the original Basis Street boys never had a recording contract, but these guys contributed their vocal talents to the unfortunately titled cartoon Swing Monkey Swing (1937) with content to match. Swing Monkey Swing is a Technicolor Columbia Pictures cartoon that takes place on an island populated by jazz-loving monkeys who are caricatures of black performers; the bandleader is another Cab Calloway caricature.

The Basin Street Boys have a lovely spot in the black-cast feature film The Duke Is Tops; aka, The Bronze Venus (1938) singing the finger-snappin' "Evening Swing." The same film also featured The Cats & the Fiddle who was a very similar harmony group, singing "Killin' Jive."

Numbers for Clean Pastures include an acapella performances of "Save Me, Sister, from Temptation"rom Al Jolsen film The Singing Kid (1936), performed behind the opening credits, & again acapella for "Half of Me Wants to Be Good" heard in Saint Peter's office (at white censors' insistance De Lawd got renamed St. Peter to avoid the original assertion that God is a black man).

Harlem jazz is represented by bits of "Nagasaki" & "Sweet Georgia Brown," while in heaven Cab Calloway out front of his Pair-o-Dice orchestra sings "I've Got Swing For Sale," the centerpiece number of the film:

"If the rhythms been too dreamy/ And you like your trumpets screamy/ That's when you should call to see me/ Cuz I've got swing for sale."

Joining in the number will be the Mills Brothers vocally impersonated but not caricatured (the four harmonizers bare not even slight resemblance to the originals). Fats Waller joins in & plays a second piano behind him with his wings. Louis Armstrong gets a verse & a horn solo. But it's scattin' Cab who holds the number together as a whole.

Harlem souls are attracted in droves. They receive their halos as they enter Pair-o-Dice to a syncopated revision of an old minstrel show classic "O Dem Golden Slippers" written in 1879 by black composer Jimmy Bland, who also wrote "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny." Heaven's such a lovely place now that even Satan repents & wants in.

This is a great cartoon. It is also insensitive to black culture, true enough, though alleging its creators were racists goes a bit far. The thing about art is the content is frequently in the eye of the beholder. This could be interpretted as a tale of moral black jazzmen in a struggle against injurious aspects of jazz culture.

While black-cast films like Green Pastures & Blood of Jesus just flat out made rural life & gospel music "good," & urban life & jazz "evil," Clean Pastures posits instead that jazz culture constitutes a heavenly reflection of Earth. The Harlem Renaissance was what heaven's all about. It can be tainted by gambling & addiction, but moral jazzmen reveal the light. It is jazz rather than some cockeyed notion of gospel singing back on the plantation which leads to redemption.


From the "Happy Harmonies" cartoon series, Swing Wedding (1937) is about Minnie the Moocher's wedding, Minnie being a caricature of Ethel Waters, & Smoky Joe is replaced by Stepin Fetchit. Caricatures of Fats Waller, Bill Bojangles Robinson, the Mills Brothers, & even a white harmony group, the Boswell Sisters, are included. The preacher is Rex Ingram.

Cab Calloway & His Orchestra are a frog band which performs a version of an actual Calloway recording, "Minnie the Moocher's Wedding Day."

Cab tries to win Minnie away from her groom, & does the cake-walk with her. The wonderfully leg-articulated frenzied dancing of one of Cab's musicians has got to be the inspiration for Chuck Jones' fantastic character of Michigan J. Frog in One Froggy Evening (1955).

The frog musicians' don't croak but cry out "Who Dat!" which alludes to a minstrel show & also a jazz-club tradition few will recognize today, though no less a singer than Aaron Neville recorded the "Who Dat" song for modern music lovers. The impressionist doing Frog Calloway did a great vocal.

When the censors decided to stop or limit distribution of racist films, those which caricatured well known figures as animals that didn't really look like black people generally were spared. But this one did not slip by, because the cartoon also posits that jazz frogs are drug abusers.

We see the trumpet player of the Frog Calloway orchestra injecting jazz before the band goes nuts. Obvious this will offend many, but the fact is, Cab did sing about drug use.

But of course, the link that did exist between jazzmen & drugs was not restricted to the black orchestras, & no cartoon would ever caricature a white orchestra injecting drugs, so the fact that this cartoon jokes about some truth doesn't defend it from racism. But neither is racism a justification for this work of art still being censored.

An added curiosity about this film is had a condensed version (three minutes instead of eight) re-released as Hot Frogs (1942) in a "soundies" format to be shown on Mills Panoram visual jukeboxes.


Cab is spoofed in the Walter Lantz black & white production of Hollywood Bowl (1938)

Also caricatured are such illuminaries as Bing Crosby, Greta Garbo, Groucho Marx, W. C. Fields, Fats Waller, Rudy Vallee, Martha Raye. This cartoon celebrates Universal stars since Universal distributed this cartoon to cinema houses.

They all have some physical charicteristic easy to turn into a cartoon, & each very familiar to anyone who would have seen this cartoon in 1938.

And again, it might have been all too easy to rely on racial stereotyping to convey famous black people, but Cab's caricature from the Walter Lantz studio is a very pleasing one that wouldn't insult anyone.

Mother Goose Goes Hollywood (1938) is a "silly symphony" musical cartoon from Disney, built around charicatures of the best known Hollywood film stars of the day.

As pages of a Mother Goose book are turned one by one, we encounter Ed Wynn as Old King Cole & his fiddlers three the Marx Brothers. Charles Laughton in his Mutiny on the Bounty role joins Spencer Tracy & Freddy Barthelemew in their roles from Captain's Courageous, recast as the rub-a-dub team in "Three Men in a Tub."

W. C. Fields is Humpty Dumpty insulted by Charlie McCarthy in the little chickadee's nest. Katherine Hepburn in an on-going gag as Little Bo Peep ("I've lost my sheep, rally I have"). Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy are Simple Simon & the Pie Man, provided with a couple quite good gags. Greta Garbo & Edward G. Robinson share a teeter-totter for "See Saw Marjorie Daw."

There are many others, including Cab Calloway & His Cotton Club Orchestra with special guest Fats Waller, as the four & twenty blackbirds baked in a pie. Their caricatures most resemble those from Clean Pastures & Have You Got Any Castles?

All the caricatured figures we've seen plus several others get together at the Old Lady Who Lived in the Shoe's shoe for a big final number with a good bit for Waller, fast & slow dances contrasted between Fred Astair & Stepin Fetchit; Cab doing a "Zazu" scat routine; & the big-mouth couple Martha Raye & Joey Brown jitterbugging us out of the show.


One of the "Banned Eleven," with racial caricatures of African Americans & Japanese that can offend, Tin Pan Alley Cats (1943) is a perfect example of how harmful censorship can be, since for whatever faults it may possess, this one's also quite the work of art, whether or not undermining itself with stereotypes.

A cat which caricatures Fats Waller is the primary star. He's disinterested in Uncle Tomcat's M christian mission, but prefers the jazz venue next door, the Kit Kat Club, besides being a bit of a scalliwag with the jitterbug cat-gals. Apart from having bigger lips, I think his caricature comes close to that of Lou Costello as a mouse in A Tale of Two Mice (1945) & as a cat in A Tale of Two Kitties (1942)

When Cats Waller gets so stoned on the music that he actually hallucinates a journey to Jazz Wackyland, it turns into a nightmare which so frightens him that he afterward finds religion & joins Uncle Tomcat's cult.

In Wackyland, the song "Schlesinger Swing" is performed by a horrible caricature of Cab Calloway, none of that tasteful attractive caricaturing like seen Walter Lantz's Hollywood Bowl.

Other songs heard are a jazzy "Nagasaki" & a choral "By the Light of the Silvery Moon." A small slice of the animation depicting the landscape of Wackyland was recycled from Porky in Wackyland (1938) after being colorized, but the caricatures constituted new material.


There are many other cartoons that feature Cab in one way or another, which goes to show the high degree of popularity throughout mainstream America's film-going public of the 1930s & '40s.

A black & white Porky Pig an anti-smoking cartoon for the kiddies, Wholly Smoke (1938) is infused with imagination.

Porky tokes a stogey obviously made with wacky tobakky. He hallucinates the character of Nick O'Teen who drags Porky off into a nightmare world where cigars, cigarettes & smoking utensiles come to life & perform songs.

Cigars resembling the Three Stooges assault him. Singing smokes include the Mills Brothers, Bing Crosby & Rudy Vallee. When Nick O'Teen gets soot on his face, he becomes a blackface performer imitating Cab Calloway -- alas not one of the pleasing caricatures. When Porky comes down from his high, he vows never again to smoke, & returns to his religion.

The elaborate adventures of two flies in Fly Frolic (1932) has as its highlight the appearance of a caricature of Cab Calloway as a Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hide sort of guy who turns into a villainous spider. The spider sings the opium song "Kicking the Gong Around." Made by the generally third-rate Van Buren studios, it's one of their most effective & original cartoons.

In the Technicolor Little Lulu cartoon The Baby Sitter (1947), Little Lulu gets a head injury while baby sitting a nasty baby. While unconscious she dreams herself at the Stork Club where she encounters caricatures of Cab Calloway, Bob Hope & W. C. Fields.

Knight-Mare Hare (1955), spoofing Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court places Bugs Bunny in the Connecticut Yankee's role. He asks the first knight he meets if he knows the Earl of Hines, the Cab of Calloway, the Duke of Ellington, the Count of Basie, the Satchmo of Armstrong, though no such caricatures ever show up in this one.

Additional Cab Calloway caricatures will be encountered in Bosko & the Pirates (1937), Woodland Cafe (1937), Kannibal Kapers (1935), & doubtless a few others.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl