A STAR IS HATCHED [1938]

 #2 IN A SILLY SERIES IS THE 1938 WARNER BROS. MERRIE MELODIES CARTOON "A STAR IS HATCHED". 

This is another of the cartoon loaded with contemporary Hollywood celebrities I tackled in the first of this series:  HOLLYWOOD STEPS OUT directed by Tex Avery.  This time around we have Friz Freleng in the director's chair and we're three years earlier than the Avery cartoon.  This one's kinda cute but there was a lot of progress between this one and the Avery 1941 cartoon and it's nowhere near as good.  Emily the Hen lives in Hicksville U.S.A. and dreams of becoming a star in Hollywood.  Sara Berner voices Emily in a barely-passable Katharine Hepburn imitation; obviously linking it to Hepburn's Oscar-winnning performance in MORNING GLORY as the aspiring actress Eva Lovelace back in 1933.  Reaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaly she is.  The Hepburn imitation drops as often as it's used and without the stereotypical "Reaaaaaaaaaaaally, I am" (in the same vein as the nonsense Cary Grant imitator's "Judy Judy Judy"), it sometimes isn't a Katharine Hepburn imitation at all.  Emily's room is plastered with 8X10's of Hollywood stars of the thirties and you don't REAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLY think I'm gonna name them all, do you???  Among them are Claudette Colbert, Janet Gaynor, Robert Montgomery, Bette Davis, Dick Powell (more on him later), the wavishing Kay Francis, Fred Astaire, Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power, Charlie Chaplin, Dorothy Lamour and a gaggle of others.  Emily the Hen gets up from her bed of movie magazines and recites "Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo"; a speech Katharine Hepburn notable did in MORNING GLORY as well.  A hick from Hicksville brings Emily some posies and Emily does her Greta Garbo impression:  "I vant to be alone!"; a cliched line Garbo imitators always do a la "Reaaaaallllllly I am" and "Judy Judy Judy".  Hollywood director J. Megga Phone drives by and tells Emily to look him up if she ever wants to get into pictures.  You may be tempted to think this is a cariacature of J. Arthur Rank (similar name, natch) but of course, it really isn't.  Rank wasn't known widely at the time in the U.S. (since he was a British   film mogul who became better known here in the 1940's with his film logo of the body builder hitting the gong.  So here, J. Megga Phone is probably just a generic representation of a 'typical' Hollywood director a la Cecil B. DeMille.  

Emily gets herself to Hollywood (cue travel montage).  We see Hollywood & Vine where stars including Edward G. Robinson, Greta Garbo, Joan Blondell (? - my best guess in the red dress), Adolph Menjou (my best guess of the guy in the white suit).  We cut to a head on shot of John Barrymore in red suit and yellow shirt.  No matter which direction he walks, his head shows his left profile.  Barrymore's nickname was "The Great Profile".  A paperboy is next seen.  This is Freddie Bartholomew, child star of such 1930s movies as CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS and DAVID COPPERFIELD.  Clark Gable (and his enormous ears flapping in the breeze) is a streetcar driver and W.C. Fields is a traffic cop.  Interestingly, during this scene the song "HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD" has been playing and when it gets to the line "Go on and try your luck, you might be Donald Duck" is changed to "Go on and try your luck you might be DAFFY DUCK".  This IS a Warner Bros. cartoon, obviously so they're not gonna advertise a Disney fowl!!!  We next go to Graumann's Chinese Theatre with the film PRINCE AND HIS PAPA on the marquee; I'm assuming this is a pun on THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER:  the Errol Flynn film of 1937.  We pan across the famous 'Walk of Fame' with the hands and feet of Errol Flynn, Bette Davis, Edward G. Robinson and (here's the joke) Greta Garbo (all the names altered to protect the innocent, I guess.  The joke here is that Greta Garbo's footprints in the cement are humongous; the joke was that Garbo had big feet.  

A tour bus showing "Homes of the Stars' goes by and we see the home of the Thin Man (William Powell) represented by a skinny house, two houses side by side both with signs saying "SEMOAN" (this admittedly escapes me completely), and then the home of Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) which has a large tree emerging from the top of it with Tarzan sitting in an easy chair on a branch.  Fade to Super Colossal Studios and the office of J. Megga Phone which is filled with hens the director has promised to put into movies.  Emily tries to enter but is stopped by a sign saying "Do Not Enter When Red Light is On".  The red light turns out to be W.C. Fields' nose (he was a drinker, you know).  Fields exits with a little guy he calls "My little pine nut".  This is Charlie McCarthy, Edgar Bergen's ventriloquist dummy whom Fields' famously had an ongoing radio 'feud' with.  The dummy looks absolutely nothing like Charlie McCarthy (it has a moustache, fer God's sake!).  Emily looks in the door of a casting office and sees several men (meant to represent no one in particular) are seen 'casting' fishing rods.  These are the jokes, folks!  On the sound stage, we see a dressing room with a door shaped like an hourglass; Mae West sashays out of it.  The door is shaped to fit her hourglass figure. The next dressing room has a door that is wide at the bottom for Charlie Chaplin; the bottom accomodates his oversized tramp shoes.  We next go into the sound stage where J. Megga Phone is directing a film along with his 'yes men' assistant directors.  The film (as we see on the slate) is called BROADWAY BROADCAST and is directed by Buzzard Berklee starring Dick Fowl.  I guess this film has 2 directors.  Buzzard is Busby Berkeley who specialized in those lavish 1930s musical which featured millions of dancing ladies in geometric patterns; we see this represented in a second as a group of woman march in pinwheel formation.  The star represents Dick Powell who, at the time was known for singing in musicals lilke 42ND STREET; later in the 1940's he would change his image to a tough guy private in in pictures like the classic MURDER, MY SWEET where he played deteective Philip Marlowe and, on radio, played RICHARD DIAMOND, PRIVATE DETECTIVE.  The vocal singing is pretty accurate; Powell was an Irish tenor.  Back to Megga Phone's office which is filled with all those hens looking to become Hollywood starlets.  Emily the Hen is left behind in tears.  A jarring cut takes us to a domestic scene where Emily apparently has married the Hick with the posies and had a passel of baby chicks.  One of the chicks announces, while reading a movie magazine, that she knows that someday she too will be a great actress.  Emily backhands her with an epic bitch-slap.  Th'End.  This is a mildly amusing cartoon which would do this kind of thing much better in other Merrie Melodies & Looney Tunes i.e. in HOLLYWOOD STEPS OUT.  The jokes here are not too sharpened and some of the vocal imitations and caricatures are not spot on; the Joan Blondell and Adolph Menjou figures who could be (and possibly ARE) meant to be someone else but are to vaguely 'someone' to be affective.  And that oddly troubling caricature of Charlie McCarthy is just kinda disturbing.  So as a Warner Bros. Hollywood celebrity parody, A STAR IS HATCHED is not your best choice.