When I was a kid, one of my favorite records was half of an LP called Bugs Bunny's Songfest. Why half? Let me explain.
For years, the kids' records of the Warner Brothers cartoon characters (Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, et al) were produced here in Hollywood by Capitol Records, and Capitol did an absolute first-rate job with them. They hired Mel Blanc and some of the guys who wrote the cartoons, and Capitol had a superb, full orchestra and great arrangers. The same guys who were arranging and conducting music for Sinatra, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole (etc.) were doing the music for Bugs, Daffy and Porky. Great stuff…and not enough of it is available today.
At some point in the fifties, Capitol stopped doing this kind of material and Golden Records got the license. Golden Records did some fine discs that didn't feature the WB players but the ones they did of Bugs 'n' Company were for the most part, pretty poor. They used cheaper orchestras and cheaper orchestrations, and they did them from New York, not as Capitol had from the heart of Hollywood. So they didn't use much talent from the WB studio and worst of all, they didn't use Mel Blanc. Even though they sometimes advertised their records as "Original Cartoon Voices," what you got were New York actors imitating (usually, poorly) Mr. Blanc.
I felt very burned when I bought these records…a mistake I made several times. I'd get one home, put it on my little turntable and ten seconds in, I'd moan, "That's not Bugs Bunny." But I only felt half-burned when I purchased Bugs Bunny Songfest.
One side of it was non-Mel material that Golden Records had produced and released as singles. But the other side was apparently material that had been produced by Capitol with their musicians and Mel Blanc, but never released by them. It consisted of twelve songs, all but one sung by Mel, each a "Happy Birthday" song for a different month. Sylvester sang the song for January, Tweety sang for February, Daffy for March, etc. They were short but, I thought, pretty good.
Someone has digitized them and put 'em up on YouTube with decent still graphics. I'm going to run them here over six non-consecutive days, two at a time. Here are January and February. And if this topic sounds familiar, it's because I wrote about it here back in 2004. Here are the first two…