Monday, June 26, 2017
Cats Dont Dance Hollywood Stars of the 1930s
Cats Dont Dance Hollywood Stars of the 1930s
I was watching Cats Dont Dance a Turner Feature Animation and there are an awful lot of caricature-like characters featured. The animated film is set in the 1930s and is about a cat trying to make it big in Hollywood. The animated likenesses of Bette Davis, Jimmy Durante, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Mae West, Clark Gable, Joan Crawford & Cary Grant were all used with permission from their estates. Which is weird because back in "many" old cartoons the people who developed the cartoons used to caricature famous people without permission not to mention that these people were all long dead by the time of the Cats Dont Dance film release.
They didnt have to get Shirley Temples permission because the character who was based on her appearance was a parody dubbed Darla Dimple. Its obvious she is based on Temple some of her film posters in her mansion are parodies of Shirley Temple films. And there is one part in the film where she eats an animal cracker.
As you know a parody is a character based upon someone with your own imagination. Its still an obvious caricature but is not that person if you get my drift. According to news reports at the time Temple was none too pleased with the parody but it didnt bother her. Darla Dimple is a character who pretends to be something she really is not and that is nice. Shes really a bratty little spoiled rotten child star something Shirley Temple was not. Temple was spoiled but not like the Dimple character. Then again the character is a parody and is not the real deal. I love caricature/parodies they make the world go around in animation and fiction.
Another thing that bothered me about the film was that Jasmine Guy did the voice of Sawyer in the film right? Jasmine Guy was a singer so why didnt she provide the singing voice for the character in the film? I totally understand the male character being ghosted but the character Guy portrayed? That sure is one big mystery and it all goes down to the people behind the film as they make the final decisions. Even Darla Dimples singing voice was ghosted by a Shirley Temple impersonator by the name of Lindsay Ridgeway at the time.
Ridgeway played a Shirley Temple knock-off dubbed Sally Shine in the 1997 Disney film Tower of Terror in the same year. There are two mixed up rumors circling the internet one is that Guy sounded too black and the other is she didnt sound black enough so they hired Natalie Cole to fill in for her.
