My three-year-old has been having awful insomniac spells at two in the morning all week and we're at a loss for getting her back to sleep . Last night, when she came into our room, I desperately grabbed my phone off the bedstand and went YouTube spelunking for something to get her calmed down enough for a story and (maybe) sleep. We found our way to this 1957 Warner Brothers/Fritz Freling Loony Tunes classic, The Three Little Bops, which is just outstanding.
It's a 7-minute musical retelling of the Three Little Pigs in which the pigs have grown up to be successful jazz musicians, and must contend with a (clearly stoned!) Big Bad Wolf who keeps trying to sit in with his trumpet, which he sucks at playing. Eventually, the wolf blows himself up with a mistimed bomb-fuse, descends to hell, learns to play his horn, and his ghost is welcomed back in to sit in with the boys.
The music is brilliant, the animation is hilarious, and we both loved it. After Poesy and I watched this, we downloaded my free audiobook of Alice in Wonderland, a story she loves from picture-book abridgments, and listened to it together as a bedtime story and we were both asleep in short order. Let's hope she makes it through the night tonight!
If you like this one, also try 1943's Pigs in a Polka, another Three Little Pigs Looney Tune which features Carl Stalling's musical adaptations of Brahms's "Hungarian Dances."
Looney Tunes – Golden Collection, Volume Two (includes Three Little Bops)
- Help select the 100 greatest Looney Tunes – Boing Boing
- Skeletal Looney Toons sculpture from Hollywood Day of the Dead …
- Looney Tunes lyrics – Boing Boing
- Looney Toons characters in the 28th Century – Boing Boing
- Abominable Snow Rabbit cartoon – Boing Boing
- Looney Tunes composer profiled in Slate – Boing Boing
- Raymond Scott tribute concert footage – Boing Boing
