Warner Bros. cartoons: Bugs Bunny, Yosemite Sam, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Wile E. Coyote... small masterpieces, many of them. I have them all on DVD, and they still work brilliantly. Some standouts: Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd doing The Barber of Seville and Wagner's Ring Cycle in 3 minutes, Bugs doing the bullfight with that marvellous Rube Goldberg device at the end--the greased ramp, the glue brush, the sandpaper, the match, the fuse, the barrel of gunpowder--and my all-time favourite, Bugs and Yosemite Sam doing the high diving act, especially the moment where Sam gets tricked into diving for the third or fourth time, but pops back up and says in that gravelly baritone: "Ah hate you."
The original producer of that stuff, Friz Freleng, was an opera buff and frequently used operatic scores as background music, if not the actual subject, as in the Barber of Seville. Those cartoons were my introduction to opera, and there are still musical passages I cannot hear without thinking of those cartoons and laughing. I doubt I could sit through a real performance of The Barber of Seville without behaving inappropriately in an opera house.
Another little vignette from real life: the guy who did the voices, Mel Blanc, was once in a serious accident and was lying comatose in a hospital unable to communicate, until one of the doctors thought to ask, "You in there, Bugs?" And he was; the medical staff was able to talk to him thru Bugs and get information about his condition and tell him about his treatments. I dunno if that's entirely a true story or not--I know the accident happened--but I hope so.
