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7/31/14

Baby Snooks & Friends (Capitol, 1977)

This is one of those album covers that make you do a double-take, when you are flipping through LP's at your local thrift store.  This is a weirder team-up than that time Spider-Man was paired with the first cast of Saturday Night Live (in MARVEL TEAM-UP).
But of course, this is a compilation album, and the only thing shared between Baby Snooks and the Warner Bros. characters is the cover.  In fact, the contents of both sides of this disc were first released by Capitol's "Bozo" subsidiary in the 1940's and 50's.
I have to confess, even though I grew up listening to OTR, and heard my share of Fanny Brice, Baby Snooks is somewhat lost on me, and it makes it all the worse to have her cloyingly sing to me about not crossing the street, or taking a bath...and, why in the world is her name "Baby Snooks," when she is old enough to attend school, and has a baby brother who is an actual infant?
Also, there are a few interesting moments where she receives more than one earnest spanking from her father. And if that's not awkward enough to listen to, see if you can keep from squirming when her father wrongfully accuses her and allows himself to be the recipient of a spanking...wow.
Some of the original artwork (which, as you can see, is where the art for Baby Snooks was lifted from).
Side 2 has three Looney Tunes adventures,voiced by the incomparable Mel Blanc, and the last two were new to me.  Interestingly, at least one other uncredited voice artist shows up (for one, as the uncle of Yosemite Sam, which according to a website was Pinto Colvig)...which reminds me, I swear that Arthur Q. Bryan (voice of Elmer Fudd) appears on the Snooks side, as a man who nearly runs over Baby with his car (too bad he missed)!



4 comments:

  1. Wow, that Snooks character is really scraping the barrel bottom for entertainment. Thanks anyway, for the upload.

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  2. It's interesting how long they managed to re-release these albums the way they did. Of course I'm sure most children in 1976 would be scratching their heads at that unless they asked their folks who this Snooks character was.

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  3. I'm sure, too, that only the large presence of WB characters sold any copies of this album!
    By the way, Bugs appears to be running on a strip of dirt...but it continues over to the left, and forms the ledge that Snooks is sitting on. Whoever put the artwork together was really sloppy!

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  4. Also, I hate to say it, but the next record is even worse than this one!

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