The Coo-Coo Nut Grove

The Coo-Coo Nut Grove (released November 28, 1936) is a Warner Brothers Merrie Melodies short animated film, set in the famed Cocoanut Grove of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. The cartoon was supervised (directed) by Friz Freleng, with animation by Robert McKimson and Sandy Walker and musical score by Carl Stalling.

Master of ceremonies Ben Birdie (bandleader Ben Bernie) is accosted in the opening scene by Walter Windpipe (Walter Winchell). The short then proceeds to showcase a large number of Hollywood stars in the form of caricatures, including Katharine Hepburn (as a horse named Miss Heartburn), Jean Harlow, Bette Davis, Ned Sparks, Hugh Herbert, W.C. Fields, Clark Gable, Groucho and Harpo Marx, Johnny Weissmuller, Mae West, Lionel and John Barrymore, Laurel and Hardy, Edward G. Robinson, Fred Astaire, and George Raft. Musical entertainments are provided by Dame Edna May Oliver as "The Lady in Red", the Dionne quintuplets (who were in reality only two years old at the time) and Helen Morgan, sitting on the piano, turning on the tears with a torch song causing most of the guest crying except Ben Birdie and a few of guests and flooding the grove in the process.

The title is sometimes misspelled as The Coo-Coo Nut Groove. This cartoon was followed by The Woods Are Full Of Cuckoos (1937) and Have You Got Any Castles? (1938), both parodying Hollywood personalities.

DVD release

 * The Coo-Coo Nut Grove is presented on the Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 3.