in 1922 by American pianist and composer Oscar Rasbach. This setting had been performed and recorded frequently in twentieth century, including Ernestine Schumann-Heink, John Charles Thomas, Nelson Eddy, Robert Merrill, Perry Como, and Paul Robeson. Rasbach's song appeared on popular network television shows, including All in the Family, performed by the puppets Wayne and Wanda in The Muppet Show, and as an animated feature segment featuring Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians performing the song in the 1948 animated film Melody Time, the last of the short-film anthology features produced by Walt Disney, showing bucolic scenes seen through the changing of the seasons, this version noticeably features a break between the third and fourth stanzas to facilitate a storm scene. Rasbach's setting has also been lampooned, most notably in the Our Gang short film "Arbor Day" (1936), directed by Fred C. Newmeyer, in which Alfalfa (played by Carl Switzer), sings the song in a whiny, strained voice after a "woodsman, spare that tree" dialogue with Spanky (George McFarland). Film critic Leonard Maltin has called this "the poem's all-time worst rendition".Movies: Arbor Day (1936) (review summary) on The New York Times website. Retrieved June 24, 2013. In his album Caught in the Act, Victor Borge, when playing requests, responds to a member of the audience: "Sorry I don't know that 'Doggie in the Window'. I know one that comes pretty close to it" and proceeds to play the Rasbach setting of "Trees". Dutch composer Henk van der Vliet included a setting of "Trees" as the third in a set of five songs written in 1977, which included texts by poets Christina Rossetti, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Kilmer, Matthew Prior, and Sir John Suckling. Parodies Because of the varied reception to Kilmer's poem and its simple rhyme and meter, it has been the model for several parodies written by humorists and poets alike. While keeping with Kilmer's iambic tetrameter rhythm and its couplet rhyme scheme, and references to the original poem's thematic material, such parodies are often immediately recognizable, as is seen in "Song of the Open Road" written by poet and humorist Ogden Nash: "I think that I shall never see / A billboard lovely as a tree. / Indeed, unless the billboards fall, / I'll never see a tree at all." A similar sentiment was expressed in a 1968 episode of the animated series Wacky Races titled "The Wrong Lumber Race", where