9/10
Little ol' Bosko and the Cannibals is highly entertaining musical cartoon short
9 June 2007
As in a previous cartoon I reviewed, Little ol' Bosko in Bagdad, Bosko (who I'll remind you here is not the monkey-looking character from Warner Bros. but a more realistic-looking little black boy) is on his way to give a bag of cookies for Grandma when he gets stopped by a frog that sounds like Louis Armstrong. In this version, he and other frog caricatures of famous African-American musicians like Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson are portrayed as cannibals. At least this time we get spared Stepin Fetchit. Also like Little ol' Bosko in Bagdad, there's plenty of singing and dancing about Louis wanting cookies/Bosko refusing to give them. Having now seen two versions of basically the same number in two different cartoons, I wonder if someone at Disney watched these and used it as inspiration for the "I Wanna Be Like You" number with Louis Prima, Mogli, and Phil Harris in The Jungle Book. Anyway, very entertaining musical short with hardly any stereotypes (not the offensive kind, anyway). Highly recommended for MGM cartoon buffs curious about the output before Tom and Jerry and Tex Avery came along...
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