Looney Tunes' first character was Bosko and he was their #1 star for several years. However, the production team of Hugh Harmon and Rudolf Ising decided to leave Looney Tunes and headed to MGM. And, unlike Walt Disney and his Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the pair retained ownership of the character...so they began making Bosko shorts with MGM. Now you'd think this would have been a great loss for Looney Tunes...and it was on the short term. However, Bosko was a godawful character and his shorts were simply jam-packed with cuteness...to the point of inducing nausea! Singing, dancing and cuteness...and not much in the way of character....and his loss meant Looney Tunes needed to develop a new leading man. After a few years of misses, Looney Tunes hit upon some great characters...full of laughs and sarcasm...something lacking in the Bosko cartoons. And, with characters like Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny, Looney Tunes was definitely better off without the Harmon-Ising approach to cartoons....and better off without such a problematic character. Why problematic? Well, in some of the cartoons Bosko is clearly black....and not in a good way but a very stereotypical one.
By the time Harmon-Ising made "Little Ol' Bosko and the Pirates" came out, Bosko was very, very clearly a black child...with a very black sounding voice and an art style which left nothing to the imagination. Oddly, Basko ends up running into some pirates that seemed based on Ub Iwerks' Flip the Frog. One, however, clearly is intended to be a frog version of Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson. Another is clearly modeled after Fats Waller, the Jazz pianist and composer.
If you want to see this one, a very poor copy has been posted to YouTube. But apart from the quality of the print, the film isn't all that fun..and fun is the main reason folks watch cartoons.
So is it any good? Well, the artwork is a major improvement over the old Bosko and it's in full color like the later Bosko cartoons. But the story is a problem...not just because of political correctness concerns but because it just isn't funny nor enjoyable to watch. I can pretty much guarantee you won't be seeing this incarnation of Bosko on TV any time soon!
