The Booze Hangs High
Tags: psychedelic

Plot synopsis:
The scene opens with a close up shot of a cow's rear end. She moos as she walks away, tail and udders swaying in time to Turkey in the Straw. Bosko appears and does a Mexican style dance with the cow. At one point, the cow's "pants" drop, revealing polka-dotted underwear. Bosko points and laughs, at which the cow pulls her pants back on and walks off in a huff—with her nose up and tail held erect.
Next, Bosko laughs heartily at a horse and the horse laughs back. He then climbs onto the horse carriage and uses a whip to play the horse's tail like a violin. He tunes the "horse" by twisting his ear. The horse seems to enjoy the music and dances in an odd fashion. He skates along, floats a few feet above the ground and makes swishing movements, with his hoofs, as if mimicking a mop. Bosko then takes a rake and starts playing it like a fiddle, as the horse begins trotting on two legs.
The scene cuts to three ducklings and their mother. Whilst walking in single file, they start bouncing on their rears in tune to the music. The mother duck starts to sway and the ducklings follow her lead. One of the ducklings, crosses its legs and whispers something in the mother duck's ear. She undoes a flap on his rear, as if he was wearing pants, and motions him off screen, presumably to relieve himself. When he returns, she replaces the flap and they all jump into a pond.
The scene moves back to Bosko and the horse. It seems to be an exact repeat of the earlier dance routine, with Bosko playing the horse's tail while the horse goes through his unique dance moves. Bosko eventually slides down the horse's neck and goes to feed the pigs, who seem to be squealing in hunger. He tilts a trash can into their trough, and they eat greedily. One of the piglets finds a bottle of booze and tries to loosen the cork. Eventually, he manages to open it using the other piglet's tail as a corkscrew. Bubbles begin to float out, and the piglets pop them merrily, making xylophone-like sounds that play How dry I am. They start drinking it and soon get drunk. Their father comes over and starts drinking from the bottle too. He laughs with a deep bass guffaw and sings One Little Drink, using nonsense syllables. He gestures expressively and flings the bottle away which shatters against Bosko's head.
Bosko becomes soaked in booze and inebriated. He walks over to the pigs and they sing Sweet Adeline together, barbershop style. The father pig launches into One Little Drink again, but the effort causes him to belch up a corn cob. Looking embarrassed, he uses his belly button like a knob to open the door to his stomach and puts the cob back inside. He starts to sing again and Bosko helps him reach for the final low note by pulling his tail, which deflates him temporarily.
Bosko and the pigs dance some more until the end credits.

Review: comedy loves booze.
Bosko, the very first Looney Tunes star, appeared in Warner Bros.
cartoons from 1930 to 1933, when his creators moved to MGM (they continued making cartoons featuring him until 1938, after which he faded into obscurity).
"The Booze Hangs High" was one outing for the high-voiced character, showing him dancing around with some farm animals and playing them like musical instruments.
The menagerie includes some inebriated pigs (and this cartoon got released during Prohibition!).Drunkenness is quite often a source of humor.
Cartoons occasionally depict a besotted stork delivering babies.
"The Andy Griffith Show" had Otis.
It seems like it's only been during the past twenty years (approximately) that alcoholism became socially unacceptable.
I assume that most people would consider it such, despite its continued existence.Anyway, this is an OK cartoon, despite the limited plot line..
On the farm with Bosko.
The Bosko cartoons may not be animation masterpieces, but they are fascinating as examples of Looney Tunes in their early days before the creation of more compelling characters and funnier and more creative cartoons.None of the previous Bosko cartoons were great, most of them being hit and miss, but they were interesting and mostly quite decent.
The fifth Bosko cartoons 'The Booze Hangs High' is the weakest of the five so far.
By all means it is a long way from awful and is watchable, but is more a very average one-time watch that is forgettable after a few days, for Bosko at this time this is somewhat of a disappointment.Certainly there are good things about 'The Booze Hangs High'.
The animation is not bad at all.
Not exactly refined but fluid and crisp enough with some nice detail, it is especially good in the meticulous backgrounds and some remarkably flexible yet natural movements for Bosko.
The music is 'The Booze Hangs High's' highlight component, its infectious energy, rousing merriment, lush orchestration and how well it fits with the animation is just a joy.Some parts are fun and intriguing, including the imaginative ways of playing instruments.
Bosko is never going to be one of my favourite cartoon characters, or among the all-time greats, but he has more personality this time round and it's more endearing than before which compared to the previous four cartoons is saying a good deal where he had not found his stride.
The supporting characters are okay enough, and the sound is not too static.However, 'The Booze Hangs High's' story is paper thin and has some pedestrian stretches.
The humour, with some potty humour and some really bizarre elements like the getting drunk scene, is too far and between and is not that funny.Generally, the cartoon is not that imaginative outside of the ways of how the instruments are used.
Pacing is pretty dull.Overall, alright cartoon but without the desire to see it again in a hurry.
5/10 Bethany Cox. Not Too Interesting, Until.......
This is a typical 1930's cartoon, featuring Bosko, until the last few minutes.
At the beginning, it is a series of overused sight gags with Bosko, his horse, and a cow.
But when the pigs appear, we are introduced to the glories of drunkenness.
The drunk is a staple of this period in film.
When one of the little pigs discovers a bottle of bootleg hootch, he and his mate drink it and become soused.
Soon an adult pig joins them and a concert of "Sweet Adeline" ensues.
It's pretty funny, to be honest, but probably not what the censors would have approved..
Decent but you can see that Disney had nothing to fear from Looney Tunes at this point in time....
The early star for the Looney Tunes cartoons from Warner Brothers was Bosco.
I've seen a few of his films and still have no idea what the character is supposed to be--so I looked him up on Wikipedia.
They indicate he's supposed to be a black young man.
Regardless of who he is, these cartoons directed by the Harmon-Ising team tended to be rather cute and less edgy than many of their competitors.
They weren't bad--they just weren't very good either.
Not surprisingly, most folks today have never heard of the guy.In this installment, much of the film is pretty bland and cute.
However, there is fortunately a bit of potty humor (believe me, it needed it) and a portion at the end involving pigs drinking booze.
Otherwise, there just isn't a lot of plot here and the cartoon is pretty forgettable.
If you care, the animation was done by Friz Freleng--a guy who later directed many of the classic Looney Tunes shorts..
The High Crime of Capital Treason on the part of "actress" Patty .
. Hearst's Grandpappy, Willy Randy, is on full display in this animated short, THE BOOZE HANGS HIGH.
Willy Randy, no doubt the financial backer of BOOZE, made his fortune by promoting the "Demon Rum" and demonizing the alleged REEFER MADNESS.
The consensus of public policy think tank experts is that Willy Randy essentially MURDERED at least 48.4 MILLION Americans by bamboozling an easily fooled U.S. Public and Congress to switch the Government's blessing from Founding Father George Washington's Medicinal Pot to the drunken Lot's incest-promoting Booze.
When social scientists tally up all the young daughters dying in childbirth from liquor-induced incest to more than a million DUI traffic deaths to thousands of wood alcohol fatalities among the desperate hooked Alkies "Down in the Hollers" to millions of Hootch-caused cardiovascular slayings not to mention hundreds of thousands of sauce-facilitated suicides and murders, the tally is Pretty Darn Near 50 million genocidal killings and counting.
All of this so Willy Randy could replace high quality hemp newsprint for his scandal rags with cheap acidic self-destructing pages made from the Empire of Tree Plantations in exploited Third World Nations (giving rise to the so-called "Yellow Journalism").
Surely Willy Randy (the Real Life basis for director Orson Welles' CITIZEN KANE) was one of the most evil, venal, crass criminal masterminds in human history, deserving to be dug up even Today and shot by firing squad posthumously!.
Bosko goes down to the farm in an okay, if unspectacular short..
This is the fourth Bosko short and it has some engaging moments.
Since I'll be discussing in a bit of detail one or two scenes, consider this a spoiler warning: Bosko continues to get music out of fairly atypical places, such as a horse's tail played like a violin and a pitchfork played like a guitar or banjo.
Like most early Bosko shorts, this is very musical in nature and has one extended and fairly amusing bit centering around three pigs who take turns drinking from a bottle (the "Booze" of the title) and lurching around.
First, two small pigs find the bottle and sample the contents and then a larger pig commandeers the bottle and takes a few liberal swigs before tossing the bottle.
The bottle then comes into the possession of Bosko, who himself partakes of its contents and staggers over to join the pigs to join them in a spontaneous (and off-key) rendition of "Sweet Adeline".
A low-rent barbershop quartet.
There's one brief gag that's possibly a bit unsettling with an ear of corn making an unscheduled (and no doubt unexpected) reappearance, but it's really rather mild by today's standards.Entertaining, if rather pedestrian in tone and substance, it would definitely be worth watching at least once.