The Booze Hangs High

Today, December 1, in 1935, the fourth cartoon in the long-running Warner Bros. series Looney Tunes was released. Like most of the early entries, this one starred a character called Bosko and was titled The Booze Hangs High.

The “booze” in the title first appears around 3:30 minutes into the 6:14 minute cartoon, fished out of the pig’s trough by one of the two piglets.

The two youngsters can’t figure out how to open the bottle until one of them has the brought idea to use his corkscrew tail.

They manage to open it and bubbles are released.

Naturally, they each take a drink from the bottle, and they both get drunk.

Whereupon Pops shows up and takes the bottle for himself.

It lands with a crash on poor Bosko, breaking over his head and also getting him drunk.

And the four of them, deliriously happy and drunk, begin singing in harmony.

The song was the then-popular “Sweet Adeline.”

You can watch the entire cartoon below. It’s fairly typical of animated fare of the time with broad humor, not terribly sophisticated or all that funny, to be honest. But in these early days of animation, the novelty of it for movie-goers was simply seeing things that they could not see or probably even imagine characters doing in real life, so that was the draw and what made them so popular. It would take several more years for cartoons to realize their true potential, with wit and sophistication, not to mention color. Bugs Bunny wasn’t introduced until 1940, five years later. This was two years after Prohibition ended and it still stands as an interesting time capsule of the heady days after repeal.