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.
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.
