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

. . . 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, 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.

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.