*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

I like Bosko... He is a little boy, who has a great imagination, and is also very brave... It's absurd to characterize this cartoon as being racist.. First of all there were only two blacks in the cartoon... Bosko and Bosko's "mammy"... the cannibals weren't blacks, but they were frogs... Now I'm not sure exactly why they were characterized as cannibals for wanting to eat Bosko, since they were frogs and he was a human, but maybe the ate other frogs from other frog tribes when there weren't humans to eat... Anyway, I first watched this cartoon when I was very young and found the frogs to be quite frightening... I know if I had been Bosko, I would have given those frogs Grandma's cookies and hightailed it out of there as fast as my sneakers would have carried me... Anyway, (spoiler alert) Bosko held onto his cookies and didn't give them to the frogs... Boskos was a good boy and you could tell that his "mammy" loved him every bit as much as the viewers... Great cartoon... If you can't find a better copy, sometimes you can download it from youtube...

As in a previous cartoon I reviewed, Little ol' Bosko in Bagdad, Bosko (who I'll remind you here is not the monkey-looking character from Warner Bros. but a more realistic-looking little black boy) is on his way to give a bag of cookies for Grandma when he gets stopped by a frog that sounds like Louis Armstrong. In this version, he and other frog caricatures of famous African-American musicians like Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, and Bill "Bojangles" Robinson are portrayed as cannibals. At least this time we get spared Stepin Fetchit. Also like Little ol' Bosko in Bagdad, there's plenty of singing and dancing about Louis wanting cookies/Bosko refusing to give them. Having now seen two versions of basically the same number in two different cartoons, I wonder if someone at Disney watched these and used it as inspiration for the "I Wanna Be Like You" number with Louis Prima, Mogli, and Phil Harris in The Jungle Book. Anyway, very entertaining musical short with hardly any stereotypes (not the offensive kind, anyway). Highly recommended for MGM cartoon buffs curious about the output before Tom and Jerry and Tex Avery came along...

Little Bosko is giving cookies by his mother to take to grandma. Bosko has a big imagination. Instead of being hunted by a wolf, Lil Black Bosko is hunted by cookie-loving cannibals.

Lots of racial caricatures common at that time. Cartoons like this can't be made now and shouldn't have been made then but the great score and wonderful animation superbly redeems this cartoon.

If you like Fats Waller, you'll like these cookies.