Studio: Harman-Ising Productions, Leon Schlesinger Productions (Looney Tunes)
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures, The Vitaphone Corporation
Produced by: Hugh Harman, Rudolf Ising, Leon Schlesinger
Short Synopsis
The First World War, fought by animals. Bosko is a doughboy in the trenches, trying to eat a large pan of peas, which is blown to pieces by artillery; he settles for the cheese on a mousetrap and sits miserable among the shells. He takes out an enormous photograph of his girl Honey to cheer himself up, and gunfire destroys that too, which finally makes him mad enough to fight. A cow soldier plays the harmonica, a dachshund's fleas are dealt with by letting the enemy shoot holes in his helmet, and the animals go over the top in a battle of comic casualties. Bosko is bombed by an enemy on a pelican, has the dachshund swallow a spare bomb and fire it back, and ends, inevitably, by saving the day in the last seconds with an explosion that leaves him dazed and grinning.
Why It Matters
- It is the blackest comedy in the early Looney Tunes: a war cartoon in which shells land on the beat, soldiers are blown up to music and a sentimental photograph is used for target practice, made thirteen years after the Armistice when every adult in the audience remembered the war. The gag of the mousetrap cheese and the exploding peas has a cruelty the series soon lost.
- Bosko was the first Warner Bros. cartoon star, created by Harman and Ising after they left Disney, and the Looney Tunes series was built around him from 1930 to 1933. The Doughboy is one of the best of his shorts and shows the Harman-Ising unit, soon to leave for MGM, at full strength, with Frank Marsales's score doing the kind of work Carl Stalling would later make famous.
Notes and Trivia
- Johnny Murray voiced Bosko in a falsetto that owed something to Mickey Mouse; Harman and Ising took the character with them when they left Schlesinger in 1933.
- The cartoon is in the public domain and circulates widely.
- See also: Love a Parade (1932), You're Too Careless with Your Kisses (1932).