Bosko’s Radio References

The MGM cartoon Hey-Hey Fever (1935) looks like a tarted up Warner Bros. cartoon. It has that two-tone Technicolor and Bosko design you see in Warners shorts. It even sounds like one. It includes Billy Bletcher (as Mother Hubbard’s dog, a black kid and Old King Cole) and that female chorus Leon Schlesinger used. Perhaps that’s not a surprise as Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising had been at Schlesinger’s less than a year earlier.

There are a few differences. There are overlays in the middle ground, perspective animation of characters walking past the camera, and animation in the background as well as the foreground. Oh, and Bosko doesn’t talk in a falsetto (though he does emit a Mickey Mouse-like nervous giggle).

Cartoons around the mid-‘30s had at least one of two things—radio references and/or celebrity caricatures. This one has the former.



The old woman who lived in a shoe has so many children who yell “We want candy!” This is a takeoff on the “We want Cantor!” shout on Eddie Cantor’s show.



Later in the cartoon, Bosko climbs a knoll and shouts “It’s only the beginning, folks! Only the beginning!” That comes from Captain Henry, played by Charlie Winninger, on the Maxwell House Show Boat.



Finally, as the starving folk of Mother Goose Land are about to enjoy the bounty of food they’ve grown themselves, in kind of an analogy to ending the Depression, Bosko strolls into the foreground and shouts “Is everybody happy?” It was the catchphrase of Ted Lewis, known perhaps more for his band-leading than radio (Lewis became a nostalgia act in Vegas in the ‘50s and ‘60s).

The cartoon is an operetta of sorts as much of the rhyming dialogue is sung or sung/spoken. One exchange:

Bosko: Are you the Farmer in the Dell?
Farmer: Yeah, my farm is shot to ——.

I don’t know if the title song is from an MGM musical. If anyone knows, please post a note.