Sinkin' in the Bathtub

In this Looney Tunes short, the first Looney Tunes short ever made (the first proper one anyway), the main characters, Bosko and Honey, are black people. This makes watching the cartoon very sad, because Bosko and Honey are portrayed more as animals than people (otherwise it would not be a big deal at all). You grow to love them, but I cannot come over the fact that I am watching cartoon PEOPLE rather than cartoon ANIMALS. Even though I am seethingly against racism, I cannot help but love this cartoon (like a few other racist Looney Tunes shorts, but not in the same way).

Anyhow, in this very odd (for today's standards) cartoon, there are two characters called Bosko and Honey. They are both black people, Bosko is a person who manages to make an instrument out of everything and Honey is his sweet sweetheart. They both go out together and find themselves in some quite turbulent adventures, but everything becomes all right in the end and shows that (not avoiding the cliché) love always finds a way. :-)

I loved this short because I found Bosko and Honey such cute characters, I liked the "oddness" of the episode and I enjoyed the old type of slapstick involved (which ran through both Looney Tunes and Walt Disney's cartoons at the same time, in very similar ways).

I recommend "Sinkin' in the Bathtub" to people who can understand the racism of this episode and not let it spoil the short, and to cartoon historians. It is worth it for every Looney Tunes fan to watch just for the fact that this was the first Looney Tunes cartoon (which was a series that ran until 1969). Enjoy "Sinkin' in the Bathtub"! :-)

8 and a half out of ten.

In this first Looney Tunes offering, we meet Bosco. I don't know if he is intended to be a monkey or a black person. I hope it's the former. He takes a really interesting bath (quite creative) and heads off in his car to meet his girlfriend. Things don't go so well, as obstacles along the way keep them from having comfortable date. For starters, he brings her tulips but a goat eats them when he isn't looking. All in all, decent animation and music.

As an animation nut, the truly significant moments in animation history always make my heart swell and my pulse race. 'Gertie the Dinosaur' genuinely makes me tear up. So it was perhaps inevitable that I would enjoy Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising's 'Sinkin' in the Bathtub' since it is the first ever Looney Tune(not counting the short pilot film 'Bosko The Talk Ink Kid'). Animated by the great Friz Freleng, 'Sinkin' in the Bathtub' is surprisingly enjoyable on its own merits. It quickly establishes a bawdier atmosphere than previous cartoons (completely naked characters, a dance involving toilet paper, a shot of a bra and a cow with an enormous, pendulous udder) which would come to characterise Warner Bros. animation. It also establishes a sense of enormous inventiveness instantly when lead character Bosko plays his shower like a harp. The subsequent story is thin on plot (Bosko visits his girlfriend Honey and they go for a drive encountering some very mild danger) but there are plenty of funny moments, my favourite being Bosko's anthropomorphic car unexpectedly emerging for a distant shed instead of the garage. If the short ever tends towards the dull, there's always the sense of "I'm watching the first ever Looney Tune" to get you through the weak patches, Surprisingly, these are few and far between (Bosko crying after a goat eats his flowers is a little saccharine but otherwise there's little that comes to mine) and while there was still a long way to go before the recognised Warner style was achieved, 'Sinkin' in the Bathtub' is a charming start to a truly great story. Bosko's climactic intonation of the soon to be iconic phrase 'That's All Folks' will surely floor any animation fanatic.

As others have pointed out, this is the first official Looney Tunes cartoon to be released, so it certainly has historical merit. I like it because it has the odd, early '30s cartoon humor. It's hard to explain but because it's so dated, it has its own flavor to it, as Betty Boop did around this time. Is it almost primitive-looking in spots? Of course, but it was made at the beginning of sound being heard on screen and, well, it's over 75 years old so that's what you get. Frankly, in an innocent basic way, the cartoons of this period offer something different.

It's still innovative in that you see some great sights that only animation can give you, like Bosco switching the shower to aim out the window, then surfing on the spray out the window, then pulling out a giant harmonica - that's bigger than he is - out of his pants! Outrageous!

I don't believe I laughed out loud once during the eight-minute cartoon, but I enjoyed every minute of watching "Bosco" and his girlfriend and thought there were a lot of "cute" things in here. It got a little repetitive near the end but overall had enough sight gags to still call the whole thing "entertaining." That's not a bad way to start off the famous "Looney Tunes."

Sinkin' in the Bathtub (1930) was the first of the Looney Tunes series. It stars Bosko, a relatively unknown cartoon character later to be eclipsed by characters such as Porky, Daffy Duck, and Bugs Bunny.

This short is derivative of the contemporary Mickey Mouse series, which was at the height of its popularity in the early 1930s. Gags such as the cow shaking its utter in disgust or the goat which accompanies Bosko to his girlfriend's home are directly taken from Disney works going as far back as Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in the late silent era.

That being said, Sinkin' in the Bathtub is a cute but not essential short. A better introduction to Bosko would be Bosko's Picture Show (1933), which is funnier and very pre-code in its sensibilities.