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Hobo Bobo is a 1947 Merrie Melodies short directed by Robert McKimson.
Plot
Bobo, a baby elephant, sees a dark future for himself if he should remain in India to haul logs with his trunk for the rest of his life. After receiving a letter from his uncle in America, he decides to emigrate there to play on a circus baseball team. After Bobo's attempts to stow away aboard a ship bound for the United States fail repeatedly, he is advised by the Minah Bird (better known from the Inki series) to paint himself pink. As seeing pink elephants is the traditional hallucination of the drunkard, neither the captain, the crew nor the passengers, will acknowledge seeing Bobo, and thus he has the virtual run of the ship for the entire voyage. When Bobo finally disembarks in New York City, he is likewise unacknowleged, until a street-cleaning vehicle washes his pink paint off, and the populace panics at the sight of a normal gray baby elephant on the street. Hauled into court by the police, the judge sentences him to life -- at the circus, where he is promptly engaged by the baseball team as the official batboy, and he angrily utters his only line in the film, "Batboy, shmatboy! I'm still carrying logs!"
Notes
- This cartoon shares several similarities to Disney's animated feature film "Dumbo" (1941);
- Both Dumbo and Hobo Bobo star a grey baby elephant protagonist that are (usually) mute.
- Both Dumbo and Hobo Bobo at least involve the circus as the major location.
- Both Dumbo and Hobo Bobo have a scene which involves the idea of pink elephants as the hallucination of drunkenness (though in Hobo Bobo this pink elephant idea is rather used as a joke)
- Both the main protagonists from Dumbo and Hobo Bobo at some point interact with a little black bird.
- This is the only cartoon from the Golden Age of American Animation featuring the Minah Bird from the Inki series that is not directed by Chuck Jones. This is also the Mynah Bird's only appearance in a Robert McKimson-directed cartoon.
- This is the only cartoon where Bobo speaks (which is only heard at the end), as in "Gone Batty" Bobo never spoke at all.
- Some airings of this cartoon's USA 1995 dubbed version print on Cartoon Network and Boomerang USA have the black screens in-between the fade-outs edited out for time (evidence in the video in the infobox here), though the cartoon's USA 1995 dubbed version print does exist without the black screens edited out, on CN/Boomerang Latin America and Tooncast. The EU dubbed version print of the cartoon however doesn't have the black screens removed.
Gallery
External Links
- Big Cartoon Database article at [1].
- Internet Movie Database article at [2].
- (Original LaserDisc print)