Summary: Bosko is a construction worker who impresses Honey by making music from everything in sight, including a decapitated mouse, a typewriter, and a goat filled with hot air. I don't know how best to describe it. The early Warner Bros. shorts were weird in their lack of a coherent plot and characterization.
Part(s) Edited: Nickelodeon strikes again with their edits. This time, they cut Bosko decapitating the Mickey Mouse-looking mouse (and the mouse trying to get its head back) as Bosko tosses the mouse back and forth on the saw. It's not as gruesome as it sounds (mostly because it's played for laughs and musicality), but I do kind of understand why Nickelodeon would consider it inappropriate for kids/family TV, especially back in the late 1980s, early 1990s when censorship was a bit more strict on the violence/dangerous behavior front. Thanks to OpenShot Video Editor, I did a recreation of how I think the edit played out on Nickelodeon.
Please note: I was too young to remember when Nickelodeon aired Bosko cartoons on Nick at Nite (but I do remember when they aired Daffy/Speedy cartoons on their daytime version of Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon), so this isn't 100% actual evidence.
How It Plays With the Edit: Besides a mild jump in the audio (and the fact that the early Warner Bros. cartoons didn't have much in the way of a story or plot), the edit doesn't make or break the cartoon. Get used to this type of evaluation. It will be semi-frequent.
Availability Uncut: Bad news: it's not on any official Warner Bros. DVD or Blu-ray release as of this writing, nor is it on any streaming service, such as HBO Max (or Max, as it's now known), Warner Media RIDE, or even Boomerang (whose streaming service has more classic cartoons than the actual channel). The good news: this short is public domain, so YouTube and other video sites should have it uncut and uncensored (and maybe, just maybe, you can find the edited-on-Nickelodeon version since there are people out there who want to upload the stuff they recorded on their VCRs back when that was common). Here's the full short on YouTube (the quality isn't the best, but it is uncut and uncensored).
For those who either weren't born between the years 1988 and 1999 (or too young to remember those years), there was a time when Nickelodeon was one of many American free-broadcast and pay-TV channels that aired the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons.
Nickelodeon's way of airing them was different. When it started out in 1988, the cartoons aired on Nick at Nite, Nickelodeon's block for old TV shows (around that time, it would have been programs from the 1950s to the 1970s that were in the Paramount library). The selection was slim: black-and-white shorts made before 1943 (specifically, the Bosko and Buddy cartoons, with some one-shot musical shorts), redrawn-colorized versions of the 1930s-1940s Porky Pig cartoons, and the post-1964 cartoons (most of which were the ones where Daffy Duck is paired with Speedy Gonzales, the Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote cartoons made without Chuck Jones' involvement, and the desperate attempts at creating new characters [Cool Cat, Chimp N. Zee, Bunny and Claude, etc] before Warner Bros. animation studio shut down completely in 1969) were all that aired.
When Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon moved to daytime hours, the line-up was changed to get rid of the Bosko, Buddy, and one-shot musical black and white cartoons, changed some of the redrawn-colorized cartoons to computer-colorized, and added some Warner Bros. shorts that would otherwise not be available on network television: the Speedy Gonzales cartoons made between 1954 and 1963 when he was paired with Sylvester or a one-shot character, the Pepe Le Pew cartoons made after 1949's "For Scent-imental Reasons", the post-1948 Foghorn Leghorn cartoons, and a lot of shorts (with one-shot or lower-tier characters) considered "forgotten", "underrated", and "hidden gems" by the more hardcore of Looney Tunes cartoons fans. Yes, the more popular shorts were included, but weren't aired often (possibly because they were needed on other, less niche networks).
In contrast to network television of the time, Nickelodeon didn't edit for slapstick violence, suggestive humor, tobacco smoking, alcohol drinking, or use of dynamite or bombs. Nickelodeon's cuts were for profanity (a rarity, but it has happened), any activity considered dangerous and easy for young and impressionable viewers to copy, comically violent gags that were too violent by the network's standards, suicide played for comedy, ingesting pills or dangerous chemicals, outdated racial caricatures of African-Americans, East Asians, and (sometimes) Native Americans/American Indians, and references to World War II involving Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan and the Japanese (the more innocuous WWII references to things like buying war bonds, rationing food, and recycling scrap metal were left intact).
Other cuts done to the cartoons were to shave off some time for more commercials, and, in the case of a lot of redrawn-colorized cartoons, edits done to cover up the fact that the artwork was terrible and there was no way in Hell that the Korean animators were able to re-create the lively and over-the-top animation done by Bob Clampett (and, on occasion, Tex Avery, Frank Tashlin, Norm McCabe, and Chuck Jones, but most of the redrawn-colorized cartoons were originally black and white cartoons directed by Bob Clampett).
As you'll see, compared with other channels, Nickelodeon's cuts made more of an effort to make the edits for content as seamless as possible. There were more successes than failures and some attempts proved that whoever edited the classic cartoons for content at Nickelodeon at least had a sense of humor. However, that's just my opinion and you (the reader) might not feel the same way.
Summary:Bosko and his similar-looking girlfriend, Honey (remember, these were made back when Mickey and Minnie Mouse were popular and other cartoon studios tried to imitate that success) go on a car ride that goes comically wrong. Oh, and the first part has a lot of comedy set to the short’s title song. That, too, was common in the early days of Warner Bros. Cartoons.
Part(s) Edited:Yes, even the very first Warner Bros. cartoon was censored when aired on American television. But Nickelodeon’s edit was fairly light. All they cut was Bosko yelling, “MAMMY!” as his car chases him down a hill with Honey in it. For more information about how and why this would be considered offensive, look up “Al Jolson” and the 1927 film, The Jazz Singer.
How It Plays With the Edit: Since this is an early Warner Bros. cartoon where the plot and characters are thin and the shorts only existed as a kind of early version of the music video, there's no need to worry about any jokes being ruined or plot holes. However, according the the old Censored Cartoons Page, Bosko shouting "MAMMY!" was muted rather than cut, so having Bosko shout with no sound coming out may turn that scene into a non sequitur. I did a crude compare/contrast video just to show how I think the edit played out.
Availability Uncut: It's been in the public domain since 1958, so you can find it on YouTube and similar video sites if you want to see it there. For those who love physical media, this short can be found on The Uncensored Bosko DVD (volume 1), the third volume of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD set as a special feature, volume two of the Looney Tunes Platinum Collection Blu-ray (on disc three), and on several public domain VHS tapes (for those who still have VCRs) and DVDs, particularly Inside Termite Terrace volume two (VHS), Hugh Harman & Rudolf Ising's Uncensored Cartoons Collection volume one (DVD), and Hugh Harman & Rudolf Ising's Uncensored Cartoons.
