Looney Tunes' first character was Bosko and he was their #1 star for several years. However, the production team of Hugh Harmon and Rudolf Ising decided to leave Looney Tunes and headed to MGM. And, unlike Walt Disney and his Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the pair retained ownership of the character...so they began making Bosko shorts with MGM. Now you'd think this would have been a great loss for Looney Tunes...and it was on the short term. However, Bosko was a godawful character and his shorts were simply jam-packed with cuteness...to the point of inducing nausea! Singing, dancing and cuteness...and not much in the way of character....and his loss meant Looney Tunes needed to develop a new leading man. After a few years of misses, Looney Tunes hit upon some great characters...full of laughs and sarcasm...something lacking in the Bosko cartoons. And, with characters like Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny, Looney Tunes was definitely better off without the Harmon-Ising approach to cartoons.
"Hey-Hey Fever" is the second Bosko cartoon for MGM...and the final one before the character would receive a HUGE makeover which made him much more clearly a black child. And, like the early MGM Bosko cartoons, it's made with a two-color filmstock...which looks nicer than black & white but which also looks mostly orange and greenish blue and simply offers a much more limited range of colors. Why did they use this more primitive process? Well, Disney had exclusive rights to use Three Color Technicolor...and would through 1935.
The story finds Bosko in a world of storybook characters. And like you'd find in the worst Bosko cartoons, there's LOTS of singing and music and less emphasis on humor and more on cuteness. In other words, it looked very nice but was also very childish and dull. I honestly can't imagine most folks (even undiscerning kids) watching it today when, frankly, most any cartoon is more entertaining and fun. It's a shame, as the previous Bosko film for MGM, "Bosko's Parlor Pranks" was excellent and looked like a major step forward for the character.
