• This is one of Louis Armstrong's earliest film appearances. Armstrong and his orchestra perform "
High Society Rag", the title song, and "Chinatown". The use of a currently popular musician represented competition with the contemporaneous music library accessibility greatly exploited by animators Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, when producing musically-synchronized shorts for the Warner Bros.
Merrie Melodies series. • Thomas Brothers has noted the racist imagery and dialogue in this short film. In addition to the depiction of black people as cannibals and savages, Koko calls the savages "babies", short for "jungle babies". During the vocal chorus, the cannibal's face and Louis Armstrong's face oscillate between one another, associating Armstrong himself with the cannibal characters. • A speedometer in Koko's tail at one point registers the Hebrew word כּשר (
kosher). ==References==