Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 26

24 ^PogularC uItur^evie^ text-itself suggests one of the greatest black jazz musicians ever: Louis Armstrong. Such a potential allusion is underscored by the fact that Louie is the only character in the film given a Western name. He even sings in a throaty and raspy voice reminiscent of Armstrong and employs scatting, one of Armstrong's trademarks. Moreover, as Thomas St. John points out, members of Disney's staff were no strangers to caricatures of Armstrong.'^ Although Louie's voice is actually dubbed in by a famous white jazz singer, Louis Prima, it is nevertheless true that Prima is singing within a genre rightfully attributed to African-American musicians and composers and that he himself was heavily influenced by Armstrong. Louie's song—also absent from Disney's source—is equally symptomatic of the subhuman nature traditionally attributed to African-Americans: his words, "I want to be like you," convey an unquenchable envy of Mowgli and therefore ironically reveal how unlike Mowgli monkeys and orangutans are. When Louie sings, "Now I'm the King of the Swingers, oh, the jungle VIP; I've reached the top and had to stop and that's what's botherin' me," he suggests by implication that he has reached the acme of development within the black community and that complete [further] development can only take the form of assimilation—i.e., of becoming fully "white" and human like Mowgli. Louie may blithely call Mowgli "cousin," but the term becomes a euphemism in light of the unbridgeable social and racial chasm between them.^ (In fact, the term "cousin" is itself a significant retraction of the monkeys' more confident proclamation of Mowgli as a "blood-brother" (34) in Kipling's tale. One wonders whether the term was changed to avoid the more offensive implication of closer kinship.) It is, significantly, only King Louie who expresses dissatisfaction with his condition in Disney's The Jungle Book. Whether inadvertently or not, Louie's words convey an echo of the desperate and futile efforts by blacks to be accepted by white society, efforts which historically went to such lengths as painfully conking (i.e., straightening) their hair, bleaching their skin, and even surgically altering their features (a la Michael Jackson).^ When Louie sings, "I want to stroll right into town and be just like the other men," he illustrates this desire to integrate, a desire that exactly replicates the historical plight of blacks under the laws of segregation. Louie's lyrics are, moreover, entirely Disney's invention; they are a far cry from the inveterate boasting