A Haunting We Will Go (1939)
The introduction of Lantz's little black-boy character, L'il Eight Ball, finds him going to bed in his small cabin and being visited by a baby ghost. He avers he is not afraid, and his isn't, so the little ghost transports him to a haunted mill where the adult ghosts hang out. They run the little hero through all the standard ghost tests and, while he is shaken, he still will not admit to being scared.
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Reviews
Pretty Good
Good story, Not enough for a whole film
It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.
The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.
Directed by former Disney animator Burt Gillett (he helmed The Three Little Pigs), 'A Haunting We Will Go' was a Walter Lantz Cartune that featured Lil' Eightball, a young caricatured black boy (with the standard white lips). As voiced by Mel Blanc, this character doesn't seem so stereotyped-at least not in the offensive way-as he talks with big words like "phantasmagoria" and initially isn't scared of a boy ghost who tries to haunt him while in bed. So this child apparition takes Eightball to a haunted house where his father and his friends try to REALLY give him "the works". They do and while the little imp keeps putting up a brave front, it's obvious how frightened he really is. Still, except for a brief craps sequence, there's hardly anything remotely offensive here and this cartoon has some very amusing gags like having a scared owl appear naked outside of his fur or having the father ghost dry clean a fellow worker! On that note, I do recommend for the Halloween holiday 'A Haunting We Will Go'.
Lil' Eightball, a darker-skinned version of Scrappy and Buddy of '30s cartoondom, is unafraid of "ectoplasmic figments of the imagination",but a bunch of silly spirits in a haunted house try to prove the opposite. Some of the cast appear "borrowed" from Disney's "Lonesome Ghosts", a film the ex-Disney director had previously worked on.Although, some pre-World War II live-action "spook" comedies took on racial overtones, it is difficult to criticize animated shorts like this and "Jasper And The Haunted House", since they closely resemble "Lonesome Ghosts", "Shiver Me Timbers", "Scrappy's Ghost Story" and many other 'toons featuring a variety of human races and animal species. The minor discretion here may be Eightball's big lips and "hee-hee" jive-talk (provided by the great Mel Blanc). Universal bravely included this excellent cartoon, along with the naughtier "100 Pygmies And Andy Panda", on the recent DVD "Woody Woodpecker And Friends Vol. 2".