ADAM That was the most charming case against miscegenation I’ve ever seen. “Would you want your daughter to marry a panther?” That was creepily of its time.

BROOM I don’t think that’s what that meant.

ADAM That’s what it meant in every other context when people said things like that. I’m not saying that’s what it meant here. I just thought it was funny.

BROOM Several times I thought about how it’s easy for us to see things that are “inappropriate.” Like that they shouldn’t be rubbing their balls on things. But I must have watched this movie many times as a kid — so much of it was familiar this time — and I never thought “look, he’s rubbing his balls!” Or that it was too weirdly intimate for Mowgli to be lying on Baloo’s belly.

BETH That didn’t really seem inappropriate.

BROOM Well, we were snickering at it, but there’s really nothing there.

BETH You don’t think the animators thought about it?

BROOM No. I just don’t think it was there at all. And I definitely don’t think that they thought of it in racial terms. I don’t think that the jungle was “the wrong kind of people” and the human village was “the right kind of people.” I don’t think there was any sort of “typing” going on.

BETH It did seem less racial than, say, Dumbo did.

BROOM I think the avoidance of any characters who were even remotely black meant that they had, by this point, learned their lesson.

ADAM Um, except the orangutans!

BROOM They weren’t black! As you said, they were like the guys who sing “Gee, Officer Krupke.” Very pointedly so, instead of being black like they would have been in any other Disney movie.

ADAM I thought that the orangutan king was, like….

BROOM He was Louis Prima! He’s Italian.

ADAM I don’t know.

BETH He seemed to be black.

BROOM Yes. He’s Cousin Louis because the voice is actually Louis Prima.

ADAM Okay. I thought it was funny that Disney’s response to the 60s — that finally kicked in in 1967 — was…

BETH Ringo?

ADAM It was like Dobie Gillis. They tried to do the Beatles, but their Beatles were singing barbershop. They obviously said, “let’s get some of this crazy 60s stuff in,” but they had no idea. Their understanding of what 60s culture meant was, like, beatniks.

BETH I don’t know. To do what they did, I think they couldn’t have been clueless.

ADAM It was like, “hey, these people are on Ed Sullivan, and they have mop-like hair and British accents!” and that was about all they got.

BETH The barbershop singing was weird.

BROOM I was wondering what kind of song they were going to sing, because if they sang a Beatles-style song, it seemed like that would be taking it too far. And when they started singing the barbershop, I thought, “this is a good move.” The quartet turns into something else so that we don’t have to be distracted thinking about the Beatles the whole time. I thought that the electric bass in the underscore while they were talking was already heavy-handed enough. Did Bagheera remind anyone else of Captain Picard?

BETH Yes! I was going to say that! He looks like him and talks like him.

ADAM I liked the shaggy style of the drawing here, with stray lines. It looked like an animated sketchpad.

BROOM That’s because they used xerography or something to transfer the drawings directly to the cells. But you liked it?

BETH I like that too. You don’t?

BROOM It’s a sign of them cutting costs. But when I was a kid, it was just “a look,” and I guess I did like it. I certainly liked this movie a lot when I was a kid. I think it has two of the catchiest songs in the Disney canon in it.

ADAM What’s the other one?

BROOM “I Wanna Be Like You” and “Bear Necessities.”

BETH When the snake’s eyes get crazy…

BROOM “Trust In Me?”

BETH … no, I’m just asking about the scene — that didn’t scare you? I feel like that totally would have scared me.

BROOM Really?

ADAM It would have scared me more if Bagheera hadn’t been as exasperated by it.

BROOM I don’t remember the first time I saw it, but I remember watching it and knowing it already, and I knew that Kaa was ineffectual. Even though he gets right to the place where he could eat Mowgli, both Shere Khan and Bagheera are more powerful than he is.

ADAM Why does Shere Khan let him go if he knows that he has Mowgli?

BROOM I think that when he lowers his middle down, the trick actually works. Shere Khan is actually surprised that he’s able to do that.

BETH I thought Shere Khan was a great villain character.

BROOM He’s excellent. It’s a shame that he’s only in about five minutes of the movie.

ADAM Yeah. He’s so authoritative.

BETH He’s just like James Mason in North by Northwest, I thought. “Your next role will be playing dead; you’ll be quite convincing.”

BROOM That’s right. I like that his power comes in being so calm the whole time. I like when he puts out his claw and quietly squeezes Kaa’s neck. That’s a good bad-guy show of force. But I think the movie — even more than Sword in the Stone — is just episodic, just a series of encounters with characters, some of whom have songs. Well, I guess they all have songs, but some of the songs suck.

ADAM The orangutans to me were pretty charismatic, and Baloo is pretty entertaining — he’s the first stoner in a Disney movie.

BROOM He’s not a stoner, he’s just a vagabond. I remember really liking Baloo in the same way I liked the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz — as “the guy who likes you! He’s so nice to you!” It’s a very warm feeling, and Phil Harris’s voice is very inviting to a kid — though now I hear a little more sleaze in it than I would have heard then.

ADAM He has a Yogi Bear quality.

BROOM Yeah, but more warm, more avuncular.

ADAM You can see in him the Hanna-Barbera-ization proceeding apace.

BROOM What does that mean to you? Just a cheapening, all-around, or something else?

ADAM Sort of a jauntier, cheaper animation style, and a jauntier cast of characters; less moralizing and more slapstick.

BROOM Some of the slapstick was pretty shoddy.

ADAM When the temple collapses, it’s like the temple collapsing in a Scooby-Doo cartoon.

BROOM That’s true.

ADAM [imitates Hanna-Barbera “scrambling feet” sound effect]

BROOM Right. The slapstick was generally well-animated, but a lot of it was pretty lazy stuff. Like someone being snapped backward and slamming into something. And the timing was very much for kids. I guess Sword in the Stone was like that too. I feel like The Jungle Book has a little more human warmth than The Sword in the Stone, which is probably why I liked it better. Bagheera and Baloo felt like nice guys.

ADAM Although it’s a shame that when he leaves his wolf family, it’s like, “oh well.”

BROOM It’s true. His parents don’t mean anything to him.

ADAM And then when he leaves Baloo and Bagheera, it’s like, “so much for that!” He leaves them for that little minx.

BROOM Yeah, the really sexy ten-year-old.

ADAM That’s the clip that I’d seen in a Disney Valentine’s Day special, which is really creepy.

BETH It is.

BROOM She’s explicitly seducing him, even though they’re just ten-year-old kids. And her really big eyes that she bats at him. She looks like that creepy shot in Lion King where the girl lion looks up at him and it’s a little too sexual. I thought that Mowgli looked like Bobby Hill. He had a very simplified flat face.

BETH I liked his face. I thought he was cute and easy to watch. A lot of times I think kids’ faces look obnoxious.

ADAM I appreciated that we didn’t have to endure the backstory of how he got into the jungle.

BROOM Right. It doesn’t matter. “He got abandoned by his parents. There are no emotions in it; go with that.” There are almost no emotions in the whole movie.

BETH Well, fear.

BROOM Just momentary fear, maybe. But even the final, serious, scary-landscape, actual-threat-of-death fight scene is still just about being bonked on the head.

BETH Yeah.

ADAM “Easygoing” is what I would call this movie.

BROOM I remember it being very appealing when I was a kid. Yes, it’s very superficial.

BETH Even if Baloo isn’t a stoner, it feels like it was made by people who had done a lot of pot.

BROOM Oh, I don’t think so. I think it was all the same old men who had done the other movies.

BETH Really? Even the music? A lot about it seemed so 60s-y.

BROOM I think the association of that aesthetic with drugs and hippies is just retrospective. I think a lot of people in the 60s were just having the same lives they had in the 50s, with a different soundtrack.

ADAM I think the orangutans were clearly pot-smokers. And I think Baloo was clearly a pot-smoker.

BROOM I don’t think pot was a factor here at all. Baloo was just a moocher, a well-meaning good-for-nothin’.

BETH But he might have tried drugs at some point.

BROOM His defining characteristic was his advice to Mowgli: “Don’t go out there looking for things that you don’t have; just give up and settle for the bare necessities.” I don’t think he was saying “space out.” He was just saying “don’t expect anything.”

ADAM Hakuna matata.

BROOM “Hakuna Matata” is exactly the same scene; it’s obviously an attempt to do this song again. “Bear Necessities” really is a standout song for me. It’s really very catchy. The patter about the prickly pawpaw — “put the paw and the claw with the pawpaw” or whatever — when I was a kid, I thought it was just the fun of saying crazy words in rhythm. This time I heard that he was actually saying things that made sense, and the idea of doing a tongue-twister break seemed almost embarrassingly corny to me now. Anything else to say about the big picture here?

BETH About the ideology?

BROOM I don’t know. Sure, if you’ve got something.

ADAM The ideology is like, “cool it.”

BETH “Go with the flow.”

ADAM “Breeze it, buzz it, easy does it: keep cooly-cool, boy!”

BROOM That’s about keeping cool and not losing your cool; but nobody here was going to lose their cool. Even Bagheera, the serious one, the prude, isn’t really a prude. At the end you think he’s going to be flustered and say “I can’t sing this song!” but instead he immediately joins in.

ADAM It’s like nobody meant any of it, for the whole movie. And that’s sort of comforting.

BROOM Which is what all Disney movies were like at that point. All those Herbie movies… there’s no threat of anything.

BETH You were just saying this. That you like encountering old live-action Disney movies on TV because there’s no threat of having to deal with anything.

BROOM I don’t remember saying that.

BETH At the beach.

ADAM Can we read the review? I have to go. Sorry, Emma.

BROOM No, she’s happy about that. I was going to say at the beginning of this conversation that this viewing was a little more distracted, because Beth was falling asleep and Adam had work emails coming into him as we watched, but that it turned out the movie could handle it. The movie didn’t demand anything of us. There’s no investment to be made in it; it’s just a series of diversions.

[we read the original Times review but have nothing to add]