Fridge / The Jungle Book (1967)

As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

Fridge Brilliance:

• Hathi Jr. has a tuft of hair so bushy one could wonder if he's wearing a wig. In a case of Reality Is Unrealistic, Asian elephant calves actually grow a thick layer of hair shortly after birth. In some cases, their coat is so thick that it makes them look like baby mammoths.
• I saw The Jungle Book when I was about four and never understood why King Louie wanted to be a human like Mowgli so badly. Just recently, I listened to his song, "I Wanna Be Like You," again and found that the song is all about institutional inequality: Louis's desire to be human is impossible because of evolution, an institution of Nature that only allows populations, not individuals, to evolve; Louie is clearly voiced by a black man while Mowgli is voiced by a white boy; there's a line in the song that says Louie wants to "stroll right into to town/ And be just like the other men/ I'm tired of monkeyin' 'round"; Louie also has Mowgli refer to him as "Cousin Louie," acknowledging that they are related (by evolutionary standards), but Louie is still below Mowgli; therefore, the song is actually about a black man longing to be considered equal to white men. But at the end of the song, Baloo barges in to get Mowgli back, and twists the words of the song so that Louie sings "You'll see it's true/ An ape like me/ Can learn to be/ like someone like me." Baloo has turned the tables on Louie so that he will stay in his place. And then you consider that Baloo spends a lot of time alone with Mowgli, Mowgli wants to spend all of his time alone with Baloo, and Baloo is a Bear. But that's a whole 'nother can of beans...-Trombone Child
  • Except that King Louie is voiced by Louis Prima, an Italian-American.
    • Well, drawing on what I learned in World History Class in high school, I can think of one possible historically and socially based example of Fridge Brilliance there: Britain's former rule over India. Not very unlikely to be that, considering it's based on one of Rudyard Kipling's works.
    • The interpretation that Louie is an aspiring imperialist fits very well. It explains why Louie has a European name while everyone else has the Indian names from the books. In-universe, even, he could have chosen that name because the Europeans are the ones he would really want to imitate, with their greater dominance and technology.
    • Expanding on this, several of the other animals roughly align with the imperialist era. Bagheera a regional adviser not wholly hating the new men, and trying to help both fit in rough harmony. Shere Khan is the rabid nationalist, despising the "fire" that such men bring that threatens the traditional ways of the people. Kaa might be a reflection of the temptations of such a life, "going native" by being entranced over the new lands and customs.
    • If you're familiar with American History, you'd know Italian immigrants actually had it pretty bad at one point (even compared to the Irish and African Americans). The biggest lynching in American history happened in New Orleans (where, incidentally, Louis Prima lived for most of his life and eventually died) in 1891 when 11 Italian Americans and immigrants were lynched for the murder of a police chief. It's part of why Italian-Americans became associated with criminal organizations like the Mafia (because there weren't many legal opportunities available to them so a fair number chose a criminal route to survive). While we have come a long way from the days of Italians being murdered for just existing at the time of the film...it was still familiar in the public conscience in 1967.
  • I wonder how that interpretation explains the fact that the big # 1 thing King Louie wanted was not to know how to wear clothes, or how to walk like a man, but how to use fire. He wasn't so much interested in fitting in with humankind as he was interested in gaining their power. Even Shere Khan is afraid of fire. King Louie shifts from calling it "fire" to "red fire" to "Red Flower", which is what fire was called in the book. I always took his desire to be dominion over the other beasts, rather than being removed from their sphere completely (treated like a man).
    • This is pretty much it. If you listen to the lyrics of his song, Louie basically outlines his entire motive within the first few lines: "I've reached the top and had to stop and that's what's bothering me." He's basically just power-hungry and the ability to create fire will effectively give him complete control over the jungle one way or another.
• It makes sense why Winifred (Colonel Hathi's wife) would be a much more responsible and competent leader than her husband. In real life, elephant herds are matriarchal and usually consist entirely of females and their calves (The males tend to leave the herd to live alone when they reach adulthood). So of course Hathi is an inept leader - it's not normal for a bull elephant to be in charge of others.
• When Shere Khan interrupts the vultures' song and thanks them for "entertaining my victim" (i.e. Mowgli), Flaps nervously addresses Khan as "Your Highness." While it could just be Flaps humoring the tiger to stay on his good side, making him feel/sound like a king, the name Shere Khan DOES roughly translate to "King of the Tigers" in various languages of India.
• Shere Khan's body language and tone of voice when confronting Kaa makes it pretty clear that he knows Kaa is lying to his face about Mowgli. So why does he let him go? Shere Khan is a big cat. And what do cats like to do with their prey? Toy with them until they get bored and then go in for the kill. He may hate man but he loves the thrill of the hunt more and what fun would it be if Kaa just handed him Mowgli, all hypnotized and unable to fight back?

Fridge Horror:

• What exactly do King Louie and his rather rambunctious minions plan to use "Man's red flower" for?
  • Louie wants to be a human and thinks that if he learns how to make fire he'll be a human. The real question is: How did he come to to that conclusion...?
    • Because in his mind, the ability to make and control fire is probably the only thing that separates apes from humans?
  • Probably to kill Shere Khan. On a side note, how many animals has Shere Khan killed before this film? Good God, I hope any weren't as enjoyably awesome as Baloo!
  • Louie probably didn't think that far ahead. His "plan" probably went thus:
    • Step 1: Make fire.
    • Step 2: Become human.
    • Step 3: ???????
    • Step 4: Profit!
  • To be totally fair to Louie, the ability to make fire actually is a really significant power difference between man and ape. Being able to make and comprehend it opens the path to a whole lot of technological achievements.
  • If another species were to demonstrate the ability to make and control fire, it would definitely put them on the legal path to "personhood".
• Why doesn't Kaa's hypnosis work on Shere Khan?
  • If I remember right, that was more a case of Shere Khan having good reflexes. He suspected Kaa might try to pull that trick, but then again, so did Bagheera. Shere Khan though, was confident he could easily put a stop to it if he notices quickly enough, that's why he slapped Kaa down and told him to just stop wasting time with it, like he didn't consider Kaa a threat at all. He was focused on the information he wanted to get from Kaa, too, most probably- Bagheera was more busy trying to come up with something that could help both him and Mowgli, and he clearly thought of Kaa as someone to be reckoned with.
  • When he talks with Kaa, Shere Khan's eyes are at least four-fifths closed, as if he had been expecting it.
• Remember the scene in the Disney-movie when Mowgli meets Baloo and they have fun? Well Bagheera groans once, claiming he can't bear this much stupidity. Baloo (at least in the Hungarian version) answers back with something like, "Who's talking stupidity, you house-cat??" Now, if you only saw the movie, this is just a funny bit. If you read the book, too, you know that Bagheera indeed was born in a cage in the court of a raj in Udipur and escaped to the jungle from there. Now, I doubt many knew this bit of Bagheera's past, or dared to mention it to his face, given that he was a respected but also slightly feared inhabitant of the jungle in the books, instead of the Butt-Monkey as in the movie.
• The vultures are presented as sympathetic, but listen to their song: 'We're your friends to the bitter end!' Remember that vultures are scavengers by nature, and it's implied that they're hanging around waiting for something to die so that they have food:
  And when you're lost in dire need
  Who's at your side at lightning speed?
  We're friends of every creature comin' down the pike
  In fact we never met an animal we didn't like!
  • Shere Khan joins in on the last line because he's their friend: they eat what he leaves. At some point the vultures decide to help Mowgli, but there's every indication that up until they decide to do that, they viewed Mowgli as potential dinner.
  • And one more point. Imagine if Shere Khan really did kill Baloo. Not only would this be a whole lot sadder for our heroes, but the vultures would probably have to eat his body to keep the ecosystem clean.
    • In other words, they saved Mowgli to spare themselves the traumatic scenario of cleaning up their new friend's remains.
• Kaa might seem a bit "goofy", considering how he is pushed out of a tree twice in his attempts to eat Mowgli, but consider how both times he comes for Mowgli the snake is only prevented from eating the boy because of outside interference (Bagheera in the first case and Shere Khan in the second). When Mowgli is able to defeat the tiger by himself in the final confrontation, this suggests that Kaa is actually the more dangerous predator in the jungle.
  • In Kaa's second encounter with Mowgli, the man-cub ultimately appears to be increasingly tempted to just look at Kaa on his own accord, often showing signs of accepting Kaa's instructions to just look at him and only avoiding it at the last moment. This reinforces the idea of Kaa's influence being pleasurable to the subject, with Mowgli torn between giving in to the pleasure and his awareness that Kaa will likely eat him if he succumbs. The fact that Mowgli is so isolated at this point, coupled with his desperation to stay in the jungle, is probably the main reason Kaa was able to get so close to Mowgli on these occasions.

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