Rikki-Tikki-Tavi

We saw a couple of mongooses in Oahu, and it reminded me of a cartoon we used to watch when it came on every year around Halloween as kids: Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. It’s based on a short story by Rudyard Kipling about an English family’s pet mongoose in India and its battle with local cobras who want to kill the family and reclaim their house. Chuck Jones animated it in 1975 with Orson Welles narrating. They stopped airing it in the 80s: I’d like to think it was because they recognized the queasy colonial overtones of Kipling’s original story, but it’s probably just because the rights expired. You can judge for yourself by watching on the Internet Archive at the link above. I’ll add that this cartoon is almost singlehandedly responsible for my lifelong fear of cobras, with an assist from Dirkie/Lost in the Desert, a film by the director of The Gods Must Be Crazy that features a spitting cobra. Cobras that don’t even have to bite you to poison you. No thanks.