i must have seen a different film!!

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

The Lion Tamer (1934) ** (out of 4) The second and final film in the Amos 'n' Andy cartoon series has our two "heroes" working at a circus where Andy is supposed to "tame" a fake lion but of course a real lion gets into the cage with him. I watched the two Amos 'n' Andy shorts back-to-back and there's no question that this one here is miles better than the first. I thought this one here actually featured a few funny moments even if the screenplay wasn't all that original. Even by 1934 there had been films where someone was supposed to be messing with a fake animal only to have a real one takes its place. I thought the scenes of Andy pushing the lion around were actually quite funny. I also thought the scene where we see inside the fake lion outfit to be funny as well. As for the rest of the film, it's certainly a product of its own time as most of the humor is just not funny and there's no doubt that the stereotypes aren't going to sit well with modern audiences. With that said, for the most part there's nothing overly offensive here once you get past the fact that it's two white guys doing the voices of the black men.

Amos 'n' Andy were two very stereotypical African Americans, voiced by Charles J. Correll and Freeman F. Gosden, who hosted a popular radio programme that ran between 1928 and 1960. In 1930, when RKO decided to make a film featuring the two characters, apparently nobody thought it problematic that everybody's favourite Black personalities were actually very White. No matter – Correll and Gosden appeared in black-face, and the film was a considerable commercial success, despite the critics hating it. Indeed, Gosden later described 'Check and Double Check (1930)' as "just about the worst movie ever." A planned sequel never came into fruition, but the two comedians later lent their voices to two short-subject cartoons featuring their trademark characters, 'The Rasslin' Match (1934)' and 'The Lion Tamer (1934).'I haven't seen the former, but 'The Lion Tamer' is nothing to write home about. Crudely-drawn, with an entirely predictable storyline, the nine-minute cartoon is largely uninteresting fair, saved only by the intriguing characterisations of the two leads. Though Amos and Andy are largely condemned nowadays as being racist creations, the characters really do work. They are stereotypes, yes, but, more importantly, each man has a distinct and identifiable personality, emphasised frequently through their repeated use of personal catchphrases (I don't know why, but I laughed every time Andy exclaimed 'Hotdog!"). Of course, when there are two lions – one fake, one real – and Andy is to "tame" the fake one, you can guess pretty far ahead of schedule where this story is leading. Of historical interest, but not much more.

The Lion Tamer is the second Van Beuren cartoon that starred the popular radio characters Amos 'n' Andy. As in the previous one, The Rasslin' Match, another character named Kingfish tricks Andy into doing something Andy normally wouldn't do. Here, Andy has to tame a lion in front of a large audience. There are actually two lions here: a real one who's tied on the ground for show and a costumed one worn by a couple of friends. Andy is supposed to tame the costumed one but of course eventually ends with the real one. The visual gags involving both lions makes this a little better humor-wise than The Rasslin' Match but not by much. Since this was the last Amos 'n' Andy cartoon made, I'd only recommend this and its predecessor only to those who are Amos 'n' Andy completists. Both these cartoons are, for now, available for viewing on YouTube in pretty blurry prints.

'The Lion Tamer' is an animated short starring Andy Brown and Amos Jones, two black men with the voices of Charles J. Correll and Freeman F. Gosden. I have not seen other cartoons with these two characters and after this one I do not really want to. The story that involves Andy as a lion tamer, a fake lion with two men in a suite, and a real dangerous one is as predictable as these things can be. You can probably guess the outcome by reading the sentence before this one.Besides the story that is not good we have a racist kind of animation. The black men (and the black audience watching the lion tamer for that matter) are caricatures, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but here it is sort of offending. Of course you should watch pass that, but with a predictable cartoon like 'The Lion Tamer' that's pretty hard.