King Louie
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King Louie is a fictional character, an orangutan who kidnaps Mowgli in Disney's 1967 animated musical adaptation of The Jungle Book. He does not appear in Rudyard Kipling's original book, which the movie is "inspired by" rather than "based on". In the book, Mowgli is abducted by a band of nameless Bandar-log (monkeys), and the rest of the scene plays out very differently.
King Louie appears to be evil, but he just wants to be human; he is the classic misunderstood villain. In the movie, he is voiced by famed jazz trumpeter and vocalist Louis Prima, who sings the song "I Wanna Be Like You" after he catches Mowgli, and asks the boy to show him the secret of "the red flower" (that is, fire) so he can be human. King Louie may not have appeared in The Jungle Book 2, but a puppet of him can been seen in Mowgli's puppet show. The reason why he was missing is because Louis Prima's widow was suing them for unauthorized use of her husband's voice, as Jim Cummings's imitation was near perfect.
Unlike other animal species featured in Jungle Book, orangutans are not native to India but Borneo. Orangutans have opposable thumbs and therefore would have little difficulty making fire (once shown how).
On the spinoff show TaleSpin, he runs a tavern where Baloo and his sidekick Kit Cloudkicker like to hang out. On the other spinoff, Jungle Cubs, he came up with the band called the Five Bananas where he performed alongside Baloo, Bagheera the Panther, Hathi the Elephant, and Kaa the Snake.
A slightly different King Louie character appeared in the Disney 1994 live-action Jungle Book movie starring Jason Scott Lee. Once again he is an orangutan, and the 'leader' of a group of monkeys that make their home in an abandoned human city. His name arises in this version from the vast wealth that humans left behind in the city, and in particular to his habit of wearing a crown similar in appearance to that worn by the King of France, Louis XIV. His appearance in the movie has more in common with the various anonymous monkeys in the source novel, than the animated character.
King Louie also appears in the Fables comic book. He is one of the revolutionaries who wish to overthrow the Fabletown government out of resentment at the apparent second-class status of non-human-appearing Fables. Due to his peripheral involvement, he is given a sentence of hard labor---twenty years, reduced to five years conditional on good behavior.
In one of the Disney TV Shows, House of Mouse, there is a King Louie look-alike orangutan who is referred to as King "Larry", and is said to be Louie's identical twin brother. It was to star King Louie, but had to be changed to Larry so as not to violate their agreement with Gia Prima.[1]
Some scholars have argued that the character is a racist caricature of African Americans that draws on stereotypes that depict African Americans as mischievous and devious [2].
