King Louie is a fictional orangutan who appears in works based on Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. In Disney's 1967 animated musical The Jungle Book, he kidnaps Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves. He appears to be evil, but really just wants to be human. He is voiced by famed jazz trumpeter and vocalist Louis Prima, who sings the song "I Wanna Be Like You" after he catches the boy, and asks him to show him the secret of "the red flower" (that is, fire) so he can be human. He does not appear in 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. Unlike the animal species featured in The Jungle Book, orangutans are not native to India but Borneo. On the early-1990s spin-off TV series TaleSpin Louie runs a bar where Baloo and his sidekick Kit Cloudkicker like to hang out. He and Baloo are friends, who enjoy a great deal of friendly bickering. In the late-1990s spinoff Jungle Cubs (featuring Jungle Book characters as children), he came up with the band called the Five Peaches where he performed alongside Baloo, Bagheera the Panther, Hathi the Elephant, and Kaa the Snake. A slightly different King Louie character appears in the Disney 1994 live-action film The 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 does not appear in the 2003 animated filmThe Jungle Book 2 (a sequel to the 1967 film), though a puppet of him is seen in Mowgli's puppet show. Voice actor Jim Cummings successfully imitated Louis Prima's performance for TaleSpin, and his widow Gia Prima had filed suit against Disney for the unauthorized use of his distinctive voice. In the Disney TV series 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. This change was made to keep Disney's agreement with Gia Prima.[1] King Louie appears at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts as a meetable character. King Louie appears in the Vertigo Comics graphic novel series Fables, about folktale characters ("Fables") living in exile in the real world. 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 20 years hard labor, reduced to five years conditional on good behavior.
