From the beginning moments of Mardi Gras Indians parading, Skull and Bones groups eerily taunting, and Baby Dolls shaking their moneymakers over the immortal Carnival music of Professor Longhair that opens All on a Mardi Gras Day, producer Royce Osborn’s fantastic documentary about Black Carnival, there is a tone set of both fun times and serious research. Osborn’s documentary strikes a balance between a social history that explains the traditions, and the joie de vivre that will make viewers want hang out in the Treme or Second and Dryades waiting for the subjects of this program.

The documentary makes great use of archival photos, drawings, and films while adding new interviews with scholars such as Maurice Martinez, Kalamu Ya Salaam, and Chuck Siler and participants like the late Big Chief Tootie Montana, Al “Carnival Time” Johnson, and Al Morris of the Northside Skull and Bones gang. Unlike many documentaries, the interviews are never dry and allow the subjects’ personalities and idiosyncrasies to come through. The interviews with Montana, both in the film and in the DVD extras, are invaluable and fascinating as Montana’s knowledge and personal experience with the Mardi Gras Indians is unparalleled.

The DVD extras are great additions as they flesh out the interviews with Montana and the Batiste families, as well as show how these people and parades have made it after the failure of the federal levees. In New Orleans, orally transmitted history means nothing is ever definitive, and new ideas, scholarship and conspiracy theories keep the past in flux. But Royce Osborn’s All on a Mardi Gras Day is as definitive a discussion of Black Mardi Gras as there is on film, and it is an entertaining one to boot.