There's an extensive review here of the Censored Eleven. These are a selection of Looney Tunes shorts that have been officially kept out of sight. This is partly because of legal and rights issues, but also because their depiction of black characters is now an embarrassment. Remember, it was a less enlightened time, when the South was still segregated and Nazi apologists couldn't even write for the Jewish Chronicle.
While these particular cartoons seem to have been buried since before I was born, a couple nonetheless sound familiar. Familiar as types anyway. The syndication packages did include shorts featuring mammies and tours of "Darkest Africa." And needless to say, the less said about, say, Chinese characters the better.
Did these cartoons make me racist? No, and I doubt that by themselves they did so to any of my peers or the kids who had come before. As the song in South Pacific says, you have to be carefully taught. The animators, writers, and voice talent at Warner were entertainers, not careful teachers. If some of their entertainment doesn't pass muster now, that's just part of the win-loss ratio.
Also thanks to Coagulopath for providing a still from The Black and White Minstrel Show, a British variety series that was still running during the early years of my lifetime. The blackface on it is almost too divorced from reality to be offensive. Like, what are you supposed to be?
2 comments:
Congrats for a very clever play on words up at the top.
Minstrelsy, eh? The only example I can actually remember is having watched the Al Jolson Story years ago. The rest I never never really thought about and I know I never saw The Black and White Minstrel Show on the BBC. Early Dr. Who, yes.
When I read about Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, and Fats Waller in the cartoon 'Clean Pastures' I just had to watch it - well, we both did since Jer was sitting next to me and heard the music. I liked it but some of the others are offensive enough to be noticeable ie, 'Uncle Tom's Bungalow', 'Jungle Jitters', and 'The Isle of Pingo Pongo'.
We too spent a lot of Satuday mornings watching similar (if not the original) cartoons and the experience never made us racist. In fact, white people don't come off looking very good in old cartoons either - or a number of newer ones for that matter. Consider Betty Boop - was there ever a more awkward looking bubble head? How about Popeye and Olive, and Bluto for goodness sake. Snidely Whiplash didn't do much for the reputation of white manhood either, but Boris Badenov and Natasha made the Cold War amusing and may have gone a long way towards humanizing Communists. You're right the people who worked at Warner were entertainers not enlightened teachers.
We actually own a copy of 'Song of the South'. Jer thought he'd burned a copy for you long ago but I'm not so sure. It's definitely outdated but still a charming movie.. Zip a Dee Doo Dah.
Thank you. I kind of struggled with what to use as a header, so I'm glad this one worked.
Jolson was working in a pretty established performance tradition. I'm curious as to what he would think about that whole tradition being condemned. Early Doctor Who does seem to have a number of unfortunate moments, which may be a function of those early seasons just being so long.
Pretty good breakdown of those examples. With the music you can overlook a lot. Some are just too much.
Betty Boop was a weird character, wasn't she? I read someone once describing her as having the dimensions of a fetus, which seems pretty close to it. Boris Badenov and Natasha were a charming pair of villains. I like the fact that Rocky and Bullwinkle, which was popular around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, made a habit of mocking the very existence of the Cold War. It was taken very seriously at the time.
The nice thing about Song of the South was that it helped preserve some American folklore that was in danger of being lost or forgotten. Even now that it's about as canceled as a movie can be, it's popularized things like the Tar Baby.
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