Eccentric Flower talk:201011/Cartoon Censorship

ProfRobert:

Warner is not interested in censorship or race relations or preserving artistic integrity, etc. Like all large corporations, it is only interested in making money. It made the calculus with the war-era cartoons that they could get away with a disclaimer and that the complaints would be insufficiently substantial to hurt its business. It's calculus regarding the racist cartoons is that the complaints and protests potentially could hurt its business. Simply put, activists against racism directed at blacks are more vocal and effective than activists against racism directed at Asians (and here, specifically, at Japanese). It doesn't bother me that corporations are actually worried about their racist behavior hurting their bottom line. I see that as a good thing, actually.

-- 06:52, 27 November 2010 (GMT)

Iain:

Thanks for the response. I was wondering.

By the by, you can probably see some of the Censored Eleven (of varying quality, to be sure) at archive.org. iTunes had a video podcast feed that downloaded the animation category from archive.org, and I pulled in some without knowing what they were. Getting "All That and Rabbit Stew" without knowing what it was beforehand was a most ... surprising experience, let's say. And they've got "Coal Black" as well. (And the quality is wretchedly bad, but that's not terribly surprising. As for the content ... Well. While I get what Clampett means when he says that it was done with and for those musicians, and it was all in good fun, and nobody meant anything racist by it, I'm also not remotely surprised that it lands on Warner's "Dear god in heaven, NO!" list. And I do not even vaguely understand why it lands on anyone's "fifty classic cartoons" list.)

EDIT: I have no idea why, but Clean Pastures doesn't bother me nearly as much as Coal Black. (That link goes to a Youtube version that's MUCH better quality than the archive.org version.) Though, that said ... once you settle into them, if that's quite the right word, you can sort of overlook the worst aspects. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. And the very end of Coal Black actually made me laugh, so there's that.

-- 07:10, 27 November 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

Robert: I agree, it's strictly a matter of financial calculation. However, I do wish that for archival reasons they would make SOME reasonably comprehensive, well-restored, complete set of cartoons available - even if some of those cartoons are available only for thirty seconds and if you didn't buy it too bad (which is about what Disney's war cartoon box availability was like). I don't care if their attitude is, "OK, look, we're only going to give you completists and history-nut types these cartoons once, and then we will never speak of this again," as long as we get the once.

ETA: I don't know if I agree with you that Warner is very consistent in their calculations, though. While I grant you that war propaganda demonizations of Germans and Japanese are much more likely to slide past the general public - which is why I didn't understand Disney's war-cartoon hesitancy, unless they felt it was shameful to admit they ever made any at all - Warner also took great pains to restore some of the earliest Schlesinger cartoons featuring a little black boy named Bosko - nearly a whole discful of them in Golden 6. I won't go so far as to say that Bosko is racist, but definitely slides well into stereotype territory. These are Steamboat Willie era black-and-white cartoons, very crude by today's standards. They did not restore those cartoons for kids or even for a general audience of adults, who will find them a bit dull in a silent-film way. Why restore Bosko, then, with very little financial incentive to do so, and yet not let the Censored Eleven get one look at daylight?

Iain: I didn't say anywhere that I understood why Coal Black made the Beck list. A number of the choices on that list baffle me and I have been known to make occasional snide remarks about that on the cartoons in question. I think Clean Pastures is far more defensible as being of historical/archival significance despite its racism.

Incidentally, the reason I provided a link to a watchable (reasonably decent quality, actually, given the circumstances) version of Clean Pastures is that that cartoon is now in public domain and therefore I can link it without conscience. I'm not sure what the status of Coal Black is.

All This and Rabbit Stew bothers me because there is no particular reason for the hunter in that cartoon to be such a racist portrayal. In fact it adds nothing whatsoever to have the hunter be black. It's as if they were making the hunter black ONLY so they could make racist jokes - which frankly, I find very disappointing of Avery. He was usually a better and smarter guy than that. In Clean Pastures, the whole point is that the cartoon involves Harlem culture of the thirties, so having white characters would miss the point. In the case of Coal Black, again, the jazz is the point. With All That and Rabbit Stew, it could just as well have been an Elmer Fudd cartoon and all the fuss would have been avoided (and in fact they took the only really brilliant gag in the cartoon and reused it - reportedly drawing Elmer right over where the black hunter had been on the same cels! - in The Big Snooze).

-- 15:52, 27 November 2010 (GMT)

ProfRobert:

Hey do you remember a WB cartoon with Bugs and I think it was meant to be a Pacific Islander "savage," who would scream, "Unga bunga bunga" while trying to spear Bugs for his dinner? I remember seeing it as a kid in the '70s, and I've wondered now and again if they've pulled it because of the racism.

-- 16:03, 27 November 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

"All This and Rabbit Stew," which features a hunter with a gun and not an island/spear style hunter, is the only Bugs cartoon officially in the Censored Eleven. I suspect you are thinking of "Which is Witch," which is not actually in the Eleven but has been in, shall we say, limited exposure for many years. Go to the page linked there and see if you recognize the witch doctor from the theatre card depicted.

-- 16:08, 27 November 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

http://www.spike.com/video/which-is-witch-1949/2722491 Not a great copy but workable.

-- 16:12, 27 November 2010 (GMT)

ProfRobert:

No, this is it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcrSVQdb9s8 It's called Bushy Hare, and the character is an Australian Aboriginal, not a Pacific Islander as I misremembered. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushy_Hare

-- 17:01, 27 November 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

Ah, Bushy Hare! They released that on one of the "Looney Tunes Superstars" discs (which picked up some cartoons that didn't make it into the Golden Collection), but I won't buy those because they crop the cartoons. "Bushy Hare" was one of the ones the completists were especially clamoring for.

(This is an example of why I don't think Warner does their math consistently. So, you release six sets of Golden Collection, right? And then the True Believers fuss about all the cartoons that didn't get picked up in the Golden Collection. So you say that you'll pick fifteen Bugs cartoons that didn't make the Golden Collection, including at least one rarity people have been screaming for. And then you release them in a mangled format that chops off the top and bottom of the original image. WHO exactly did you think you were releasing this disc for, then, again?)

-- 17:08, 27 November 2010 (GMT)

Iain:

Incidentally, the reason I provided a link to a watchable (reasonably decent quality, actually, given the circumstances) version of Clean Pastures is that that cartoon is now in public domain and therefore I can link it without conscience. I'm not sure what the status of Coal Black is.

Ah, OK. Sorry about that. For what it's worth, archive.org is usually fairly careful about that sort of thing when it comes to media (I believe both RIAA and the MPAA have had "frank and forthright" talks with them about this sort of thing -- i.e., "watch it or we'll sue you out of existence, and you don't have any money so that would be easy") -- though, oddly enough, they don't have Clean Pastures.

All This and Rabbit Stew bothers me because there is no particular reason for the hunter in that cartoon to be such a racist portrayal. In fact it adds nothing whatsoever to have the hunter be black. It's as if they were making the hunter black ONLY so they could make racist jokes - which frankly, I find very disappointing of Avery.

I would be willing to swear that they did a frame-by-frame remake of that one, featuring a red-headed white hick swapped for the black hunter, but I don't know what they called it. I can remember seeing both of them when I was a kid -- there was a local channel that showed a half-hour of what were, even then, public domain cartoons (or at least cartoons that nobody would make them pay for), and "All That and Rabbit Stew" was one of them, along with some of the more mammyish Tom and Jerry cartoons. Took some chutzpah -- or something -- to show that in the 1970s. I think the remake got pulled because people were complaining that it made fun of the poor and uneducated.

-- 23:33, 27 November 2010 (GMT)