Click on the link below and pick two of the following videos:
The early worm gets the bird
Jungle Jitters
Little Black Sambo
http://grace2411.edublogs.org/videos-for-analysis/
Take notes on the stereotypes you see. After you read the article, you will view the videos again to see if you are aware of stereotypes you may not have known about before.
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Warner Bros.'s depiction of an African American child. (1930s).
By: Craig Smith
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Early Warner Bros. cartoons showed African Americans as savages, often serving white people. (This cartoon is not Warner Bros, but resembles many early WB cartoons from the 1920s-1940s.)
If you were a young kid in the 1980s, you probably spent much of your earliest years watching the WB cartoons of Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig. If you think back hard amidst the laughter, once in awhile appeared a strange 'toon or two with really odd, savage-like dark skinned characters that suffered much embarrassment at the hands of the cartoon heroes. We were too young to realize it then, but this was the racist legacy of cartooning from the middle of the 20th century.
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You certainly won't find these cartoons on the Cartoon Network. By the time the old Warner Brothers cartoons hit cable, they'd been censored quite thoroughly. But a small video distribution company called Goodtimes has made available some of the most offensive examples of cartooning in a collection called Cartoon Scandals. Pretty scandalous, indeed.
In Leonard Maltin's Of Mice and Magic, the famous Warner Brothers' cartoonist Walter Lantz gave this quote regarding TV censorship: "The first thing that happened was the elimination of all my films that contained Negro characters; there were eight such pictures. But we never offended or degraded the colored race and they were all top musical cartoons, too."
In Leonard Maltin's Of Mice and Magic, the famous Warner Brothers' cartoonist Walter Lantz gave this quote regarding TV censorship: "The first thing that happened was the elimination of all my films that contained Negro characters; there were eight such pictures. But we never offended or degraded the colored race and they were all top musical cartoons, too."
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An image from an early Warner Bros. cartoon. It portrays an African American boy as having thick lips and jet-black skin.
After viewing the Lantz cartoon included on the Goodtimes tape, I'm glad that Lantz didn't purposely try to "offend or degrade" anyone: He did enough damage without thinking about it. Virtually every stereotype one could apply to African-Americans is used in Scrub Me Mama With a Boogie Beat (1941). According to the imagery of the film, Blacks are lazy, shiftless creatures a step or two removed from monkeys until they hear music or see an attractive woman. Then they suddenly possess endless energy, albeit directed more towards dancing and singing than working.
So that no one could miss the implication, Lantz set Scrub Me Mama With a Boogie Beat in a town called Lazy Town on the banks of the Mississippi. The woman who animates the entire town's populace is fairly light-skinned, while the rest of the townspeople are far darker, with exaggerated thick lips. If you live in Lazy Town, you're too lazy to scrub your clothes, fight or work but you have enough stored energy to bop away to jazz and ogle the ladies.
So that no one could miss the implication, Lantz set Scrub Me Mama With a Boogie Beat in a town called Lazy Town on the banks of the Mississippi. The woman who animates the entire town's populace is fairly light-skinned, while the rest of the townspeople are far darker, with exaggerated thick lips. If you live in Lazy Town, you're too lazy to scrub your clothes, fight or work but you have enough stored energy to bop away to jazz and ogle the ladies.
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Aunt Jemima has been a popular icon for pancakes. Many consider the way she has been portrayed as racist.
This is a deplorable movie unredeemed by either comedy or decent animation. Lantz wasn't the only offender, however. Little Black Sambo(1935) wherein after a black baby's diaper is changed he is powdered with black baby powder. Of course, Little Sambo's mother is an Aunt Jemima type, and Sambo looks more like a monkey than anything else. Uncle Tom and Little Eva not only has an offensive title and imagery, but also a slave auction with happy-go-lucky whistling slaves. Goodtimes included both these cartoons in Cartoon Scandals.
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This African American child is portrayed as a "wild savage," similar to the cartoons Smith talks about in his article.
Cartoon Scandals also includes Jungle Jitters, a 1938 outing directed by Fritz Freleng. It features racially based humor of a slightly different stripe, wherein a tribe of savages is ruled by a white princess. The African cannibals manage to make a Goofy-like traveling salesman's life quite difficult during the picture. Similar stereotypes appear in Robinson Crusoe Jr (1941) in which Porky Pig finds himself on a desert island populated mainly by thick-lipped cannibals.
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Felix the Cat, a popular Warner Bros character, is surrounded by creatures that seem to portray African Americans in a negative way.
It's frightening to see just how bigoted these animations were. When you realize many of them were still being shown relatively regularly during our childhood, it's just plain spooky. But it's good to know people have taken notice. Cartoon Scandals provides an interesting reexamination of a too-easily-forgotten piece of history.
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