WB Cartoons racist - Video collection reminds of bigotry past

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.

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."

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.

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.

All This and Rabbit Stew (1941), the Bugs Bunny cartoon included on the tape, is a different story. The Black version of Elmer Fudd is a caricature, but no more so than Fudd himself is a caricature of a Caucasian. The humor in the cartoon is not really that different from that in other Tex Avery-directed Bugs Bunny cartoons of the period. Basically, Bugs outwits and sasses a not-too-bright hunter. Mel Blanc's Southern dialect may be offensive to some, but is really no more offensive than Blanc's redneck Foghorn Leghorn or even the Brooklyn/Bronx voice of Bugs Bunny himself. This cartoon is a judgment call. I didn't see anything truly offensive about it but then again, it may appear less offensive in the company of Walter Lantz' racist cartoon than it really is.

Supposedly, Warners later edited footage of Elmer Fudd over the hunter so that All This and Rabbit Stew could be shown on television. MGM turned a black maid on the Tom and Jerry series into an Irish maid when the shorts aired on television, and Warners colorized many of the 1930s Looney Tunes by sloppily painting over actual frames of film, so who can say?

The real danger is that censors may mistake all mention of race for racism. It is possible that one day, cartoons like Fat Albert might be considered offensive caricatures.

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. This myth is the foundation of Tarzan movies and still turns up in TV shows and movies today, with slight modifications. 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.

Minstrel-style entertainment was featured as the punch line in the Bugs Bunny short Fresh Hare(1942) in which Bugs' last wish before a Canadian firing squad is that he were in Dixie. Native Americans were mocked mercilessly in Big Heel-Watha (1944), a Tex Avery cartoon in which Red got to play an Indian princess.

Among the worst examples, Tokio Jokio (1943), featured a parody of newsreels that turns terribly bigoted. The film opens with a rooster about to crow as the sun rises on Japan, the Land of the Rising Sun. The rooster turns into a sinister, slant-eyed vulture with a thick Oriental accent. The rest of the movie contains sight gags mixed in with horrible caricatures of the Asian race. Obviously a result of wartime hysteria, the intent of the film seems to be to present the Japanese as a subhuman race. Disturbing as it is, this is a far cry from the "just for children" attitude most people take towards cartoons.

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.