Airbrushing the Past

Imagine a world where Ronald Reagan was never a Democrat. Where F.D.R. never had polio. Where John Kerry never served in Vietnam or John McCain was never taken prisoner. Sound far-fetched? Maybe in real life, but in film anything is possible -- including rewriting the past.

I had noticed a wire item a while back on a really idiotic piece of censorship happening in England, and thought about posting a blog item about it. But when push came to shove I didn't, mainly because it was happening in England and I consider this to be a blog about America.

But John Patterson has an interesting piece in Friday's Guardian about it so I thought I'd discuss the issue in terms of his piece and see where we agree and disagree, because it's worth having a debate about.

"I see Tom and Jerry are undermining the safety and morals of our children once again," he begins. "It used to be violence; now it's cigarette smoking that's got the cat and mouse's corporate overseers all in a lather. One complaint to Ofcom by a single viewer, and Time Warner, maddeningly, is all too happy to revisit its classic cartoon archive and airbrush out anything that makes smoking look cool."

So far we're in agreement. It's hard not to be. The actions of Time Warner [full disclosure: my former bosses] are pretty indefensible. One person complains and they vandalize some of the best cartoons to come out of America? This is ridiculous, and the fact that it's only in England that this is happening, and not America (yet) doesn't make it any better.

Patterson discusses the smoking issue at some length, then moves on:

"I remember about 25 years ago seeing a fascinating compendium of racist, sexist and generally phobic cartoons from the 1930s and 40s, featuring such classic animated figures as Betty Boop (her clothes just kept falling off!), Bugs Bunny and other 'toons from Disney and Warner Bros. Blacks were lampooned as pimps, loafers and idiots in regrettable shorts such as Snow White am de Sebben Dwarbes. The Japanese took a racist pasting - bucktoothed, slant-eyed, fanatical, all that - in half a dozen justly forgotten flag-wavers of the second world war, and women generally got the misogynistic end of the animator's pencil. But how are we served by the suppression of these materials? Sure, they're grotesque and offensive, but they remain a solid index of broadly acceptable social attitudes prevailing at the time they were made, and, as such, they should never be erased. There was plenty that wasn't so great about the so-called Greatest Generation."

I think Patterson must have seen this in New York, because this sounds suspiciously like the "Sex, Violence & Racism in Cartoons" program that they used to show at midnight at the (sadly, now defunct) 8th Street Playhouse in the early 1980s. Possibly because of a faulty memory and the fact that he saw these films so long ago, he's a little inaccurate factually. The title of the cartoon is "Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs," and far from being "regrettable" it's universally considered by animation enthusiasts one of the greatest cartoon shorts ever made. If you don't believe me you can see for yourself -- in spite of being one of the "Censored 11" cartoons that Time Warner refuses to put out on DVD or play on cable, bootleg copies of it are available on both Google Video and You Tube. I would also respectfully disagree with people who call "Coal Black" racist. All you need to do is compare it to the legitimately racist Warners cartoons of the same period (such as "All This and Rabbit Stew" -- which you can also find on You Tube) to see the difference. "All This and Rabbit Stew" plays its stereotypes straight -- "Coal Black" pushes racial stereotypes to an extreme to point up their inherent absurdity. It does what the TV show "In Living Color" did forty years later, and it does so with the enthusiastic participation of an all-black cast, none of whom, as far as I know, complained about the content of the cartoon.

But then, people were far less touchy in those days.

As far as the racist portrayals of the Japanese in cartoons like "Tokyo Jokio" (also on You Tube), I remember pointing out to my father that the portrayal of the Japanese in some Warner Bros. cartoons of the era was incredibly racist. He just gave me a look that I'll never forget and said, his voice dripping with sarcasm: "There was a war on at the time, you know." I think that's all that really needs to be said about those cartoons. People at the time were not concerned with the sensitivities of the people who had bombed our fleet at Pearl Harbor. And why should they have been? We were at war and they were the enemy -- why shouldn't we lampoon them?

Should children be protected from such films? I suppose you could make an argument that they should be -- it's as arguably inappropriate to show a five-year old "Tokyo Jokio" as it would be to show them "9 1/2 Weeks." But for Time Warner to withhold them from an adult audience who wants to see them, either to appreciate their value as animation or to know about them as cultural artifacts of a particular period in American history, is just plain wrong. I would like to see "Coal Black" on DVD as part of an overall Bob Clampett DVD collection (I once wrote to George Feltenstein of Warner Home Video requesting that he do just that, and never got a response), and I think the entire "Censored 11" should be put on one DVD so that people can judge them for themselves.

That is what free speech is all about -- isn't it?

Tom Moran