Zachary Strobel
December 28, 2014 at 11:58pm
The most racist and bizarre cartoon I have ever seen… and I watch a lot of cartoons!
http://www.dailymotion.com/…/x98sa4_tin-pan-alley-cats-1943…
Tin Pan Alley Cats (1943)
dailymotion.com|By Melvin-X
Tin Pan Alley Cats (1943)
dailymotion.com|By Melvin-X
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• Keith Scott, David Germain, Jesse Oliver and 32 others like this.
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Brian Blaquesmith This is more racist…
Scrub Me Mama With a Boogie Beat
Good old stereotype humor… enjoy.
youtube.com
December 29, 2014 at 12:00am • Like • 6
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Zachary Strobel That’s messed up too but I think “TPAC” negatively portrays black culture more than “SMMwaBB”
December 29, 2014 at 12:02am • Like
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Glen Banks I love the music!
December 29, 2014 at 12:06am • Like
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Jesse Oliver One of my favorites! I love the animation and jazzy music!
December 29, 2014 at 12:21am • Like • 2
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Brian Blaquesmith Recycled gags and backgrounds…
December 29, 2014 at 12:43am • Like • 1
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Reg Hartt This cartoon does in 6 1/2 minutes what YELLOW SUBMARINE did in 90. Yes, it is PORKY IN WACKYLAND re-cycled. That is part of the brilliance. Racist? Not by a mile.
December 29, 2014 at 4:51am • Like • 2
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Robert Farrell I love this cartoon and I hope some day it (and all of the other censored 11) gets released on DVD/Blu-Ray
December 29, 2014 at 5:23am • Like
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Sylvia Harris WOW! That was one something fiercely funny and messed up! Racist? Nah. Wacky as hell? Most definitely.
December 29, 2014 at 8:18am • Like • 1
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Reg Hartt Bob Clampett had gone to a Duke Ellington Concert in Los Angeles. After the show Bob talked with the musicians. They said, “Max Fleischer is making cartoons with us. Why aren’t you?” Bob replied. “Be happy to.” COAL BLACK was the first. This is the second.
December 29, 2014 at 8:43am • Like • 4
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Reg Hartt I believe that is musician Fats Waller. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSNPpssruFY
Fats Waller – Ain’t Misbehavin’ – Stormy Weather (1943)
http://www.bojazz.com/ — http://bjazz.unblog.fr/Fats…
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December 29, 2014 at 9:35am • Like • 2 • Remove Preview
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Reg Hartt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7kKYJH-B14
FATS WALLER The very best
FATS WALLER The very best – DIVERTIMENTO ASSICURATO ! Qui c’è il meglio di Fats Waller, con il…
youtube.com
December 29, 2014 at 9:38am • Like • Remove Preview
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Reg Hartt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AFats_Waller
Talk:Fats Waller – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I notice that Fats Waller is caricatured in many cartoons of the 40’s (specifically WB’s “Tin Pan Alley Cats”, “Clean Pastures” and MGM’s “Little Ol’ Bosko” cartoons). In all of these cartoons the character inevitable yells out to the audience “What’s the matter with him?” (sometimes it sounds like…
en.wikipedia.org
December 29, 2014 at 9:43am • Like • Remove Preview
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Reg Hartt Just ’cause it is so damned nice to listen to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56YYiiBHCvI
Fats Waller | (Do You Intend to Put an End To) A Sweet Beginning Like This
youtube.com
December 29, 2014 at 9:44am • Like • Remove Preview
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Reg Hartt And because he sings, “Whats the matter with him” in there.
December 29, 2014 at 9:47am • Like • 1
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Reg Hartt These are caricatures of musicians just as movie stars are caricatured in many cartoons. They are not done out of a mean spirit nor out of a desire to inflict pain. To be caricatured like this meant that you had become a star. Barbara Walters asked Bette Davis if it hurt when she saw herself caricatured in cartoons. Davis replied, “Hell, no! I worked for that. It meant I had become a star.” People get these things all wrong today mostly because their teachers come from academia (which is always out of touch) and not show business.
December 29, 2014 at 9:56am • Edited • Like
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Reg Hartt As to recycled gags and backgrounds this is what smart film makers did. The budgets on these films were impossibly low. Leon Schlesinger said, “I don’t want quality and I don’t want it in the worst way.” Also, “Let Walt Disney make chicken salad and win prizes. I will make chicken shit and I will make money.” One thing they knew not to do was to ask permission because the answer would always be no. Thus, to do really creative work they economized where they could by recycling gags and older animation. Disney did this as well.
December 29, 2014 at 10:03am • Like • 1
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Chris Leonido I know that Bob clampett was a huge fan of African American jazz music. Oddly enough he wanted to do a jazz band to do the music for Coral Black like how The Fleischers got Cab Calloway to do the music for the betty boop cartoons. But that got rejected by Leon.
December 29, 2014 at 1:20pm • Like
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Jonathan Gies These posts where people assert that cartoons like this “aren’t racist” are getting. Very. Tiresome.
This cartoon is sheer unadulterated brilliance. Clampett at his surreal best and his animators at the peak of their powers. It is also the byproduct of an extremely dehumanizing caste system. These two facts are not mutually exclusive.
December 29, 2014 at 1:26pm • Edited • Like • 6
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Jonathan Gies The fact that Clampett made this and “Coal Black” as celebrations of, and tributes to, jazz culture does not change this. History is filled with people whose intentions were good but whose vision and understanding were still limited by the blinders their time period imposed on them. We ourselves will, I’m sure, join that history in time, in ways we can’t necessarily foresee.
While it is silly and wrong to lump Clampett’s relatively innocent films in with the likes of overtly hateful white supremacism, it is also silly and wrong to pretend they owe nothing to the longstanding American tradition of minstrelry.
December 29, 2014 at 1:31pm • Edited • Like • 5
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Chris Leonido Well said Jonathan.
December 29, 2014 at 1:31pm • Like
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Matthew Anscher But hiding them allows the intellectual property holders to pretend they were more enlightened than they actually were.
Did they even show cartoons like this in black movie theaters?
December 29, 2014 at 1:34pm • Like
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Karen Marjoribanks I saw this on TV in the early 50s. I thought it was in black and white, but then TV was only Black and white then.
December 29, 2014 at 1:45pm • Like
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Jonathan Gies Matthew: Good question. Probably depended on the theater owner. Some might take a stand, some might say “Ugh, why fight it?” Pretty much the same with every demographic and every societal issue. Some of us fight, some of us complain but buckle.
December 29, 2014 at 2:10pm • Like
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Reg Hartt Jonathan, get a life. This was made as an entertainment. Nothing more.Nothing less. Read into it what you will what you read is not there. Bob told me of some Black Panthers who after going to one of his presentations had a meeting with Los Angeles Mayor tom Bradley who, informed they had come from a Bob Clampett event, said, “Oh! Bob Clampett! He made my favorite cartoon. I saw it in France during World War Two. It’s called COAL BLACK AND DE SEBBEN DWARFS.” Stroke your ego with this pretentious bull dung.
December 29, 2014 at 2:28pm • Like
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Karen Marjoribanks Amos and Andy were on TV in those days…it was a different world
December 29, 2014 at 2:28pm • Like
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Jonathan Gies It’s good that you remembered what the subject in question really is, Reg, which is, of course, me! I’m glad you realized that.
December 29, 2014 at 2:34pm • Like • 2
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Jonathan Gies Regardless though—-it’s your privilege and mine to talk to each OTHER about this, as opposed to talking beyond each other. And that’s the problem.
December 29, 2014 at 2:51pm • Like • 1
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Reg Hartt My friend Bill Smith and his wife Chloe Onari tell a story of when they first went to New York back in the 1950s.They were told the city was racist. They were unable to book a hotelroom. Bill is white. Chloe is Black. Then went to hotel after hotel. Finally Bill had Chloe stay outside. He booked a room. Once he had done it he said to the clerk, “By the way my wife is Black.” The man replied, “What color is your money.” Turned out there was a major convention in the city. The hotels were sold out. Luckily, he found one that was not. COAL BLACK, TIN PAN ALLEY CATS, GOLDILOCKS AND THE JIVING BEARS, CLEAN PASTURES and Chuck Jones Inky And The Mynah Bird films nor Tex Avery’s UNCLE TOM’S CABANNA, HALF PINT PYGMY are not racist films. They are identical in body and spirit to everything produced by those men. You want to call them racist and, by extension, the men who made them racist, fine. Go ahead. Nonetheless, you are wrong. Bill and Chloe by the way ran THE JAZZ AND BLUE CENTER in Toronto. Brit musicians like the ROLING STONES ordered their music from them. It was the only record store in the world that could get you American Black music. As for progress made by Black musicians, that was thanks to gangsters like Dutch Schulz and Owney Madden. Scott Joplin,America’s first great composer, was not allowed to join the American Federation of Musicians. They saw his music as whorehouse music. The point of my story about Bill and his wife is that you see racism where it ain’t. Bob Clampett saw the person not the skin color. He was one of the most decent men who ever lived. You made it about you when you wrote that denying these films are racist is tiresome. It is not. It is the truth YOU wish not to hear.
December 29, 2014 at 4:30pm • Like • 1
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Jonathan Gies Reg, I think it’s pretty obvious that you’re reacting to what you think I’m saying, not what I’m actually saying. You’re harboring a very, if you’ll pardon the expression, black-and-white view of what constitutes “racism,” and you’re projecting that onto others.
This issue has nothing to do with Bob Clampett being a fundamentally decent man, or “seeing the person, not the skin color.” It’s much larger than that, and it’s not an either/or thing with good guys and bad guys.
Once again it bears repeating that arriving at a personal conclusion about what is and isn’t “racist” after talking amongst ourselves (and you know what I mean by “ourselves”) is a privilege that isn’t really earned.
December 29, 2014 at 11:23pm • Edited • Like • 1
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Jonathan Gies Anyway.
It’s always struck me that Clampett’s approach became more and more surreal and less conventionally grounded as his time at Warners drew to a close. His later films feel more like dreams or hallucinations than conventional narratives. This one shows early tendencies toward that, I think. Most of his other 1943 films still feel pretty conventional—-even Coal Black, wild as it is. But by the time of Baby Bottleneck and The Big Snooze, it’s like he stopped being a storyteller and more like a purveyor of fever dreams.
I sometimes ache with frustration that Clampett’s journey of development as a director was basically stopped cold prematurely, due to several factors.
December 29, 2014 at 11:36pm • Like
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Reg Hartt TIN PAN ALLEY CATS is not racist. Period. It is neither consciously nor unconsciously racist. The dream/nightmare quality of the film reflects perfectly the marihuana/heroin culture that pervades Jazz and that has always pervaded Jazz. And though those substances may be illegal there is nothing wrong with that. Clampett and his artists in doing research for these films hung out at the clubs and with the musicians. Yes, after these films we do see an intensity in the use of color, of “trails,” and vibrant internal rhythm in Bob’s work that we see in no other animation directors before or sense. Bob may not have smoked pot but at those clubs and with those musicians pot was in the air. He got a contact high. John Taylor Gatto, in his UNDERGROUND HISTORY OF AMERICAN EDUCATION, shows the steps taken to produce an education system in The United States (and Canada) designed to dumb down not sharpen up those caught in its nets. Those fortunate enough to be forced to fall out of the system through necessity (or who choose to walk away from it as I did) find themselves forced to rely upon themselves. The first lesson learned is not to be quick to judgement. The second, for myself, is to be loving. The third is to keep an open door/mind. The fourth is to be helpful. Asked why Warners was not employing Black musicians on cartoon soundtracks Bob said two things. The first was, “I don’t know.” The second (and most important) was, “If you fellows want to make a film I will make one with you.” This with a producer, Leon Schlesinger, determined not to spend a dime extra on his films though he was happy to lose fortunes at cards. If you know the culture and the music (which it is clear most of you seem not to) than you know this is not a hateful but a loving interpretation of that culture as well as an extremely bold. Yes, it is unfortunate that Clampett was never able to explore animation as thoroughly as he could have. My God, the work he might have done! But here is the rub. At Warners he was working for hire. The studio had right of refusal on all of his ideas and sole ownership to the ones they used. For that gift of his intelligence (as well as that of Friz Freleng, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and the rest) he received a pittance. They were as much slaves as were the people who worked the cottonfields before the American Civil War. This eagerness to jump not to conclusions but to assumptions is far too common. Standing up to those who make assumptions is far too rare. I learned long ago that when I do this I risk fire but having bathed in the fire several times I have found it makes me stronger. A young Russian said, “In my country we had an iron curtain and we knew it. In this country you have an iron curtain and do not know it.” A woman walking in front of me on the street said to three extremely well dressed Asian men, “You know it. I know it.The American people know it.” I spoke, “Pardon me. You may know. They may know.The American people, however, know nothing. If they did there would be riots in the streets.” She looked at me in shock (I think she had rehearsed that line for hours in front of a mirror). After a long pause the three Asian men spoke as one. They said, “Yes. This is true.” There is a lot more to concern yourself with for the sake of the future of America than whether or not these old cartoons are racist. You have fine minds. Your school system is deliberately designed to put them to sleep. Your school system, as Gatto makes clear, is designed to create slaves. Disagree with me all you want. But while you are disagreeing read Gatto. As Bertrand Russell said, “Men are born ignorant not stupid. It is education that makes them stupid.” When Friz Freleng was in Toronto he was asked, “What is your favorite character.” He replied, “My wife like Bugs. I like The Pink Panther. I make money from him.” You might think that crass. Many young animators hearing him say that did think that. But it is nice to have an income that gives you freedom when you reach Friz’s age. That allows us to choose which is what freedom is all about.
December 30, 2014 at 7:50am • Like
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Jonathan Gies Again, Reg—-you’re not really reacting to anything that’s actually been said, here. Only to what you think is being said. I can’t help you there. One could address your above comment (which is full of great historical info) in detail, but there’s no point because it’s a rebuttal to things that haven’t been asserted to begin with.
One thing has to be said, though.
“They were as much slaves as were the people who worked the cottonfields before the American Civil War.”
Sorry, no. Absolutely no. That this comparison is unacceptable should go without saying.
December 30, 2014 at 7:59am • Edited • Like • 1
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Reg Hartt Post Script: The heightened sense of awareness of visuals and deeper appreciation of the complexity of sound that comes with the marihuana experience is one damn good reason why I sincerely hope all of you are smoking pot. As I said, Bob may never have smoked a reefer in those clubs. He did breathe the air which was thick with it. As for the benefits of LSD, I regularly give talks on it.
December 30, 2014 at 8:01am • Like
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Jonathan Gies Sadly, one of the most singular achievements of my life is somehow managing to be the world’s only living person who went through four years of art school (ART SCHOOL for chrissake) without ever trying weed.
I know, I know.
What can I say? I was young and foolish back then….
December 30, 2014 at 8:03am • Like
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Reg Hartt As The young Russian said, “You have an iron curtain of the mind and don’t know it.” And don’t want to know it which is worse. “First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are:
laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the
habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory
education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to
turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have their childhoods
extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could
apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself
through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today),
there’s no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and
thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius
is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women.
The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage
themselves.–John Taylor Gatto, AGAINST SCHOOL.
December 30, 2014 at 8:06am • Edited • Like
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Reg Hartt There is only one race, the human race. Within our family there are rainbow colors. Within our family there are many people who think people of a different color are not as them. Their are Blacks against marriage with peoples of different shades just as their are browns, whites and yellows (and if we had green skinned people be sure there would be green skinned people opposed to intermarriage). These are the small people though they be not small in number. Nonetheless racism does not exist because there is only one race. Biogtry exists, yes. We have the bigotry of the academic against the working class, the bigotry of religions, the bigotry of wealth as opposed to poverty (though the poor, not knowing it, are infinitely richer than the materially well off). If you can understand this than you live in a world without racism. If you can’t you exist in a divided world where the illusion of racism lives. I don’t smoke pot, don’t smoke hashish and don’t smoke period. Nonetheless, I am not blind to its benefits. My friend the late Al Aronowitz turned THE BEATLES on just before they went on stage at Shea Stadium. When they stepped off stage the direction of their music had been changed forever for the better (I like my pot in cookies as did Al). To have spent four years at ART SCHOOL and not to have smoked pot is like spending four years in a bordello and remaining a virgin.
December 30, 2014 at 8:43am • Like
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Edward Foy Reg, you’re not even arguing with Jonathon. You’re arguing with yourself. And you already lost your argument with yourself when you felt the need to play the “my black friend” card. Not to mention the “this group of black people is okay with it, so all black people are okay with it” song and dance. Racism, Reg, is more subtle than overt discrimination or outright bigotry. It’s the difference in this case between celebrity caricatures that emphasize specific features of the individual and characters that emphasize racial exaggeration. And me explaining this to you is multiply ridiculous, not least due to my utter whiteness. Sometimes I swear there’s an entire section of white people for whom nothing white people do is ever racist as long as they don’t say n*****. I’m beginning to wonder if that’s the case for Reg.
December 30, 2014 at 9:11am • Like • 3
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Keith Scott In 2015, can’t we move this tiresome, endless bickering to a new page like, say, Social Changes Reflected Over 100 Years of Film History, and just go back to talking about great animation, voices, music and FUNNY stuff.
December 30, 2014 at 9:03pm • Like • 7
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Greg Bruhl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5AxxE5sbjQ
Screen Song Camptown Races Famous Studios x264 cartoons
The Fleischers signed a new contract with Paramount…
youtube.com
December 30, 2014 at 9:52pm • Like
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Reg Hartt “THE BEST LACK ALL CONVICTION, WHILE THE WORST ARE FULL OF PASSIONATE INTENSITY.”–WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS.
January 4 at 6:55am • Like
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Reg Hartt http://reghartt.ca/cineforum/?p=14175
The best lack conviction while the worst are fanatics. | Reg Hartt: Hell’s Kitchen,…
Hey there! Thanks for dropping by Reg Hartt: Hell’s…
reghartt.ca
January 4 at 8:43am • Like • Remove Preview
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Reg Hartt The answer is no because there is nothing more important than standing up to this B.S. in all the forms it takes. Historically there have been far too few who do this which makes doing it all the more important.
January 4 at 10:13am • Like
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Reg Hartt The Crusade especially, thanks to folks like you, belongs here.
January 4 at 10:18am • Like
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Jonathan Gies Reg, I find it difficult to believe that someone with your historical knowledge is unaware of the history of minstrelry and its related imagery.
January 4 at 10:20am • Like
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Reg Hartt As I said, these films are HONEST reflections of their time and place. Considering the constraints imposed on the Warner artists (and the poor pay they received) it is a miracle they did such great work. You folks are the Thomas Bowdlers and Edmund Ducis of our time.
January 4 at 10:24am • Like
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Jonathan Gies David: You and I are to blame for taking the bait. I’d thought the hurricane had passed.
January 4 at 10:24am • Like • 1
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Jonathan Gies Yes, they’re honest reflections of their time, and that means accepting both the good AND the bad that comes with that fact. Clampett’s intentions were good. His vision was limited by his being soaked in the culture of his time, which was awash in minstrel imagery and tropes. And that imagery is unambiguously and straightforwardly racist. That’s it. Period. There is no arguing that. You can debate about where to go FROM there, and how the films should be treated today, but you cannot argue the historical roots of the images and cliches on display here.
January 4 at 10:27am • Like
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Reg Hartt This hurricane never passes. The hurricane is not by speaking up against your attacks on those who can no longer speak for themselves but rather in your persistence in storming against them.
January 4 at 10:29am • Like
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Jonathan Gies If you’re trying to pretend that minstrel imagery is rooted in something other than what it was, then you are willfully placing yourself opposite to voluminous recorded history, as well as lived history. That is simply all there is to it. Holocaust denialism beats such efforts only in sheer scale.
This exchange is honestly one of the most disappointing I’ve ever seen/participated in on this forum, not only because of the sheer zeal behind the effort devoted to historical revisionism at the expense of balanced integrity, but because of the myopia and dismissiveness toward others’ lived realities.
And also, it must be said, because of the impossibility of getting the point through, no matter how many times it has been repeatedly stated, that speaking honestly about the minstrelry tropes here is in no way an attempt to impugn the character of Bob Clampett personally, nor any of his artists. Would that life were so simple.
January 4 at 10:39am • Like
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Jonathan Gies “Fortress of his Vision”…..
Hmm. I’ll have to remember that one. Will you want royalties, in any event?
January 4 at 10:55am • Like • 1
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Reg Hartt “Balanced integrity!?” Who the F..K do ya think ya are? You are one of the most bigoted people I have met and that is saying something. Until recently, show business has always been the business of poor people trying to make a living. Al Jolson started out in a Minstrel Show because that was the door that was open. What he did once he got through that door was exceptional and unique to him. People who thought themselves “good” forced prohibition on America and with it a heap of misery. Nonetheless, during that time the advancement of Black artists was brought forward not by concerned good folks but by gangsters like Owney Madden and Dutch Schultz who liked Jazz. Nothing changes. The Pharisees and Scribes just change their clothes. They continue to make life Hell for everyone not of their club. My point is there are not races. There is ONE race. That seems to be a minority view. That does not stop it from being true. I see a direct line from SWING WEDDING and the frog cartoons of Harman & Ising to COAL BLACK and TIN PAN ALLEY CATS (and SCRUB ME MAMA WITH A BOOGIE BEAT). These films are honest and accurate reflections of their times. They are not racist in part because there is only one race. Walter Lantz went out of his way to help people.After Jack Teagarden was sent to prison on a drugs charge Lantz gave him work on a cartoon soundtrack and a credit on the film that helped greatly to restore him. These men grew up in the garden of poverty. The poor help. The rich cross the road and walk on by. Damning the past because it does not fit your idealized view of the world does not change it and does not heal it.
January 4 at 11:04am • Like
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Jonathan Gies Still responding to what you think people are saying as opposed to what they’re actually saying. Projection is powerful stuff.
Remember though—-proclaiming something to not be racist is your privilege. (And mine, let’s not kid ourselves.) Don’t forget that.
January 4 at 11:09am • Like • 3
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Reg Hartt I am saying separate races do not exist. You are maintaining that they do. My friends Bill Smith and Chloe Onari ran THE JAZZ AND BLUES CENTER in Toronto from the 1960’s through 70’s, 80’s and possibly the 90’s. When THE ROLLING STONES first came to Toronto it was the only place they wanted to see because it was the only record store in the world from which one could order Jazz and Blues recordings. Tellingly, the promoters who had brought them here had never heard of the place. Bill and Chloe were and are friends with legions of artists of all shades from Cecil Taylor to Louis Armstrong with whom Chloe smoked pot on more than one occasion. From her I learned that the artists who worked on these films saw them as popular entertainments that helped to increase their audience. While the Warner films do not showcase talent the ones at Lantz and Fleischer did. Two weeks before Cab Calloway would come to a city a cartoon like MINNIE THE MOOCHER or a live action short subject would appear in the theaters promoting the talent. These films were music videos BEFORE there were music videos. “Most teachers say you should go to school to get your degree to have something to fall back on. Aside from being a huge lie, that also creates a very high level of mediocrity, because nobody who really believes that is going to take the leap of faith required to be a serious artist. Stay out of school.”–Ellis Marsalis to his sons Branford, Delfeayo and Wynton. Now when it comes to music Ellis Marsalis is no slouch. The mediocrity he warned his sons against is evident in everything that comes out of Academia. These films were made to entertain. They are vibrant, exciting, unique and deserve to be championed. The only problem is a scarcity of champions. I am no stranger to dealing with the deliberately obtuse. There have been riots at my presentations. You are the product of a school system designed to make people dumb. I cant fault you for their success.You and the fundamentalists of any faith you wish to choose are birds of a feather. You are all busy casting stones.
January 4 at 11:53am • Like
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Jonathan Gies Sigh. Well, now you’ve done it. You’ve forced me to say something I promised myself I’d never say ever again. But here goes.
LOL.
January 4 at 11:59am • Like
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Jonathan Gies Joking aside, I repeat—-projection is a powerful thing. In this case, it’s a freakin’ H-bomb.
January 4 at 12:00pm • Like
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Jonathan Gies I have a very serious affliction, David. I fully admit to it. That serious condition is known in the medical community as lastworditis. It’s caused much distress to many individuals for at least the past 20 years, increasing at an alarming rate along with the spread of the internet. The only known cure is self-control. Unfortunately, my bottle ran out.
January 4 at 12:03pm • Like
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Jonathan Gies A trial attorney turning away from a debate? Now THAT is a kind of willpower that puts me to shame.
January 4 at 12:06pm • Like • 2
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Reg Hartt It seems Voltaire’s “I disagree with everything you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” is lost on you. In the late 1930s the reissue prints of many film classics were censored. Many of those prints stayed censored until they were issued on DVD and Blu-ray. Whatever argument we put forward against one work we disagree with can be applied by others to work THEY disagree with. A fierce censorship dominated motion pictures from the late twenties through the 1960s and 70s that kept American film from bring mature. One stands against all of this or against nothing at all. As an example there was a fierce battle in the early Christian church about whether or not Gentiles should be circumcised. It ended when Peter and Paul stated that we can not impose one part of the law without imposing the WHOLE of the law. Peter added, “Why burden them with that which neither WE NOR THE FATHERS COULD BEAR.” Now that is about as plain as it can get. That does not stop Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Christian Right and their fundamentalist allies from insisting those laws are still in force. What are described as racist works stem from people with limited vision and little love. If you knew who Thomas Bowdler and Edmund Ducis are then you would be aware of the horrors they wreaked upon great literature using the same specious arguments that are found here.
January 4 at 3:56pm • Like
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Jonathan Gies A) Dial down the projection.
B) Dial down the tangents.
C) Cast a much smaller net.
D) Dial down the projection some more.
January 4 at 4:23pm • Like • 2
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Edward Foy I can only speak for myself, but I’m not arguing that these cartoons should be censored. They are a part of the past. Indeed, censoring them creates a sanitized past that bears little relation to reality. But that doesn’t mean that I must deny these cartoons are racist. Quite the opposite, really.
January 4 at 4:50pm • Like • 3
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Glen Banks If there is something I’m not supposed to see… I WANT IT IN MY COLLECTION! Thank you.
January 4 at 5:27pm • Like • 1
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Keith Scott One guy filled with verbal diarroeah, the other insufferably smug. Enough already! When will Cartoon Research get back to its original mission: the childish fanboys and their important stuff (like what time did Clampett’s inbetweeners go on their lunch break in 1943).
January 4 at 5:33pm • Like • 1
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Glen Banks WHO was insufferably smug? I hope it was ME!
January 4 at 5:34pm • Like
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Reg Hartt When you understand that the hardest part of making a Warner Cartoon was coming up with a story and that to solve that the only word forbidden during story sessions was the word “no” not only will you understand why the caricatures in TIN PAN ALLEY CATS are so exaggerated you will also understand why it is important to get the word “no” out of our lives. Native people taught that to beat a child is to hammer the badness in. I apologize to Jonathan for saying he is a dork even if he is a dork (I know the words I used were not “dork” but that is what they mean. I see things posted here like, “they recycled animation” as if that were a fault. The rule is “Don’t draw what you can’t trace. Don’t trace what you can’t paste.” That is how we get good work done when we have little money. I much prefer honest hatred to dishonest love. Give me a hardcore bigot any day over fake compassion and tolerance. And, I realize, Eddie, that you hang on to the word “racist” like an infant holding a nipple. Well, babies grow up. Hopefully, one day you will. Get the “no” out of your life. Then you can start living it.
January 5 at 10:10am • Like
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Jonathan Gies Reg Hartt: For the last time, it’s your privilege and mine to declare what’s racist and what isn’t. And usually it’s not an earned one.
Keith: Can’t say I’m happy about reading as “insufferably smug,” but the line between straightforward and smug can be a very subjective one, especially when you attempt to defuse with a pin instead of a hammer.
January 5 at 10:55am • Edited • Like • 1
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Edward Foy Oh Reggie. There’s no arguing with you when you’re too busy arguing with yourself.
January 5 at 11:20am • Like
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Reg Hartt These films are not racist. You are like pseudo Christians seeing devils where there are angels.
January 5 at 12:50pm • Like • 1
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Jonathan Gies “THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU!!! THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU!!!”
“In timmme…”
January 5 at 12:51pm • Like
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Reg Hartt Or pseudo Buddhists seeing Demons. Anyway we look at it you are wrong. Dead wrong. The power of TRUTH is what compels me.
January 5 at 12:53pm • Like
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Jonathan Gies “Dami. Dami….why they do this to me, Dami?”
January 5 at 12:54pm • Like
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Reg Hartt There is a movie called THE OX BOW INCIDENT. In this dialogue I am Henry Fonda and you, Jonathan, are a member of the lynch mob: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIDfzCzdjcs
The Ox-Bow Incident (trailer)
Trailer for the 1943 Western “The Ox-Bow Incident,” starring Henry Fonda and directed by William A….
youtube.com
January 5 at 1:03pm • Like • Remove Preview
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Jonathan Gies This just keeps getting more interesting. XD
January 5 at 1:11pm • Like
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Jonathan Gies Yet also more grotesque. Mutual ego stroking is rarely an attractive sight.
January 5 at 1:12pm • Like • 1
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Reg Hartt Unlike you I walked out of the education system when I was told I would starve if i did. I was 17. As a direct result of that choice I was gifted with better teachers than anyone in any school will ever get. Among them were three strong New York women: Doris Mehegan (whose husband wrote the score for the Broadway version of STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE). Doris had studied dance under Charles Wideman who came out of the Ruth St. Denis Company (seen in Griffith’s INTOLERANCE) and taught it in Toronto where she worked as head librarian at the SPACED OUT LIBRARY started by the mother of modern science/speculative fiction, Judith Merril whom I met at Rochdale College and Jane Jacobs (author of THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES and whose last book, DARK AGE AHEAD I find demonstrated in yourself. All three of these women, who led busy and productive lives, never tired of standing up for what is important and standing by those under attack no matter how unimportant the rest of the world might view the person being attacked. They said, “If we do not do this a part of our self dies.” I don’t expect you to listen. Nor do I expect Edward Foy. In fact, I don’t give a damn whether you listen or not. I do care about standing and speaking up especially when so few will and so many who should say they want this post to be only about cartoons or they are too old and tired to do what is right. These people died long ago. The dead do not concern me. Zachary made this about more than cartoons when he labelled TIN PAN ALLEY CATS racist. It isn’t. I have said what needed to be said. You have proven yourself part of the lynch mob. What more is there to do? Nothing but give you the last word you insist on having.
January 5 at 1:26pm • Like
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Jonathan Gies Reg, who is it that anyone here has “attacked?” Who is being “lynched” by the “lynch mob?” Who?
January 5 at 1:29pm • Like
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Jonathan Gies Huh. Totally by coincidence, I happened to come across this interesting article just now, and it ties into this issue in particular ways regarding the two-sided cultural legacy of minstrelry.
http://www.salon.com/…/we_get_huck_finn_all_wrong_race…/
We get Huck Finn all wrong: Race, Mark Twain, children and myths of an…
Our sense of comedy and seriousness in “Huck Finn”…
salon.com
January 5 at 2:09pm • Like • 1
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Edward Foy Reg compares a discussion about racism on Facebook to a lynching. After comparing people working for low wages to slaves on a plantation. Are you really this tone deaf, Reg? Wow. I’m going to quit posting any sort of response to you. Continuing a dialogue with you would just be cruel.
January 5 at 4:28pm • Like • 1
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Cole Rothacker I can’t even imagine what kind of ignorance would lead a person to believe that a cartoon with minstrel caricatures isn’t racist. Wow.
January 5 at 8:28pm • Like • 3
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William Cairns For me the money quote from the Chronicles of Reg Hartt was “these films are honest and accurate reflections of their times. They are not racist in part because there is only one race”.
Look, as a liberal DeadHead I certainly agree that the world will be better off when we realize that we are all one race. But to pretend before that day that something isn’t racist because “there is only one race” is logic so flawed that I’m stunned that it could come from an adult. And I don’t mean that to be snarky or sarcastic, but it’s true.
Of course these cartoons are racist. If we were to describe racism by degrees, with pure bigoted hatred at the top (lynchings, etc) Clampett and the other directors didn’t mean any harm, of course, and would be at the very low rung of the degrees. But as Jonathan Gies has pointed out, the caricatures and dialog are rooted in deep seated and deeply rooted minstrel imagery. That someone could somehow not, or refuse to, see this is honestly shocking to me.
January 5 at 10:32pm • Like • 2
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Keith Scott At last, the above comment by William Griffin offers a sensible, cool-headed take on the issue. Sorry, I simply refuse to accept it’s all “minstrel”-based without some proof….Fats Waller, then a famous contemporary pianist-entertainer and hardly a minstrel figure, clearly inspired the lead cat, and Waller’s famous song, “What’s the Matter with Him”?, which the cat repeatedly says, is NOT minstrel dialogue, either. Waller was featured in the same year’s famous Fox feature film STORMY WEATHER, and some of the cartoon’s plotline, about the good vs. bad parts of a soul, are a takeoff on 1943’s other great all-black musical, Warner Bros.’s CABIN IN THE SKY. And how is the jazz playing trumpeter cat a “minstrel” figure?…rather it’s a caricature of a typical early ’40s zoot-suited Central Avenue musician, of which there were hundreds seen nightly throughout the war years if you travelled to S. Central L.A.’s club scene, as hundreds of non-blacks did to be royally entertained. Only the revivalist preacher & Salvation Army band could be argued to be (unintentionally) offensive. Yet a part of that, with the bass-voiced preacher, is a takeoff on an excellently acted all-black church revival scene in the 1940 Fox feature MARYLAND. Have any of the overly righteous contributors above read the two large historical books about Central Avenue and the whole L.A. African American jazz era (1920s-50s), which this cartoon mainly satirizes? The whole “send me outta this world” thing is based on a 30s novelty song about hot jazz music. To make the smug, self-satisfied sweeping statement that it’s all based on “minstrelsy” is arrogantly wrongheaded, and totally inaccurate, animation commentary for a page called Cartoon Research. Call me a bigot or whatever (even though I’m not), but FFS can we get onto a new topic. Or at least contribute some actual facts.
January 5 at 11:35pm • Edited • Unlike • 3
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John Dymer i saw this one when I wuz a little white kid. I never guessed they were putting anyone down innit. Except maybe Hitler.
January 5 at 11:53pm • Edited • Like • 1
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Jonathan Gies William Joseph Griffin: “…and UNCLE TOM’S BUNGALOW, despite being directed by Tex Avery, is just plain BORING.)”
Gadzooks! The very worst thing of all that you can accuse a cartoon of being! That’s more of a burn toward Tex Avery than anything about anyone that’s been said in this entire thread!
January 6 at 12:07am • Edited • Like • 2
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Jonathan Gies Keith: This film isn’t “all based” on minstrel imagery, and its influences derive largely from where you say. That doesn’t mean they are free from that legacy completely.
The caricatures of Waller (and while we’re at it, of Cab Calloway from “Clean Pastures” and “Have You Got Any Castles?”) are an odd mixture of the specific and the golliwog. On one hand they are definitely individuals, specific to the unique physical characteristics and movements of the two musicians, just like all the other Hollywood caricatures that are all over these cartoons. It’s the golliwog aspects that mar them, and keep them from being at the same innocuous level as all the others.
Besides that, there’s the question of context. I don’t know if it’s possible to separate comedic films like this one from the broader social realities of the time, regardless of the individual intentions. They are, when all is said and done, comedic depictions of a marginalized caste by a majority group privileged with immunity to the effects of those depictions. Some might say you can separate it, others would say you can’t.
That’s an debate I’ve seen regarding the crows in Dumbo, for instance, despite them being the Good Guyz and despite being free from most traces of minstrel imagery.
January 6 at 12:45am • Edited • Like • 2
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Keith Scott It’s all about perceptions, and on this we’ll just have to agree to disagree. I don’t see “golliwog,” even in Harman’s frog caricature cartoons … I only see well animated dance and a degree of caricature on, e.g., all the Calloway takeoffs. We are talking animation here, by “cartoonists,” so caricature is going to be part of the equation. And, yes, I’m highly aware of, and saddened by, the vile institutionalized colour bar in place in those times, Hollywood and a million other places. But consider the reactions by those in question: Louis Armstrong met Hugh Harman and told him he loved his caricature; Calloway was reportedly delighted with his cartoon-ization; Vivian Dandridge (the voice of So White) sent a very personal, handwritten letter of appreciation to Clampett two decades after the fact, in the Civil Rights 1960s; Scat Man Crothers told me at a recording session in 1984 that he and all his musician and actor friends loved the caricature pictures; Leroy Hurte of the Four Blackbirds vocal group (MGM and WB cartoons of the 30s) spoke in 1999 of his affection towards “the cartoon guys, who used us and loved us” and he was referring to events from sixty-plus years ago; Eddie Beal, the pianist/musical director of Clampett’s COAL BLACK and TIN PAN became personal friends with Clampett…Sody Clampett told me that Eddie and his brother used to go to dinner with the Clampetts all the way into the 1970s….there are more examples, but if the black performers and musicians took these films as the lighthearted entertainments they were intended to be, and voiced such affection years later for the “cartoon guys” like Clampett, then I cannot take the ultra serious debating here with anything except “we will always have differing opinions.” I am now going to leave this discussion as it is endless and ultimately pointless.
January 6 at 1:21am • Like • 3
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Jonathan Gies The reactions and perceptions of the performers (and gratitude toward “the cartoon guys,” some of which are downright heartwarming to read about) are one of the many reasons this issue is complicated, even when by surface appearances it shouldn’t be.
It’s purely speculative, but it would seem to tie into a certain generation gap that would have come to the surface when everything else was coming to a head in the 1950s and ’60s. Recall Sidney Poiter’s blistering speech to his father in “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner,” for instance. I don’t know who wrote that scene or how deeply or not that person had ties to those who actually made similar pronouncements or held similar views, but it’s difficult to imagine that it wasn’t representative of a certain generational schism going on at the time. A faction of the “young generation,” as represented by Poiter’s character, might well have viewed the sentiments of Crothers, Beal, Hurte, Dandridge and the others as disgusting.
January 6 at 1:40am • Like
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Keith Scott Sorry, one final reaction. You guys dwell on this way too much…in your last comment you used the following: “purely speculative” – “it would seem” – “I don’t know…” – “difficult to imagine” and “might well have” (and if your last sentence is in any way accurate, then plainly and simply those young people you are depicting would have been, as much as you’ll not like reading this, wrong). Is this what 25 years of galloping correctness has wrought. Okay, now I am leaving this thread (and this time I mean it).
January 6 at 2:19am • Like • 2
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Jonathan Gies In some other context, Keith, I don’t think you’d be comfortable with others making definitive statements on your behalf, since they hadn’t obtained your permission to speak for you. Same applies here. Thus the presence of qualifiers. If that’s “galloping correctness,” bring on the horses.
“….(and if your last sentence is in any way accurate, then plainly and simply those young people you are depicting would have been, as much as you’ll not like reading this, wrong).”
Projection again. Sorry.
January 6 at 2:41am • Like • 1
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Reg Hartt Lips.
January 7 at 6:10am • Like
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Reg Hartt Bette Davis on the importance of caricature in building a star career:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tqb3boYrOIQ
Bette Davis Interview by Barbara Walters Pt1
Bette Davis post-stroke interview with Barbara Walters.
youtube.com
January 7 at 6:15am • Like • Remove Preview
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Cole Rothacker Oh brother, give it up.
January 7 at 6:29am • Like
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Reg Hartt When I started my four hour animation marathon programs in the late 1970’s a young Black kid in the audience took objection to Ub Iwerks’ LITTLE BLACK SAMBO. I told him I was running it in the context of the time and that it was important to look at these things;
Two weeks later as part of a collection I bought I got a copy of Ub Iwerks’ SODA SQUIRT with Flip The Frog. Wow! Now the shoe was on the other foot. In this cartoon is the single most offensive caricature of a homosexual man I have ever had the displeasure to sit through. It made me cringe then. It makes me cringe now. There are some who long for the days when colored folk and pansies knew their place which was at the back of the bus and in the closet. I am not one of them. Forgiveness gives us the power to heal ourselves as not forgiving is like picking at an insect bite and turning it into an ulcer.
I put SODA SQUIRT on the screen. Some gay men said, “How could you show that thing?” I replied, “How could I not.” Nothing in any of the so-called “racist” cartoons is as demeaning and vicious as the fag caricature in this cartoon. I don’t see anyone getting their tit in a wringer on the web over this.
I do see young gay men in their early teens of all colors surfing the web and stumbling on to this little gem in horror. What I am saying here as a homosexual man who has witnessed discrimination first hand and who has also received threats on his life (and who still receives them) is that I understand these issues better than perhaps most on this site. I know what is labelled “racism” when I see it. “Racism” stems from small minded poisonous people which Bob Clampett was not. TIN PAN ALLEY CATS is not racist. It is not even over the top.
As for speaking up against the attitudes that foster hate say, “Enough, already,” if you will. The truth is we can never speak up enough against hatred. Nonetheless, I stand with JEAN COCTEAU who said, “Whatever the world condemns you for make it your own. It is yourself.” I will take honest hate over false love any day of the week. The former I can and have turned into love. The latter no one can do anything with.
I also realize (and God knows I have pointed you often enough in the directions where the statement can be confirmed) that our school system is designed to make us stupid. So I expect to be told to shut up. I had an audience in a packed theater screaming at me during one program. They were silenced when an East Indian man who looked as old as the Himalayan Mountains rose and spoke. He had a turban, long, wispy fingers and a flowing white beard. He said, “Be quiet. He is speaking the truth for a great many people and he is doing it very well.”
That audience was stunned. The next week every one of them came back and apologized.
A while back as some Asian boys and girls from a school boarded a street car on which I was riding an old man at the rear shout, “Lousy Chinks! Damn foreigners! Send them back where they came from.” I looked him dead in the eye and said, “HEY! YOU!” He snarled, “WHAT?!” I said, “In this country, unless our ancestors wore feathers, we are ALL FOREIGNERS. Now shut up.”
He was silenced. Those kids who were in tears at once began to laugh as did everyone else.
As I said, I had great teachers in Judith Merril and Jane Jacobs from whom I learned the importance of hearing the people who choose to stay silent say, “Enough already.”
There is a poem by Anna Akhmatova called TWENTY-FIRST. NIGHT. MONDAY.
Twenty-first. Night. Monday.
Silhouette of the capitol in darkness.
Some good-for-nothing — who knows why–
made up the tale that love exists on earth.
People believe it, maybe from laziness
or boredom, and live accordingly:
they wait eagerly for meetings, fear parting,
and when they sing, they sing about love.
But the secret reveals itself to some,
and on them silence settles down…
I found this out by accident
and now it seems I’m sick all the time.
*********
It was a cold night in Moscow when she wrote that. Thing is she is right. Love does not exist on earth. It is something we have to create and which we have to give without asking for in return.
America (and Canada) is a nation of boys. John Taylor Gatto and others have shown how the purpose of our education system is not to create adults but to keep us in a prolonged childhood.
In AGAINST SCHOOL he writes, “First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don’t let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a preteen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there’s no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.” http://www.wesjones.com/gatto1.htm
If you don’t think it important to speak up against this, well, you are entitled to your uninformed opinion but you are wrong.
The past is something we can do nothing about. Today we build for tomorrow.
“There goes Reg,” said a fellow student when a teacher asked me a question in high school. The teacher roared, “YOU BE QUIET! HE IS THE ONLY PERSON IN THIS SCHOOL WHO IS THINKING.”
I am not the only person thinking on this site. I am, however, one of the few who does not mind pissing you off with the truth. Hell, I have given refunds to full audiences when told, “Shut up or give us our money back.”
January 7 at 7:28am • Like
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Reg Hartt http://www.dailymotion.com/…/x2izb0_tin-pan-alley-cats…
Tin Pan Alley Cats-Commentary
commentary on “Tin Pan Alley Cats”
dailymotion.com|By MatthewHunter
January 7 at 7:45am • Like • Remove Preview
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Reg Hartt In the commentary there are a couple of mistakes. BY THE LIGHT OF THE sILVERY MOON goes back past the 1940s. More importantly television broadcasters did not ask Warners not to send out these cartoons. Ted Turner asked Bill Cosby to look at the cartoons. It was Bill Cosby who chose the “censored eleven.”
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censored_Eleven)
Censored Eleven – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The “Censored Eleven” is a group of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons that were withheld from syndication by United Artists (UA) in 1968. UA owned the distribution rights to the Associated Artists Productions library at that time, and decided to pull these eleven cartoons from broadcast beca…
en.wikipedia.org
January 7 at 7:56am • Like • Remove Preview
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Jonathan Gies William: Jeremy’s teacher is being held up as a point of comparison with the caricatures in Tin Pan Alley Cats and elsewhere, the intent being to present them as being basically equal.
I shan’t comment further.
January 7 at 6:28pm • Edited • Like
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Ted Herrmann Interesting discussion. I’m actually pro-censorship on this issue. Other than us seventeen collectors, the main audience for these cartoons is children. As the song says, “you’ve got to be carefully taught,” and cartoons like these teach children very carefully indeed.
January 7 at 11:23pm • Like
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Jonathan Gies That can be murky, though. For instance, some of the minstrel or golliwog-ish caricatures I saw as a kid in these cartoons went straight over my head. It never occurred to me that they were supposed to be people of the persuasion I knew as “black.” Not only were they physically caricatured in a way that didn’t reflect any cultural norms seen anywhere else by that time, the Fetchit-esque, country-talkin’ servile figure was a completely dead stereotype by then, irrelevant to any real life context that a little kid of any color in the late ’80s would ever have internalized. So in my opinion the argument that little kids would see the cartoons and be negatively influenced by them isn’t quite so cut and dried.
Which is emphatically not the same thing as saying “Ehhh, let ‘em all run uncensored in all time slots!”
“Other than us seventeen collectors, the main audience for these cartoons is children.”
Hmmm. Their creators never thought so…
January 8 at 9:20am • Edited • Like • 1
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Reg Hartt Thomas Bowdler(1754 – 1825) re-published an adapted works of Shakespeare to cater for women and children of his time. Bowdler’s edition, stripped of obscenities and blasphemies, was published as The Family Shakespeare (1807). This process of expurgation, especially in regard to published works, became known as bowdlerisation. To bowdlerize a work of literature is to castrate it. In France Edmund Ducis did the same. This prompted the author of THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO and THE THREE MUSKETEERS, Alexandre Duma, to write, “In Rome until Pope Gregory forbade it, doctors had a sign over their doors that said that for a small fee and a twist of the wrist young men could be made perfect for the Papal choir. As those doctors perfected those boys so Ducis and Bowdler have perfected Shakespeare. The minute the kids are brought into the picture and I am told things have to be censored to protect them I know I am dealing with particularly stupid people cut from the same cloth as Bowdler and Ducis. You might argue these films are in poor taste but as both Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso said, “It is good taste not bad taste which is the enemy.” I am with them. By the way, it is the Bowdlerized texts of Shakespeare which are the ones studied in schools which is another of the many reasons one should stay as far away from the classroom as possible.
January 8 at 10:05am • Like
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Reg Hartt “Jeremy’s teacher is being held up as a point of comparison with the caricatures in Tin Pan Alley Cats and elsewhere, the intent being to present them as being basically equal. I shan’t comment further.” As always,you miss the point. In 1943 Clampett was following in a popular tradition as to how Brits, the Irish, Italians, the French, Jews, Russians, and many more including Blacks were depicted in newspaper comic strips, on theater stages and in the movies. Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman, the men behind ZITS, follow in no such tradition yet continue the stereotype which passes unnoticed by all.
January 9 at 12:17pm • Like
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William Cairns I’m sorry, I fail to see what stereotype the Zits comic strip pictured is continuing. That all african americans are teachers? It could be passing by unnoticed by all because there is nothing there to notice.
January 9 at 12:22pm • Edited • Like
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Jonathan Gies It’s about the teacher’s lips.
This overlooks two important things. Full lips are not an either/or thing. It’s perfectly possible to depict full lips without them evoking golliwog imagery, and it’s done all the time.
Also, Rick Borgman tends to give some characters prominent lips anyway. The teachers mouth looks a lot like Jeremy’s mom’s.
January 9 at 12:28pm • Edited • Like
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William Cairns I mean, seriously, comparing that Zits comic strip pictured to the caricatures of black people that appeared in the media of 1943 is so off base that I don’t even know where to begin.
January 9 at 12:25pm • Like
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William Cairns Oh geez…thanks Jonathan Gies. I stand by what I said….a ridiculous comparison.
January 9 at 12:26pm • Like
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Jonathan Gies [facepalm] Whoops, I called him “Rick Borgman.” It’s Jim Borgman. Schmuck. X)
January 9 at 12:38pm • Like
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Jonathan Gies I got him muddled with Jerry Scott’s other main collaborator, Rick KIRKman, who draws “Baby Blues.”
January 9 at 12:40pm • Like
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Reg Hartt Aside from honoring the artists who were murdered the piece on COONSKIN and the deliberate refusal to see value in it IS relevant to this. The teacher was drawn for the sake of humor. Nothing wrong with that. Ralph Bakshi has pointed out the strength of vulgarity to censored children’s storybook illustration: http://www.cartoonbrew.com/…/6-stories-of-cartoonists…
6 Stories of Cartoonists Who Stood Against Tyranny
These cartoonists stood up against intimidation and…
cartoonbrew.com
January 9 at 12:52pm • Like • Remove Preview
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Jonathan Gies Reg, did anybody in this thread exercise “deliberate refusal to see the value” in Coonskin? I sure didn’t see anyone do that.
January 9 at 12:54pm • Like • 1
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Jonathan Gies By the way I would like to encourage you to post that link on the top of the page as it’s a good read, but it’s actually an unspoken rule here that the site in question can’t be linked to.
January 9 at 1:00pm • Edited • Like
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Reg Hartt Ralph Bakshi: “The art of cartooning is vulgarity. The only reason for cartooning to exist is to be on the edge. If you only take apart what they allow you to take apart, you’re Disney. Cartooning is a low-class, for-the-public art, just like graffiti art and rap music. Vulgar but believable, that’s the line I kept walking.” That vulgarity Bakshi talks about infuses every frame of COAL BLACK AND DE SEBBEN DWARFS and TIN PAN ALLEY CATS. We can argue until the end of time. You’ve taken your position. I stand by mine. These films are not racist in the smallest degree nor is there anything minstrel showish about them and, if there were, that would not be a fault. These films were made by working class men and women. The motion picture industry was built by working class men and women. While they were doing it the academics in the colleges, schools and universities were sniffing their noses in the air. They were on tight schedules that left no room for reflection. They worked for men like Leon Schlesinger whose motto was, “I don’t want quality and I don’t want it in the worst way.” Well, in spite of himself, he got quality, he got brilliance, he got originality and he got genius because these people low paid as they were loved what they were doing and could not help themselves. Vitriolic labels like racist as much as all the other ones inspire volatile reactions just as throwing gasoline on a fire does. No one walked out of COAL BLACK, TIN PAN ALLEY CATS, GOLDILOCKS AND THE THREE BEARS, CLEAN PASTURES or ALL THIS AND RABBIT STEW hating. They walked out happy to have seen such damn good animated cartoons. I have always been proud to turn people on to these films. I will always be proud to share them. Keeping them from official release has not kept them unseen. They seem to be out there everywhere in crappy copies. My copies do full justice to the originals. Warners ought not to ashamed of these films but proud. Nothing produced at Disney or elsewhere comes anywhere near them as vibrant expressions of popular culture. This is a useless conflict. It has convinced me of one thing, though. It is time for me to dust off my prints and give people a chance to judge for themselves. The point in linking COONSKIN to this is that Bakshi created a brilliant film that was robbed of a proper release by hysteria. He deserved and de