When we think of cartoons today, we think of Saturday morning children’s entertainment. We think of images drawn in bright colors, dealing in fanciful concepts, moving at a quick pace. Sometimes they deal with ethical struggles of selfishness. There is a common story arc of the main character indulging him or herself, hurting people around him/her, and ultimately learning a lesson about sharing or togetherness. When people think of cartoons today they don’t think of them as being places to make sweeping statements about race relations, or a place to influence opinion on national enemies, or a place to make jokes about domestic violence.
This is where we cue the film archivist. Dennis Nyback is an archivist who has spent his life collecting films and re-framing them in a critical light. He takes these films and produces shows of them while filling in pertinent cultural and historical details. With Bad Bugs Bunny he has put together a series of cartoons from the golden age of animation that reflect different aspects of censorship.
He was inspired by an article he read in the early 1990′s, in the midst of the political correctness battles, wherein a mother who had trusted Disney Inc. to entertain her child was appalled to see an image of a smoking character in a vintage cartoon. She raised hell, and Disney responded by looking at every scrap of film and editing out anything that could be perceived as offensive. Granted, the cartoon in question may have not been made for children, as many in the past had not. Historically, cartoons were written to make the average person on the street laugh, not specifically children. The jokes reflected the culture, which was now a piece of history. The censorship stirred Dennis Nyback, because it seemed like the wholesale editing of history not for one mother’s sensibilities, but for all of the potentially outraged mothers’ pocketbooks.
He assembled a group of cartoons that had all been censored for varying reasons. Each cartoon was offensive to a different subset of the population, and each being censored at different times since their creation due to shifting cultural sensitivities. Highlights (or lowlights depending on one’s perspective) from the show included a murderous Bugs Bunny in Hare Ribbin who took out a gun a killed the hound dog that had been chasing him. This ending was later changed to the dog committing suicide, which was later censored all together. There was a blatant black face joke and subsequent Cab Calloway impression in Wholly Smoke. There were Arab suicide bomber jokes in the 1940 cartoon Ali-Baba Bound. There was the anti-classic Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs, featuring the Disney Snow white character as a very attractive African American woman living in Harlem.
Sioux Me was a cartoon about Native Americans which delved into about as many “Indian” stereotypes as possible, from the murderous, yet ignorant chief, to a mocked rain dance, and a constant theme of being taken in by con artists and snake oil salesmen. The Japanese Culture fared worse in the WWII propaganda cartoon Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips, where the Japanese people were drawn as slant-eyed, bucktoothed with glasses, and yet again, dumb yet murderous. The apex of the cartoon was Bugs Bunny in disguise as an ice cream salesman, selling chocolate bars with grenades inside to droves of Japanese while verbalizing a torrent of cultural epithets to each customer.
He was her Man was particularly offensive to women, as it was cartoon with jokes based in domestic violence. The cartoon featured a couple, the woman, an apple saleswoman, selling her wares on the street in a thinly veiled allusion to prostitution; her man, her pimp, laying about at home and taking all her money. He leaves her and she chases after him, getting slapped, then comically punched, visually akin to the Bozo the clown bop bag, popping back up for another punch, and then choked nearly to death. Their domestic issues are solved when she becomes the abuser and puts him out on the streets.
Dennis Nyback showed a cartoon entitled Let it Be Me, which was an innocuous cartoon about a rooster singer and philanderer who wooed the hens away from their men with his beguiling charm. There is nothing outlandishly sexist or violent about it. The issue was that rooster singer was an obvious Bing Crosby caricature, and Crosby had his lawyers go after WB. Let it Be Me was censored a year after it was made, which showed the other side of censorship, when those rich enough can decide what should and shouldn’t be censored.
One of the most interesting censored cartoon was Tin Pan Alley Cats made in 1943 and directed by Bob Clampett. The story behind the cartoon was that the director had been asked by an African American woman to produce a cartoon that included only black people, as opposed to a cartoon with black characters interacting with white characters. The cartoon was intended to both reflect the culture and to entertain. Tin Pan Alley Cats follows a cat from his walk on the boardwalk, into town, past the church and into a jazz club. Dancing, drinking, debauchery ensue. He gets thrown up into the air from the music, up and up and up until he finds himself in a new wacky world. It is a frightening place, Dali-esque with the melted pianos on a spare background, the horizon line extending seemingly forever. He runs around disoriented and feeling frightened. This cartoon included a later censored scene of our 1943 ally Stalin kicking a Hitler in the butt repeatedly. He pleads hard, showing real fear and bursts out of the hellish world and runs straight out of the Jazz Club to the Church next door, bangs the drum for the church band as if his soul depended on it.
What is interesting about this cartoon is that it is on the 1968 Censored 11 list of cartoons that Warner Brothers swore would never be taken out of the vault and be seen again. Out of all the cartoons seen that evening, it was probably the least violent, the least sexist, the least meant to cause harm, and made with the best intentions of cultural inclusion. It was even a story of redemption, eschewing Saturday night for Sunday morning. But still, locked away as if it was one of the worst cartoons Warner Brothers had produced, due to the nature of cartoon simply referring to a non-white culture, it becomes a possibly racially offensive cartoon, and then censored.
Bad Bugs Bunny was a fascinating trip through cultural history, each cartoon an artifact of buried and obscured attitudes. History is not always pretty, not always politically correct, but through this archived material, we can see past the sanitization attempts and whitewashing.
To learn more about Dennis Nyback and the variety of shows he produces from archived material,visit his website:
To learn more about censored Warner Brothers films go to:
Nice piece.
I remember some extremely dicey Bugs Bunny (& friends) shows from early Saturday mornings when I was a kid. The violence and racism were not hidden, not thinly disguised and had no hint even of shame. It just was.
Occasionally I have wondered if any of today’s young children will ever see them. Warner came out with Looney Tunes Babies or some such crap, which was such a distilled milk toast version of what the original was, and they boxed away the original Looney Tunes never to be seen again. Well, until last year when they went through and hand picked what they deemed suitable for re-release on dvd. There was a part of me that wanted to rush out and buy it while even THOSE were still available, because we all know it’s only going to get worse. But then the part of me that refused to support them in their hand picked version of the past kicked in and I didn’t.
Anyway, I just wanted to let you know your work was appreciated.