I’m referring to the scene where Jim and Linda perform in blackface in order to elude discovery by Ted.
Thoughts?
It was definitely there last year. I remember it clearly, because my mom purchased a bunch of movies for us to watch on Christmas–including Holiday Inn, which I had never seen before. My jaw dropped when I saw that scene. A couple of days later, flipping channels, what did I hear but, “Abraham!”
I was very surprised to see that they still showed that scene on TV.
It has been removed in a number of versions. Don’t blame AMC.
After looking at that link, maybe I caught the TCM version last year. Oops.
Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing. 
Now I’m thinking I better buy the DVD!
Fixed the link. You didn’t close the parentheses around the word “film” inside the tag.
We recently bought the original Popeye cartoons, which came with a disclaimer (I’m paraphrasing), something like, “These cartoons contain stereotypes which were wrong then and are wrong now. However, to pretend they didn’t exist would be to deny the history of mistreatment, and fail to learn from the past.” Their wording was much better, but that was the gist. I thought that was the right way to handle it.
Changing artifacts of the past that don’t reflect popular current thinking seems wrong to me.
Disney has been doing the same thing with their release of a lot of the classic cartoon shorts.
Except Song of the South:
Which is why I included the caveat “shorts.”
OK, but Disney has released parts (animated parts) of the movie, which kinda makes it into shorts. Don’t know if they include the disclaimer, but if they edit it carefully, they may not have to.
Well, no, it doesn’t really. So, let me make it a bit clearer.
Disney has been doing the same thing with their release of a lot of the classic cartoon shorts *which they have not done with the feature films *(i.e. Song of the South, Fantasia, etc.)
Probably not his fault. This happened to me when I simply copied the URL from the box and pasted it – and i made sure that I copied the entire URL. Some systems seem to want to “correct” things.
I bought the DVD for the first time a month ago and the black face scene wasn’t in there. I had never seen the movie before so I didn’t know anything was missing.
I don’t understand why people feel the urge to cover up the past I think it’s important to see where we came from other wise a lot of things that happened in that context don’t make sense. I also worry about classic westerns disappearing due to their insensitivity to the Indians since some of them can’t be edited to make sense with out it.
I can see why they do it, as long as you can buy the unedited DVD I don’t see a problem with it.
It’s the same old thing. I recall a “Leave It To Beaver” episode where June fretts about the book “Tom Sawyer,” because he among other things, “cusses.”
Ward handles this nicely by explaining to Beaver and Wally that cussing and doing things he did were just “part of being a boy, in Tom’s day.” He says “There was nothing mean or malicious about it and that times change.” Then Ward says that since times have changed, while it’s OK to enjoy the book the boys shouldn’t try to go around doing what Tom did or acting like he did.
Wally and Beaver agree and say “If you did that today you’d be called a delinquent.”
Which is ironic since now it’s “cool” to have gone to jail and be a delinquent.
This disclaimer appears on many of Warner Bros.'s cartoon collections- the first couple they did featured a statement from Whoopi Goldberg instead. The exact wording is:
I agree in that this is the best way to deal with things like that.
I hadn’t seen Holiday Inn in decades, and bought it on DVD a couple of years ago. I’d forgotten all about the blackface scene, and found it very uncomfortable to watch. That said, it does advance the plot a bit, and I think a disclaimer would serve better than cutting the scene altogether.
I just watched this movie on AMC last night. They showed the scene where Bing is painting her face in black… and then cut to *after *the show! It didn’t occur to me at the time that a scene was removed, but it makes sense…TRM