Really the only mean spirited gag in it, though, is actually directed at the Japanese. There are loads of stereotypes, potentially ugly ones for sure, but for a cartoon that was so bad it can never be officially seen by anybody, it’s pretty tame.
I would’ve thought Check and Doule Check, the one and only Amos and Andy movie. I still doubt you’ll see it on TV. But evidently it’s out on VHS and DVD:
I understand A and A was a truly major revolution in its day, and laid the foundation for a lot of shows and sitcoms since. The Homeymooners and its imitators stiole from it. But I’ve never seen or heard an episode. And evidently this movie (with the two white guys who created the roles playing black guys on the screen, opposite black actors) was a disappointment in its day, and spawned no sequel, despite the show’s popularity.
I’ll have to rent this to see what it’s all about.
I suspect that “Check and Double Check” is in the public domain. As an owner of a copy, I can say that its only value is as a collector’s item. I liked the “Amos ‘n’ Andy” TV series, but the movie (made two decades earlier) just isn’t funny. Well, there is one kinda humorous spot. Kingfish lines up a job for A&A’s taxi service. It’s going to be worth $20, and Kingfish feels he is due a 10% commission. By the time he finishes ciphering his 10%, it amounts to $12.
That’s where I’ve seen it. PBS, to be specific.
Ain’t sayin’ you’re wrong, but exactly what influence was Amos n’ Andy supposed to have on other sitcoms of the era?
I didn’t realize that *Fantasia had ever been censored! What was in the original that isn’t in modern copies?
I’d guess that none of the porn flicks Tracy Lords made before she turned 18 will get much screen time again.
Beadalin, you musta been in the wrong places. we’ve cdiscussed this recently on the Board. Have a look here:
http://www.epier.com/iq.asp?1234676
http://calvincrowe.tripod.com/fantasia/
Walloon – I’m amazed! I’d heard this before, and it’s reported on the IMDB entry (claiming Harryhausen himself as a source – it’s the URL cited in my post) that no copies of Animal World exist.
I’ll have to get a copy – I only know this from th Dell comic and from brief clips.
I always wondered what the “offensive” part of the Fantasia portrayal of the black centaur was. Was it racist to suggest that black women and girls often worked as personal maids for white women? Well, they did. In 1940, the year Fantasia was released, almost 60% of black women in the labor force worked as domestics.
Was it racist to suggest that black girls wore barrettes in their hair? Well, they did and they do. My schoolteacher mother, whose class was mostly black, used to pick up the lost barrettes off the floor at the end of the day and keep them in a jar.
In a recent Disney shareholders meeting, Disney CEO Robert Iger stated that this is no longer the case.
I’ve heard of it and it sounds pretty out-there, but no more than Jakob the Liar or Life is Beautiful. But it was from his “more daring than competent” period, so sitting on it might be for the best,
Hm. One of my favorite movies is John Ford’s Judge Priest, starring Will Rogers and Stepin Fetchit. Something of a buddy movie. I have it on a $1 DVD.
Well we’ll probably never see Todd Browning’s silent film, London After Midnight, as no known copies of it exist. But there is some reconstructed version of it made from production/publicity stills that is available now.
Have to say Lon Channey Sr. make-up in that still gives me the creeps.
Logan: Is there a reconstructed movie? The only thing I’d heard of was a published copy of the script with all the production stills, publicity photos, and supportinmg materials they could scrounge up.
Apparently in 2002 Rick Schmidlin assembled a version with available stills, used a shooting script for the intertitles and added a score by Robert Israel. I haven’t seen it, but I guess he pans across and zooms in and out of the stills to break up the static feeling. It was commissioned by Turner Classic Movies and they aired it. In runs about 47 minutes according to IMDB.
That was part of it, but the “uncensored” version of Fantasia was probably the original version, where the female centaurs were bare breasted, nipples and all. Disney figured they were art, but the Hayes Office thought otherwise.
For racial sensitivity reasons, you’ll never see any of Chuck Jones great “Inki and the Minah Bird” cartoons. It’s not so much that Inki has been lost (while he pretty much acts like a boy playing hunter, though he does look like the standard “African” stereotype of the time), but that people haven’t gotten a chance to see the Minah Bird – one of the most memorable and mysterious characters to ever appear in cartoons.
Not true – Disney, AFAIK, never released a version with bare-breasted centaurs that had nipples*. They did release the version with the “pickaninny” black centaur. She;s the only black centaur they cut out, and out of at least two scenes. (They didn’t cut out the zebra black centaurs, which is a Good Thing. They’re sexy, interesting, imaginative, and not at all offensive. It’s true that they’re serving Bacchus, but all the centaurs are serving Bacchus.
I think that the “pickaninny” centaurette was cut out because 1.) she’s the only centaur shown serving another centaur (those cherubs serve all the centaurs) and 2.) her appearance was wildly different from the other centaurs, including the other black centaurs. It veered awfully close to, if not actually trespassing on, caricature. I’m not surprised they cut it out.
- There are nipples on bare bosoms in the existing print of Fantasia. Every single release has had them – they’re glimpsed fleetingly but unmistakeably on two of the harpies in the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence near the end. The nipples are green, I think – not a wholesome color, unless you’re a green harpy. The moral is that you can’t have nipples on a female character in the Disney universe unless you;re evil. No wonder those Disney villainesses can line up so many henchmen.
While they certainly aren’t ever going to be re-released, there are still thousands of copies of them out there in VHS format and on hard drives.
Movieola, a digital channel in Canada with an audience that consists of me and six kids who are part-time film students and full-time stoners, shows the damnedest old cartoons. I’ve seen *Inki and the Mynah Bird * there, as well as All This and Rabbit Stew and another incredibly racist but beautifully drawn cartoon –Scrub Me Mama With a Boogie Beat .