Airman:
I gotta nitpick here…“censorship” in its purest form is when the government steps in and requires the editing/suppression of the media or speech. At best, we might call this “self-censorship,” and we might grumble about how extreme political correctness and social pressure have blackmailed CN into pulling the cartoons.
And as an art lover, I hate to see anything altered from its original form. But it ain’t censorship if the government isn’t involved.
A program is being shown. It may not be the same program that you’d like, but then, tell that to fucking George Lucas and his psycho CGI muppet remixes.
It’s not censorship in the sense of some edict preventing you from viewing or creating certain content. The current owners are releasing what they want to release.
An over-abundance of information – most of it false – leads to a need to parse through it all, and maybe ask some questions. Censorship leads to misinformation, causing a child to become completely dependant on the explanations of the parent. And what happens when he doesn’t ask?
In most cases where T.V. gave people an unhealthy prejudice towards others, it was because an alternative viewpoint was never presented. Back in the day, I’m not sure which day in particular, if you saw a cartoon portraying black people in an unflattering way, you would probably come away with a pretty screwed up view of blacks, but only because there weren’t any real black people on television.
That was the censorship of the day, and it’s quite likely that it adversely affected people’s perceptions. How can any of you be so sure that history will view our censorship in a better light?
P.S. Lemme tell you, censorship and The Repo Man gave me a pretty odd view of people who happen to be melon farmers…
Out of curiosity, why are we blaming the “Politically Correct” bogeyman here? Because as I remember it, the scissoring of cartoons began in the early '80s, when Peggy Nolan and other well-minded parents fought against the growing tide of cartoons that were (a) violent, (b) toy-oriented, or © both. Speedy Gonzalez and Tom & Jerry may not have been the first in line, but they were caught in the same overprotective net that snared G. I. Joe, He-Man, and My Little Pony.
And this was all long before “Politically Correct” became the catch-all excuse of the conservative right…
You know what, it still sucks to be a black guy in this country. Keep right on flipping the channel and telling me what to watch.
Wow. I’m stunned. You’re calling racial stereotypes a buzzkill? So sorry to interrupt your halcyon.
Very nice. Don’t tell me what I can and can’t watch. And don’t tell me to go buy the video, because that changes everything; only the wealthy can view these little snippets of time. Or we can see them at the National Archives? What next – register at the Bureau of Social Cleanliness to go view them?
Tom & Jerry and Looney Tunes are both being released uncut on DVD starting in the near future. So the original cartoons will be available in all their violent and racist glory for adults who wish to purchase them. Meanwhile Cartoon Network can continue to run the edited versions to appeal to their intended audience, children.
And if you’re going to complain that you have to [sub]gasp[/sub] spend money while those kids get their cartoons for free, well, I didn’t know you had a right to free entertainment of your choosing. I want to see the old Transformers cartoons. I guess Cartoon Network should run those too! I can’t afford the DVDs. I imagine they might be available at these newfangled things called “video rental stores”, but then I’d have to leave the house. And it would still cost a couple bucks. So… FUCK Cartoon Network for not showing Transformers!!! And The Smurfs too!!!
Oddly enough, it is more “correct” these days to vehemently criticise Political Correctness than it is to support PCness, such is the venom heaped on those who take steps to improve the terms and images we used to describe minority groups.
Even odder, it seems those up in arms against PCness are overwhelming white and middle-aged.
Why is that, do you think?
I’ll tell you why. To people like Airman Doors, PCnes is an inconvenience and it’s unsightly. It is offensive to their memories to alter the good old cartoons of the past. It breaks continuity when people dare to change the presentation of these sacred relics. Worse, it goes against the view “if it was good for me, then it’s good enough for my kids!”
After all, we all turned out just fine and dandy. Right?
OTOH, who gives a fuck how you turned out? Who gives a shit if you’re responsible enough to educate your children as to the racism presented in all WB cartoons? No one does; it is completely irrelevant to the issue, because the fact remains that some unedited cartoons of the past are blantantly offensive to minorities watching them today.
This issue IS NOT: “cartoons don’t influence the worldview of our children anyway, therefore they shouldn’t be edited.”
This issue IS: “minorities and right-thinking people don’t want to see racist shite on their screens.”
Still don’t like it? Dry your tears, princess – CN responds to what its audience wants to see, not your misplaced sense of outrage.
Mr B: your attitude of entitlement is as amusing as it is deluded. No one is “telling you” what you can and can’t watch. Cartoon fucking Network is determining the nature of the content it chooses to broadcast. They don’t owe you anything.
IIRC, “politically incorrect” is a term that technically just means something that doesn’t offend politically driven sensibilities. It was only after conservatives tried to spin it as being an awful part of the liberal’s “nanny-state” agenda that it became synonymous with liberal. Personally, I think the conservative wing is actually more responsible for much of the PC censorship that goes on, but liberals get blamed for it.
Sincerely,
The man who hopes his future child grows up seeing at least one image of a blackface person saying “Fuck, fuck, fuckity, fuck fuck fuck.” And hopes he doesn’t feel too uncomfortable when he has to explain the falsity of stereotypes and the damage they can cause. And what “fuck” means.
I wouldn’t consider myself to be “up-in-arms”, but I do see our current version of political correctness as being just barely on the rational side of completely-fucking-ridiculous. I’m twenty-two years old, and part cherokee. Does that make my view any more or less relevant?
Weird With Words, I think you’d better lay off the glue.
Yes, and they’ll edit Spongebob of its blatant homosexuality because some day it will be, rightly, viewed as objectification. Racial stereotypes are wrong, but it’s awful that cartoons have turned into children’s programming and for mindless entertainment only. It’s Cartoon Network, not “Fuck Your Mushmelon Kids Unless They Buy Our Shit” Network.
The cartoons were broadcast on the networks when I was a kid, and we had four channels. Now we have hundreds of channels, but the only place Tom & Jerry is being shown – good God, a cartoon network – is a channel that blatantly edits its content? Sounds like Revisionist History to me.
Some time in the distant future: “Oooooh, Miller Jr., best not watch A&E right now. What happened at Selma is such a buzzkill.”
Don’t know - Does the suppression of “one little, two little, three little indians…” lyrics while Bugs and/or Granny are shooting indian warriors who are attacking their forts bother you, or does it encourage you?
How about Bugs chalking up a kill, then erasing 1/2 the mark, explaining “Ooops, that was a half-breed!” - cut it, or leave it in?
Even when motivated by inexcusable racism, these shorts still reflected the attitudes of the times, and, sadly, many of those attitudes are still around - do we confront them with the kids, or do we just bury them, and hope the kids never encounter such racism?
Ummmm… whuh?
Maybe it’s just because of all the glue I don’t seem to remember taking, but I’m not sure what your comment is in reference to…
I think I had that video as a child, wasn’t it Daffy Duck picking off those indians?
I guess the answer would be: neither. When it comes right down to it, I don’t think I could possibly be more ambivalent.
When I was a child I didn’t know I was part cherokee, and when I found out, it didn’t change my view of myself or indians one bit. Why? Cuz that’s not who I am. I’m not cherokee, or white, I’m Minnesotan. Due to the fact that I had the “all people are equal, and equally deserving of love” line consistently pounded into my head by my parents and my school, it’s possible I turned out differently than others would have if exposed to the same material as I. I don’t know. But I do know this: that cartoon didn’t leave me with the impression that shooting american aboriginals is okay, Speedy Gonzalez didn’t leave me with the impression that all mexicans are fast as hell, and Droopy didn’t leave me with the impression that all dogs are methadone addicts. YMMV.
Sorry, I just noticed that I passed this important bit by.
I tend to think it’s best to confront children with everything, so that hopefully they’ll know better than to let history repeat itself. An overtly sanitized society will only leave children without any form of intellectual immune system. My dad’s policy with me was: “You can say what you want, you can think what you want, and you can see what you want, you just can’t do what you want.” I think it worked pretty well.
I remember when I was thirteen I was reading Tom Sawyer, and there’s this line where Mark Twain refers to “sweating like an injun.” This made me notice two things at the time: one, that a word used in common parlance can be offensive (not to mention Huckleberry Finn and the complete lack of self-consciousness in using the word “nigger”), sometimes it’s offensive in retrospect, and sometimes during the very era it was used. Second, it made me notice that in all of Mark Twain’s writings, with all of his references to social justice and his strong belief in such, he never mentions the plight of the american aboriginal. I greatly admired Mark Twain, a habit I picked up from my dad, and viewed him to be one of the most egalitarian thinkers of his time. This realization didn’t cause me to lose respect for the man, but rather to think that any man, no matter how progressive, will still find himself in some way limited by the culture he grew up in.
I hope that answers your question, but I’m getting tired and sloppy, and I suspect that it probably didn’t.
Then come and join the Democratic Party. We get our history from original documents, records, research and scholarly texts.
For anyone who thinks it’s wrong to edit cartoons (because we all know cartoons are sacred, Chuck Jones be Thy name), take a glimpse of the tail end of Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled”.
I love cartoons. And as Miller said, it’s a buzzkiller to see some of the images that the old-school cartoons portray. I can’t even bring myself to like Bugs Bunny the character because I know the wascally wabbit has wacist ways. It reminds me of the “olden days”. The olden days weren’t fun times for black people.
I think cutting out suicides is perhaps too much, though.
Those cartoons have always been just mindless entertainment, and Leon Schlesinger would tell you no different.
I don’t know jack about most of these cartoons. But there’s a long history of this sort of thing. For instance, some of the early Hardy Boys books (about which I do know jack) had truly awful and offensive ethnic stereotypes, judging by modern standards…Chinese laundrymen speaking a ridiculous dialect of pidgin English, Pancho Villa stereotypical Mexican banditos, a lazy shiftless African American, etc., etc.
In the sixties, the publisher reissued the first 24 books, leaving out this kind of crap. True, the rewriting was for a number of reasons; references to automats and jalopies were a little, um, dated, the books moved more slowly than sixties kids wanted, and so on. But these offensive passages were part of the reason. They don’t appear in the reworked versions.
And why should they?..You can have action, humor, characterization, plot, without falling back on offensive stereotypes. Writing about a blinking little Chinaman in pigtails who screams “No likee!” was once a cheap-n-easy way of getting a laugh, but it sure as hell doesn’t take any brains or creativity. I’d guess the same is true of having cartoon characters suddenly turn black, or some of the other things brought up here.
By the way, just wondering: are the original cartoons completely unavailable these days, or are there copies floating around eBay, used video stores, etc? I ask because those who really want their Hardy Boys full of demeaning ethnic stereotyping can get their fix at used bookstores, if they so desire…
But you can do those things without rewriting the originals and revising history, simply by writing new stuff. Pretending that what happened didn’t happen dooms future generations to repeat what happened.
“It is luck for rulers that men do not think.” — Adolf Hitler