So I’m watching Popeye cartoons on MeTV, and the network puts on a long-winded disclaimer in tiny writing about ethnic portrayals in the past, and how wrong they were, both then and now, and how showing this cartoon in no way reflects the opinions of the network or indeed Warner Brothers, and please remember that to edit these offensive stereotypes, instead of showing them in their entirety is an attempt to sanitize history, and blah blah blah…
All this to show a cartoon with an Eskimo…whoops, I mean an indigenous person. Now normally, I know I should specify whether this indigenous character was Tlingit, Athabascan, or possibly Yupik, but the character in question only appears for a five second gag, and I really couldn’t tell for sure.
I wouldn’t have commented at all on this fulsome apology of a disclaimer. In fact, I understand and even agree with its intent.
But in the very next cartoon they ran, entitled “Bridge Ahoy”, Bluto punches a bridge Popeye is building and the structure collapses in an eerily similar way as the one in Baltimore. It was so uncanny how the animation resembled the disaster footage that I was cringing.
And MeTV, who quails at the thought of presenting ethnic stereotypes, puts on a cartoon entitled "“Bridge Ahoy” without checking if it has a bridge collapse shown for laughs.
Why, next you’ll ask for warnings about opening spinach cans or standing under anvils, or disclaimers about how coyotes usually can’t mail-order hardware. And they can’t go through the catalog every time there is a trainwreck or logging accident or mouse infestation./s
MeTV is just an automated feed to a bunch of subscriber stations and I would be very surprised if individual episodes of any episode are reviewed more than once. They are not going to blow their time and budget scanning everything they’ve got every time something happens in the news.
The local public library put the following on its website: “Looking for answers after the devastating Key Bridge collapse? Learn about bridges!” The first item? A DVD for children called “How Do Bridges Not Fall Down?”
I dunno, I kind of appreciate the effort. We’ve been rewatching some 60’s to 70’s era TV shows, and last night I beheld the spectacle of Leonard Nimoy in yellowface on Mission: Impossible. A warning might have taken some of the shock out of it.
Let me say for the record that I don’t object to disclaimers about stereotypes in general. It just seemed to me a tad ridiculous to stick warning signs all over a five second innocuous portrayal of an indigenous trader, and then, knowingly or not, show a bridge collapse played for laughs after a national tragedy.
I mean, even for an automatic feed of a network, any sentient human being at the controls of that feed might spot a cartoon entitled “Bridge Ahoy” and think for a moment, “Whoa, this might not be appropriate considering the recent news.”
This just makes me think that their disclaimers aren’t very heartfelt either.
Sometime recently they went through the old cartoons and either stopped showing ones that are now seen as offensive or added the disclaimer. (And some of the old ones had really offensive portrayals of various nationalities and ethnicities.) They’re not reviewing all of them as they air to see if the content might be offensive given recent events.
I would suspect that that show, and the particular cartoons, were selected days, if not weeks or months, in advance. It would certainly have been possible to go back and review it in light of recent events, but my guess would be that their “offensive content” reviews are more about stereotypical portrayals that have not aged well (and have likely been done well ahead of time), rather than an at-the-moment review in light of current events and possible triggers.
At least on Star Trek, they didn’t try to give his eyelids epicanthal folds and then pretend he looked Japanese enough to blend in with a group of actual Japanese people.
Quick, we need to slap a disclaimer on every film in which the Golden Gate Bridge is destroyed. That would be Superman (1978), Pacific Rim, The Core, It Came from Beneath the Sea, Godzilla (2014), San Andreas, X-Men: The Last Stand, probably a few dozen more. Better just put a disclaimer on every movie, just to be safe.
Dale Earnhardt died during a race on a Sunday afternoon. On Monday morning I walked into a Wal-Mart and at the entrance there was a floor stack of Dale Earnhardt child safety seats.
I’m not easily offended but that one I thought was offensive.
