You can also see the World Trade Center under construction in Loving (1970), The French Connection (1971), and Godspell (1973).
There were two versions of this episode, for a reason I forget why. They explain it on the DVD. One version ends with Bart giving a longer speech, and ends seriously, without a gag. The othe version (the one you remember) ends with a single sentence from Bart, and the final line is from Homer: “I’m glad you stood up for yourself, son. But remember, most lynch mobs aren’t this nice.”
[QUOTE=control-z]
In addition Sanford & Son, there was an episode of Good Times in which James tells a patronizing white deb who’s come to ask Thelma to pledge to be a (token black) member of her sorority that she better be careful going back to her car “cause they’s n___s here!”
On an episode of The Jeffersons, George pays a ridiculous amount of money for a watch as a gift for Lionel and an exasperated Louise says “N___r please!”
It was used on several Archie Bunker episodes, but a lot more seriously. In one Archie (locked with Mike in a storage room) relates how a black kid beat him up because he said Archie called him the word.
Mike: Did you call him that?
Archie: Yeah…
It then goes into Archie’s childhood and how he actually liked the kid, but his old man used the word and his old man was always right. (It’s also an episode in which it’s learned, for the first time [in about the 5th or 7th season] that Archie was a victim of physical and emotional child abuse, but worshiped his father.)
Archie also used the words spade, fag, spic, wop, Hebe and several other slurs, always in context. By the end of the series (or actually into the next series) Archie punches a man who calls his housekeeper the same word.
All of the above shows were Norman Lear shows, incidentally. All of the shows with black main characters got huge laughs when they used the word, though the N word wasn’t used for laughs on Archie. (The other slurs were.)
There was also an episode of the shortlived and little remembered series Carter Country in which the black NYC policeman who moves to a small Georgia town wakes up to the sound of spray paint and finds the word painted on his door. It turns out to have been the young son of Jasper, the racist older cop he works with, who doesn’t understand why his son did such a thing. (When the policeman, Baker, refused to paint over the word Jasper cries out in exasperation “Damn it Baker we all know you’re there! You don’t have ta advertise!”- Twenty+ years later the first episode of Queer as Folk featured the main character, Brian, driving his teenaged boyfriend to school in a vandalized Jeep with the word FAG! painted on the side and an almost identical comment was made. I wonder if it was (perhaps subsconscious) plagiarism.)
But I’m talkin’ 'bout Shaft.
I can specifically recall one additional one, which is somewhat notable as a relatively rare incidence of a white person using the word: in one episode of The Jeffersons, George goes to a CPR class. After he (I’m pretty sure it was George, although it may have been someone else in the class) tries out what he’s learned on the CPR dummy, two people in the audience get up and start to leave. The instructor asks why they’re leaving, and one says something to the effect of, “I won’t touch anything that’s been kissed by a nigger.” The guys, as it turned out, were Klan members. Later in the episode, George applies his newly-acquired CPR skills to save the very same guy. As they wheeled him to the ambulance, the guy asks his son, “He saved my life?” “Yes.” “…you should have let me die.”
I tell you, the 1970s had some strong stuff on TV when it came to race relations. Unlike today, it didn’t always end with everyone learning a valuable lesson.
It came from Hollywood features a sequence from some old movie with black people dancing around in heaven with big slices of watermelon. I remember seeing this when I taped the movie off of TV, but I think later they got rid of this sequence. It’s offensive, of course, but since ICFH was a documentary about bad movies, I don’t see why they couldn’t have left it in as an example of what filmmakers used to get away with.
That scene might have come from The Green Pastures (1936), which does play occasionally on TCM, watermelon scene intact.
I remember that one because it was popular down here as for once the racist wasn’t a southerner. Of course it was also an extremely contrived plot (and how many people who would actually say something like that out loud live in high rise luxury buildings on Manhattan?).
There was also an episode of Sanford in which Fred freaked because Lamont was dating Julio’s sister. At one point he asked her something to the effect of “If you just have to date a brother why’d you pick one so dark? Why not start out with a high yella and work your way up?” I wonder if that’s been cut in syndication. (There were several comments about skin tone on the show; in one episode Fred has a white maid who, when he tells her something Bubba said, remarks “He must not be too bright” and Fred responds “Nah… he’s about my color”- today that would be on CNN the next day.)