One of the more intriguing programs at the TCM Festival was a collection of Warner Brothers shorts that were taken out of circulation in 1968 due to negative racial stereotypes, introduced and contextualized by film historian Donald Bogle, who has written several books about the representation of African-Americans in cinema. As a cartoon fan, I was particularly interested in seeing these films which aren’t on DVD and don’t play on television at all, but even though I’m aware of the way these stereotypes played out at the time in live-action, music, art, and literature, I was not really prepared for some of these cartoons. I’m glad to have seen them, but for once in my life, I’m actually in agreement that most of these should not be shown without appropriate contextualization and that they’re more valuable for historical study than for entertainment. I’ve since discovered that many of them are readily available on YouTube, so I’ll link them for you to watch yourself if you’d like.

A lot of what Bogle said in introduction is pretty close to what you’ll learn from documentaries like Ethnic Notions, a mainstay in classes about race; I watched it with a course I took on the Harlem Renaissance, and it really is an excellent and highly watchable introduction to the portrayals of black stereotypes in popular culture from the mid-1800s through 1950s or so. Most of them stem from the enormously popular minstrel shows of the 19th century, which involved white performers in blackface – these lasted right up into the 1930s, with famous portrayals on film including Al Jolson in the first sound film, The Jazz Singer. Minstrel shows were particularly popular in the north, where there was a lot of curiosity due to the lower black population there – a situation that meant blacks were seen as unfamiliar, other, and both fascinating and potentially threatening. Minstrel shows developed several “types” that were all really intended to take away the potential fear of otherness – the kind old Uncle Tom figure, the nurturing Mammy, the lazy but harmless coon, the highly sexualized younger woman (usually very light-skinned, suggesting mulatto heritage), etc. These four types come up again and again in popular culture, never more exaggerated than they are in the cartoons of the era. One thing to remember is that these cartoons, like most of the films of the time, are not intentionally racist the way such films made today would be – they’re products of pervasive and institutionalized cultural racism. These minstrel show holdover types are essentially the ONLY widespread depictions of African-Americans you’ll find in popular culture at the time, and that’s the real problem here.

Having already seen Ethnic Notions and understanding some of this background, I think I expected to see these offensive stereotypes in this set of cartoons, but I expected to also see cartoons that were worthwhile aside from that. That is, I expected to be able to look with my academically-trained eyes and say “yes, that is an inappropriate depiction of black Americans that is untrue and offensive, but the quality of the animation and the writing, while not enough to overcome the negativity of the stereotypes, still makes the short worth watching.” And that’s true of several of the cartoons, but there is at least one that is essentially nothing BUT the stereotypes – no gags that aren’t racially-based, no particular design or animation quality that is put toward anything but perpetuating stereotypes, and essentially nothing worthwhile at all. Several of the cartoons have entire sections that are like that, even if there are redeeming features here and there. In other cases, the stereotypes distracted from things that actually would’ve been funny otherwise.

There are eleven films altogether that Warner Brothers pulled out of circulation in 1968 (other have been essentially pulled since then, especially a few wartime cartoons with negative Japanese stereotypes, but are not usually considered as part of the Censored Eleven, as the 1968 censored films are known); Bogle showed us eight. Those eight are as follows after the jump, in the order he screened them (mostly chronological, but not quite, so as to keep shorts from the same director together).

Hitting the Trail for Hallelujahland (1931)

This is a really early sound cartoon by Rudolf Ising that struck me as largely inoffensive, but not particularly interesting either, unless you’re interested in early animation history. Which, okay, I sort of am. It’s basically just a couple of characters heading down to a showboat and their misadventures falling off the boat, getting back on, dancing around, that sort of thing. It was pulled because of an Uncle Tom character, the driver of the carriage taking the main characters down to the boat. After dropping them off, there’s a section where he heads back and goes through a cemetery and is terrorized by some ghosts. There are some negatives to the way he’s drawn, but Bogle mentioned to pay attention to the way he reacts in the graveyard, which is scared out of his wits, but I mean…if I were driving through a graveyard and skeletons popped up and started chasing me, I’d be pretty scared out of my wits, too. So yeah, it’s caricatured, but it’s on a par with any other portrayal of black servants in 1930s film. Not that that’s great, but…yeah.

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Sunday Go to Meeting Time (1936)

This Friz Freleng-directed entry is the one that really had my jaw on the floor; it’s honestly a little unfair to lump all the others together in my statement above as depending wholly on racial stereotypes with no redeeming features. If I think back, this is really the only one that I totally didn’t enjoy and thought was pretty much undeserving of, well, existence. The story is basically of a bunch of different black people getting ready and heading out to church. A young couple with enormously exaggerated features jaunt and dance their way down the street (because black people are always happy and always dance everywhere), a mammy figure gets her two little ones ready to go (grabbing a bra off a clothes line to serve as a double bonnet), and a young lazy oaf tries to avoid church and do some gambling and petty theft. He ends up getting knocked out and dreaming about going to hell, which has him back in church as soon as he wakes up. There is NOTHING funny about this cartoon, nothing original, and nothing that doesn’t depend 100% on stereotypes. I recognize that it’s a product of its time and these were prevalent stereotypes at the time, but I can’t help my respect for Freleng (who is my second favorite cartoon director after Chuck Jones) dropping a little after seeing this. None of the others floored me quite as much as this one.

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Clean Pastures (1937)

Another one by Freleng, but this one benefits a little from the inclusion of specific caricatures of specific jazz performers of the time. With people’s time on earth being taken up with gambling and nightclubbing and other vices, St. Peter’s having a tough time keeping the stock up on Pair-O-Dice (the toon’s take on heaven), until a set of jazz angels modeled on Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Cab Calloway, and Jimmie Lunceford tell him he’s got to modernize the message to get people interested. They go down and do their thing and soon Pair-O-Dice is swinging. The drawings are still caricatured (and the initial envoy St. Peter sends down based on perennial character actor Stepit Fetchit is pretty unfunny), but having specific people being caricatured brings a bit more individuality and interest to it.

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Goldilocks and the Jiving Bears (1944)

And yet another one by Freleng. Here, the three bears are jazz musicians who play such hot jazz their instruments literally catch on fire and they leave to take a walk while they cool down, opening the door for Goldilocks to come in and eat the porridge and all that. Goldilocks is a very curvy and sexy young black girl, and when the bears come back it turns into a hot dance party, which the wolf from Red Riding Hood crashes. This one was interesting because honestly, the portrayals of Goldilocks and the wolf are not far off from Cinderella and the wolf in Tex Avery’s Swing Shift Cinderella (and the others he did of that type; there were three or four of them) – a hypersexualized girl and a whistling wolf – except they’re racially coded black. Similarly, the jazz musician bears are drawn as bears, they’re only coded black by accent and slang, not really in the way they’re drawn. I didn’t have time to talk to Bogle about this one, though I would’ve liked to – I’d be interested in reactions to this film from African-Americans in comparison to the Avery Cinderella films and how the racial coding changes the perception.

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The Isle of Pingo Pongo (1938)

One of several travelogue spoofs that Tex Avery did while at Warner Brothers, this one follows a ship through the islands of the South Pacific (the Sandwich Islands, the Canary Islands, the Thousand Islands – with a bottle of salad dressing), ending up at Pingo Pongo, which is inhabited by a group of natives that fit all the normal indigenous peoples stereotypes with gags to go along with it. They eat off plates that are actually embedded in their stretched bottom lip, for example. But Avery plays with the stereotypes a little bit, in that when the narrator tells us the natives are about to do a traditional native song and dance, the song is a hillbilly number straight out of the Ozarks and the dance is an 18th-century style European dance. My question while watching it, though – yes, there’s an element of subverted expectations that’s amusing and shows Avery is a bit cleverer than some of the other filmmakers working at the time, but what the dance sequence mostly suggests is how ridiculous it is for indigenous natives to perform a quadrille. I don’t know, this may be me overthinking it. I will say that most of this short is actually quite enjoyable, the first one of the night I truly enjoyed, simply because Avery is very clever with his sight gags.

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Uncle Tom’s Bungalow (1937)

Tex Avery again, with a version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that, as Bogle put it, manages to make a giant joke out of the entire institution of slavery. Uncle Tom is sold from a “used slave” lot, Simon Legree becomes Simon-Simon (pronounced “See-moan”), a caricature of a silent movie villain, Tospy and Little Eva become best friend moppets, the chase across the ice floes becomes a horse race complete with fast-talking announcer…and on and on. It’s most definitely a reduction and essentially negation of everything Uncle Tom’s Cabin is meant to represent. I have to admit that Avery’s sense of timing and gags actually makes this funny, but only at the expense of the characters, story, and history associated with slavery. This was the only one I couldn’t find on YouTube – there’s one where the guy filming it talks all the way through it (thinking his commentary is funny, obviously, but it isn’t at all), and one where the sound cuts out after 45 seconds, but that’s it.

Tin Pan Alley Cats (1943)

Robert Clampett’s turn to take the reins, with this toon of a Fats Waller-esque cat given the choice between the rollicking Kit Kat Club or the sanctimonious Uncle Tomcat Mission; he chooses the Kit Kat Club and the trumpet player literally sends him out of this world with his skillz and into…Wackyland, from Clampett’s stupendous Porky in Wackyland short from several years earlier. With added Hitler, Stalin, and Japanese parodies. The return to Wackyland pleased me as an animation fan, but aside from that the accents and features are at least as over-exaggerated as in any of the other cartoons, if not more so, and the story is pretty lame.

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Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (1943)

This is the cream of the crop of the entire Censored Eleven, and the one that gets the most support from animation fans who want it released in some form. And with this one, they’re right. This is a quality cartoon on every technical level – it’s Robert Clampett at his best. Clampett is a director that I think sometimes is incredibly innovative and enjoyable, but other times I don’t care for that much – he’s totally on in this cartoon, though. The narrative throughline is great, the animation is really stylized and innovative, the gags are spot on. The frame story has a mammy figure telling a story to a child, who asks for the story of “So White and the Seven Dwarfs”; that story, as Mammy tells it, has So White meeting Prince Chawming, getting kidnapped by Murder Inc. at the behest of her evil stepmother, and seeking out the dwarfs, who are soldiers at the front, all set to rhyming jazz couplets. The transition of the Snow White story into a jazzy WWII setting is perfectly accomplished. It does have the young, sexualized female mulatto character and the exaggeration of accent and animation style that play into the stereotypes, but in this case there’s so much here that’s excellent I think this cartoon should be shown for sure (with appropriate context; it also takes some potshots at the Japanese).

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