When I was in Cambridge I watched some cartoons with my friend’s grandchildren, and I was struck at how anodyne they were. Nothing dark happened, everything was wonderful and happy (and of course diverse), and there wasn’t anything I thought the least bit funny. Nevertheless, the kids were engaged. I wonder if that’s because all the cartoons that are on t.v. these days. Now think of Bugs Bunny, the Roadrunner, and Tom & Jerry, which had many moments that weren’t sweetness and light.
In fact, when some of these cartoons (masterpieces of the genre: remember “Acme”?) are shown today, they censor them. Granted, some feed into racist stereotypes, and are best seen by adults who can put them in context of the time, but others show violence (tail severing, spanking hammer blows, etc.), and other bad stuff like smoking, aggression, and even Tom painted up like HITLER. But of course Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner had tons of violence. Here’s a 20-minute narrated video of all the Tom & Jerry scenes that have been banned or censored.
The YouTube notes:
Tom and Jerry is a beloved cartoon series that originally ran from 1940 – 1957. And has since become a timeless classic over the years. But since it’s original airing, the series has actually undergone some major censoring, some resulting in a few scenes being cut, whilst others resorting to the banning of entire episodes.
Skip the first 2 minutes and 45 second, as it’s a big ad for VPN.
“but others show violence (tail severing, spanking hammer blows, etc.), and other bad stuff like smoking, aggression, and even Tom painted up like HITLER.”
How’s that foe a twiggew wawning, you siwwy wabbit?
:o)
“(Modern) cartoons […] how anodyne they were. Nothing dark happened, everything was wonderful and happy (and of course diverse), and there wasn’t anything I thought the least bit funny. ”
I’m more and more convinced that this exact impression is the result of Social Emotional Learning, perhaps coupled to Sustainable Development Goals at the UN.
The students are data mined at school (see the “Psychodata” paper), then the TV / movie / video game studios generate programming to plug into or reinforce that data.
This is so strange and funny. My two grandchildren are here for the holidays and we are watching the same cartoons and discussing the exact same thing! Also, btw, the original Tom and Jerry cartoons are on Max (previously known as HBO) uncut I think. The kids love T&J and Roadrunner and ask for them and laughing at the craziness. They say “it’s just a cartoon!”
The ones from the late 40’s have a lot of references to wartime images with the guns, airplanes, tanks and navy tattoos (anchors) on the big strong dogs and cats.
But not a swallow flying at the base of the thumb?
Or is that a Royal/ Merchant Navy code?
Original Road Runner cartoons are available on YouTube. I watched them with all my grandchildren and it did them no harm. They were all bright enough to understand cartoon violence is not real violence. Plus Road Runner cartoons teach valuable lessons about best laid plans, humility and perseverance and even quantum physics — they always especially enjoyed the moments when coyote was suspended in mid-air but did not fall until he realized it. There is a profound truth in those depictions of coyote simultaneously falling and not falling: see https://journals.unilj.si/elope/article/download/7850/8205/18236 Children recognize themselves in the coyote, always chasing and trying, and the cartoons offer the gift of self-effacing laughter in reaction to life’s unfairness and indignities.
I was just talking to my sister about this over the weekend. We watched all these cartoons and more when we were growing up, and I don’t think we were harmed. We knew what was right and wrong in the cartoons (as we did when we watched “All in the Family”). They were funny. Except for Woody Woodpecker, who was just an asshole. Thanks to Tom and Jerry I have an abiding love for Lizst’s “Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2.” My best friends’ kids grew up on them as well, and don’t seemed to have been turned into racist, violent criminals. I remember when Disney released “Walt Disney Treasures” series about twenty years ago(!), which included in its compilations the wartime cartoons. These included Donald in the classic, Oscar-winning “Der Fuehrer’s Face” (featuring the song of the same name). By that time, though, the pecksniffs were already around, and to watch those cartoons, you have to go to a special place on the DVD, and have Leonard Maltin place them in context. I also remember (my mom telling me) that when I was very young she came into the family room and there was all this fighting on the TV. With concern she asked what I was watching. It was the news.
Yeah, comedy is different today. I can see changing these for modern sensibilities—particularly for children who might be watching them without parental supervision and explanation—but I also hope that the historically accurate originals remain available.
Your friends’ grandchildren could have done worse – the popular Paw Patrol cartoon show recently introduced a non-binary character.
“Disney Afternoon”, a collection of amazing animated series made in the mid/late 80s to early/mid 90s were full of violence, sexual inuendo, minced oaths, implied unpleasantness’ and fairly serious drama. Heck there was straight up murder and terrorism!
But boy were they often serious and dramatic, with antiheroes and the harshness of life.
I wonder if there is a long term symmetry to this pecksniffian trend, in that what is considered shocking in these and many other older cartoons would have shocked genteel viewers in, say, the 1800s if they had the technology.
They better not start censoring Rocky and Bulwinkle!
If you are concerned, get them on physical media.
If you don’t have your copy on physical media, you don’t have a copy in any meaningful sense.
I didn’t note the names involved (some company I don’t have dealings with, turning off access to some TV or movie series I’ve never been attracted to watching), but another large tranche of “media owners” had a big pile of access turned off in the last few days. It’s a type of story that recurs on a monthly, if not weekly, basis.
Whoever Rocky & Bullwinkle are, I’d be astonished if their censorship hadn’t started decades ago.
Say it ain’t so, Aidan!
Which way? I don’t think they’ve ever been on the tube here – which gives zero incentive to try tracking them down to some online source. Are we talking about the film, the video game, or the cartoon I infer from the context? From Wiki,
Which rings no bells whatsoever. But since it was produced through much of the 50s, it’s almost certainly raddled with the racism and rabid right-wing speechifying so common in US cartoons of the era. So if it is still broadcast, I’d expect it to have been retconned into sweetness and light long since.
How many appearances per episode does the MacCarthy-a-like character make?
BTW, both the “email on reply” and “edit” functions are working again – so Jerry’s tech dude done good.
It was one of the greatest cartoon series ever. The best. Clever. Erudite. It assumed you were smart and educated.
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For “GBJames” : your description may be correct. But TTBOMK. it has never been broadcast here (UK). Do you have a useful link, or have the copyright-holders won?
“it’s almost certainly raddled with the racism and rabid right-wing speechifying so common in US cartoons of the era”
Have you ever watched any cartoons of that era? Everything and everyone was stereotyped back than. Including all the white characters. They made fun of everybody, thats what made them funny.
I don’t mind Roadrunner. Wiley Coyote falls prey to his own foibles. Bugs Bunny is fine most of the time as well.
Tom & Jerry though… it rubs me the wrong way in terms of conditioning kids to laugh at Jerry inflicting pain and injury on Tom. The hyperbole of Itchy and Scratchy on the Simpsons isn’t too far off here.
It leads right into physical comedy where the audience laughs at the painful incidents that happen to characters, which I detest.
I remember being moderately surprised when the technical term “Acme” came into my life, via palaeontology, when I’d only ever heard it used as Wiley’s IED (Inadvisable Equipment Delivery) people.
I wonder how Amazon would like being described as a latter-day “Acme”. Probably not at all. Good reason to adopt it.
So the right wingers worry that a cartoon will turn their kid gay and the left wingers worry that a cartoon will turn their kid into a Klansman. Neither are ever correct but one should never let a 100% failure rate slow one down.
No kid is gonna try stuff they see on Tom and Jerry for real.
Those actions scenes are full ob fictional stuff.
While sexuality is a real thing that children might try out. You are comparing apples to oranges.
We have a huge collection of cartoons and films on digital media, at least the good ones.
The reflexive argument is that we watched these as young kids, and they never did us any harm, but the woke would likely reply that the cartoons are probably what made us fascists.
Not that they waste much time engaging in reasoned discussion about this, or anything else.
My conclusion is that they do not really care about any of this. It is the process of forcing others to comply with their demands that they crave.
As to things that should not be banned or censored, I have a nice Blu-ray copy of Song of the South, which is still available in Japan, at least.
+1
Just yesterday I was thinking about “retconning” (or “ret-conning”) – the art of re-writing a piece of fiction retroactively so that it has better continuity with other parts of the fiction – episodes in a series, or changing the groundwork so that the dead character can reappear in the next series. Star Trek and the time-travelling Mr Spock, I’m looking at you!
Anyway, my bit of interest in retconning was due to an SF story originally (emphasis important) written in the late 1940 or early 1950s, which described a “meltdown” in a nuclear power plant. At least, my copy, printed in the mid-1990s, with an Author’s Prologue about the machinations at his publishers in the late 1970s~80s used the word “meltdown”. Evidently, the author had retconned the word “meltdown” into describing what had originally been a nuclear (civil) power plant explosion. After Three Mile Island, his readership had a word, “meltdown” which his early-50s SF fan audience didn’t have.
Damned annoying thing, retconning. By the time the author submits their revised copy to the publisher, that should be it, IMHO. (Same for film-makers, producing a “Directors Cut” 20 years after the prints went to the mass-copying lab for the theatrical release. But I’ll grant them a bit more slack due to having a lot more corporate irons sticking their noses into the pudding.)
Anyway, this retconning of media seems to me to be an attempt to lie to future generations that things in “our” society (as much as people can share the exact same society as their grandchildren) were as hunky-dory in the 1950s as they are (will be?) in the enlightened 2020s and beyond. Which is a flat-out lie.
Is lying an accepted part of pedagogy these generations? It certainly wasn’t in my youth, but hearing stories like this one makes me think that perhaps the arbiters of social mores today think it is. Or maybe, they’re lying to themselves.
I bet Cicero, Horace, or Suetonius had some pithy Latin one-liners about retconning in their “history” books. Virgil retconning the origin of the Roman Republic ; Caesar live-retconning his genocides in Gaul ; just about every word of the official history of the Imperial family. Hell, infamous self-proclaimed historian Churchill made it a central plank of his posterity intentions by planning to write those histories himself.
I remember back in the 60s when old Three Stooges films became censored for their eye poking behavior. Apparently kids were hurting each other. That make sense…I mean the censorship.
My Dad cured me of imitating that sort of thing with a blindfold.
No censorship required.
Perhaps the coddling of the American mind has impetus with parents who didn’t understand the difference between animation and reality. Or they bought in to the pseudo-psychology that kids seeing too much violence turn into deviants. Or perhaps it’s sans-TV parents who haven’t got a clue; not enough of those I suppose. It doesn’t make sense to me. Maybe “vintage animation” (which wasn’t necessarily targeting kids) stopped airing because it stopped making money…that’s the Occam’s Razor theory. New models superseded, directly targeting kids (and their parents) and they were all “nice.” Is Sponge Bob violent-ish? I know that was HUGE, don’t know if it still is. I always thought of it as “stony.” Either way, I was born in ’69 and enjoyed all the “violent” cartoons…and later, enjoyed The Simpsons, Ren and Stimpy, Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill et. al. I still enjoy that type of animation, plus Ghibli and on and on.
I could have cut this comment down to this: Censoring these classic cartoons is absurd. They have purpose and meaning and will not warp a single human mind.
I still think “Itchy & Scratchy” should have their own, prime time, show. It’s not as if any potential investor doesn’t have plenty of market research to (I assume) back up their investment choice.
My media pile includes the part-animated “Alita Battle-Angel”, the animated version of “Ghost In The Shell” – and they’re just the recent, adult-targetted animations I’ve seen recently.
Oh, I binge-watched 20 hours of “Valarian & Laureline” recently too. What was that thing about animation being intended for children? Or is that an American idea?
Oh, I forgot “Rick ‘n’ Morty”. And “Teenage Euthanasia”. I’m pretty sure they’re both aimed at the American adult market.
I agree about “Itchy & Scratchy” great stuff! “Rick ‘n’ Morty” is great too. I haven’t heard of “Valarian & Laureling” I’ll check it out. And there are some great adult animation series on Netflix: “Scavengers Reign” and “Love Death + Robots” come to mind.
Valerian and Laurelin[b]e[/b] She’s the sexy, brainy part of the duet. Valerian is the idiot-with-muscles. Obviously, Holy-wood can’t handle such contra-concepts.
Even worse – she doesn’t die for her disagreement with deistic plans. Burn the heretic!
When I was a child in the 70’s watching these cartoons for the first time, there was a big fuss about the violence in Tom and Jerry cartoons (not the racial stereotypes though). I remember being quite irritated because they were cartoons. I knew they weren’t real. I knew that hitting a cat in the face with a flat iron wouldn’t make its face iron shaped, nor would the cat recover from the experience.
Being an older person, I remember when cartoons were cartoons. Nothing wrong with trying to throw in a little education with cartoons, but don’t get rid of the humor . I remember all the hoopla about all the violence in cartoons. Now that they have been scrubbed clean supposedly, violence is at all time highs. Obviously cleaning cartoons was no help.
By the way, I sat and watched Frozen with my 3 yr. old granddaughter. You talk about gore and violence in a animated feature for kids. I never saw anything like it in Tom and Jerry, the Roadrunner, etc. I can’t believe it was created for kids. It should be R rated for the gore.