Coal Black

By catfishrushdie
Posted on: Nov 11th 2008 at 7:41 AM

Replies: 2

I saw your Coal Black article, good points, and I am surprised that the studio won't release it; surprised that they haven't gone the disclaimer route like WarnerHV/Paramount/KFS did with the Popeye packages.
I just got Popeye the Sailor vol III last week. This one features most of the best of Poopdeck Pappy. And we see how Paramount one-upped Disney by using FOUR identical nephews to complete a sentence instead of just three. Also included are Scrap the Japs, You're a Sap Mr Jap, and all or most of the wartime white-suited Popeye pictures produced by most of the same animators after Paramount gave the Fleischers the sack in '42, and changed the studio name. Significantly, as long as Max Fleischer ran the place, Popeye never fought an enemy identified by nation, German or Japanese or anything else. That changed when Paramount took over and they wanted their cartoon studio to be Famous.
Even with the war on, I don't get the sense of meanness directed at the Japanese as I see in all kinds of content (directed against anyone you can name) today. Sure, the creators wanted to humiliate the Japs and make them look stupid and perfidious. But never in a 1930's or 40's cartoon, have I sensed an intent-to-do-harm such as we saw in the recent two-year-plus partisan political season.
Cartoon racial and ethnic stereotypes evolved from the ones used in Vaudeville, making fun of, and having fun in an America filled with a panoply of new immigrant arrivals (and old) which were familiar to US city dwellers across the spectrum, but especially the eastern seaboard centered around New York City, where the film and animation industry established itself prior to moving westward to California.

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Posted by: Small Town Hick

Posted on: 2008-11-11 at 04:44:42 PM

Fortunately, it isn't too hard to get a copy of So White, despite the lockout.
Most SF or comics conventions will have a vendor selling "Banned Cartoons", perhaps by a different name, containing this and other "unreleasable" classics.

Posted by: Don Markstein

Posted on: 2008-11-12 at 06:43:16 AM

Yes, Catfish, unbelievable as it sounds, Warner is still trying to pretend Coal Black doesn't exist, if not wipe it from the face of time (as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, another ridiculous caricature, might put it).

But yes, Small Town, it's fortunate that they're doing so poor a job of it. You can also see one of several copies at YouTube. They're not made from top-notch prints, but you can still see it whenever you like. The Animation Archive has a very good copy, which was famously donated from the collection of John Kricfalusi. (It's from that one that I got my illustration for the article.)

By the way, I watched it yesterday with my going-on-3 granddaughter, Megan, and she loved it. She really responded to the energy.

Animator Milt Gray wrote an article (at michaelbarrier.com) about how he responded to such things as a child growing up in the South, which I read in doing research for the article. I haven't agreed with everything Milt ever said, but he's got a good head on his shoulders.

Among other things, he points that this is not only no more vicious than non-racial cartoon stereotypes of the time -- a good case can be made that if the characters hadn't been colored the way they were, it's scarcely a "racial" caricature at all. Certainly, there's no hint that So White is in any way inferior to anyone else.

He uses The Legend of Sleepy Hollow as an example, and points out that if the characters' skins had been colored differently, it would be even more notorious than Coal Black is today. Ichabod is an ugly, lazy opportunist, and the vicious bully Brom Bones plays on his extreme superstition.

So what does anybody get upset about? That cartoons make fun of black people just like they make fun of everybody else? That cartoonists point out they look different from white people? But -- I thought diversity was supposed to be a good thing.

Quack, Don