A couple of weeks ago was the Great American Smokeout, which is always the third Thursday of November. It got me thinking about one of my more recent (if you can call it that!) posts on this site, Cancer Cures Smoking. It’s ironic, but while I’m a non-smoker, I’m not crazy about smokers being around me, and I have no sympathy for smokers when it comes to increased taxes, fees, and the like, I see tobacco as part of history. Thus, when well-meaning companies and organizations attempt to do the Politically Correct thing, I see it as an attempt to erase history.
Let me give you an example. Earlier this year, Turner Broadcasting (the same folks that brought you colorized movies) announced they were going to edit a bunch of Hanna-Barbera and MGM cartoons, such as the Flintstones and Tom and Jerry, and remove any scenes that “glamorized” smoking. While i understand the pressure they might be under from various groups, in this instance the decision was prompted by *one* complaint– not hundreds, not thousands.
I disagree with their decision. These cartoons aren’t just episodes and vignettes we watch today, they’re also from and representative of an earlier time in our history. After all, there’s a lot to criticize in these animated offerings beyond smoking. The Tom and Jerry cartoons, while far more mild than their Warner Brothers counterparts, featured cartoon violence. The Flintstones, an animated take-off on the old “Honeymooners” show, shows a lovely domesticated family with decidedly 50’s and early 60’s values and mores, especially regarding women’s roles in the house and in society.
Although I generally agree that TV has a very strong influence on people, especially impressionable young minds, animators, film corporations and television companies can do the “right” thing with anything they make these days (I haven’t watched Saturday morning shows in ages, but the last time I checked, about fifteen to twenty years ago, what was being shown were essentially extended animated commercials for products sold at your local Toys R Us and Target). To whitewash history is to pander to certain segments in our society who aren’t willing to take a rational, reasoned approach to programming (such as perhaps becoming involved in current programming, rather than trying to edit old shows made 40 or more years ago.
Lest you think it’s merely Turner that’s guilty of creative editing, others are to blame too. Disney, for example, edited out Pecos Bill’s cigar in the “Pecos Bill” short, seen in the animated musical anthology of shorts, “Melody Time” (a junior version of “Fantasia,” “Melody Time” and its companion “Make Mine Music” were made in the immediate post-war years in the late 1940s, sort of the doldrums for Disney, before he resurged during the 1950s with “Peter Pan,” “Lady and the Tramp,” and “Sleeping Beauty,” among others). Excuse me, but emasculating a cowboy by taking away his cigar? Sure, Pecos Bill is still enjoyable sans cigar, but it reduces the original work through a form of politically correct censorship. Disney did the same thing in recent years at its flagship amusement park, Disneyland, when they changed the pirates in the Pirates of the Carribean ride to chasing women carrying platters of food, rather than the women themselves. Funny, but it was my understanding that pirates who attacked a seaport in the Spanish Main usually added carousing to the looting and burning. They’re *pirates* you know– bad guys…? Still, with the supersizing going on today, chasing a bunch of food wasn’t entirely out of place, I guess. I’ve heard that as part of the retrofit for the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, they’re going to remove the food and go back to pirates being pirates. Now if they’d just put Pecos Bill’s cigar back…
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I agree with you. This reminds me of 1984 where they were constantly “fixing” history. Kind of like how the ‘new’ Curious George who doesn’t cause as much trouble as the old one.
With the transition to an electronic medium, it’s so much easier to lose pieces of history. For example, there is little history about a particular web page, say, from 1998. In many instances, a web page might be gone, and how can you or anyone else point to it and say that it existed? Well, there’s the Way Back Machine which archives old Internet Web pages.
http://www.archive.org/index.php
it’s a gross way for the government to be further included in choices we make to view entertainment and media. aside from “1984″ I’m also thinking about the sandra bullock and wesley snipes movie “demolition man” with slyvester stallone.
Sara and Kaybee, I agree with you both. I’m all for encouraging health, and downplaying stereotypes, and the like. I just don’t want people, organizations, companies, or governments to start censoring popular culture. We already have a rather secretive government and delays in FOIA requests; we certainly don’t need our popular culture erased. Let it be, warts and all. This is how we’ll best absorb the lessons of the past and apply them to the future. It’s one of the reasons I’m for Disney re-releasing “Song of the South.” If you’re going to remove movies from circulation simply because they’re racist, you could remove “Birth of a Nation,” “Gone With the Wind,” and a host of other films.
Anonymous (such a unique pseudonym, that)– I’ve seen that website before, but thanks for sharing with the rest of us. I’m just disappointed not to see Mr. Peabody or Sherman there, though. It’s a great way to look up old websites, and a reminder that anything we commit to the web in the way of words and pictures probably can never be fully removed. Beware. Be very very ware (apologies to A.A. Milne!).
Its interesting when you grow up and look at the cartoons you enjoyed in the past as a kid and see all of the hidden messages and meanings that adults intentionall put in there in the first place.
I dont think that they should erase or edit these cartoons, but keep them as evidence as to how easily smoking or other behavior was quite common at the time.
Bugs bunny was racist against the Japanese during WWII and Speedy Gonzalez is a really racist cartoon if you just look at it. Not to say about Scooby Doo, the Velma lesbian and closeted gay Fred thing….
I agree, Johan- I *loved* the Warner Brothers cartoons when I was a kid. But now that I’m watching them again as they’re being re-released on video (with none of the extras captioned, of course. Nuts!), I’m still enjoying them, but as you said, picking up on all the double entendres and adult jokes. Occasionally though, things do go over my head, and I suspect that’s true for others as well. (Jokes like “Open the door, Richard!” don’t go over well with anyone under, say 65 or 70 at minimum…)
I think cartoons and movies that are successful in this genre are either timeless stories (Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, etc), or are movies that can appeal to all ages without being overly clever or immediately dating itself. “Shrek” is a great movie, but it will be dated in a sense because of some of the jokes and cultural references. The same is true of “Aladdin,” which is one of my favorite movies from the more recent Disney releases. Overall, great– but 60 years from now, how many people will “get” the Arsenio Hall reference?
David, I think you meant “but 6 years from now, how many people will get” the Arsenio Hall reference?”
Who’s Arsenio Hall? :-D
You gotta laugh at how corporations are scrambling to sanitize kid’s shows while at the same time are bombarding them with contradicting images.
So, Pecos Bill’s cigar is a no-no… but it’s OK for Mattel’s dolls to encourage little girls in the aspiration of becoming Frosted Mini Hos? Or How about the countless video games out there that are shaping young boys into the Future Serial Killers of America?
Politically correct? Schmolitically Correct.
I cant say I know anyone who didnt try to imitate something on a TV show, but the vast majority of those actions were simply kids acting like kids.
If you look at the sheer number of girls who had Barbie dolls, are you calling them Whores? Even if they did not? Same goes for video games, the amount of violence that is seen on a primetime television show versus a game which is unrealistic (if you have played GTA the fact that people call it a killer training game makes it sad to the point of what anyone will believe), I played mario brothers and while I did hop on a mushroom once I did not try to fall down a pipe or jump under a brick expecting gold coins.
I know someone who liked to wear a superman costume when he got home. One day at a party that his parents had all of a sudden the people here a “Superman!!!…..*Thud*” he jumped off the second story balcony, luckily onto grass. It was stupid, but it was part of being a kid.
Johan, I get what you’re saying. Kids will be kids, and it’s inevitable that they will imitate some of the things they see on TV or in movies. I do agree, it’s part of being a kid.
However, I’m not trying to ridicule kids here– nor am I trying to “blast” the type of toys and games that are available out there today in the manner of some holier-than-thou morality police, a la Tipper Gore. It’s a different world, certainly– the times, they have gone a changin’. And I definitely wasn’t labeling little girls as “Whores” just because they like and want to buy the types of provocative looking (ie., Bratz) dolls or what have you. I was simply trying to point out (sarcastically, of course) how hypocritical it is for toy corporations, movies, tv, and other media in trying to sugar-coat and sanitize things such as Dave describes above, while at the same time they think nothing of bombarding society (not just kids) with images of sex, violence, you name it. Certainly if you think about it, something such as Pecos Bill’s poor little cigar is relatively benign compared to the images that kids today see everywhere– including in the real world! Doesn’t it seem ironic that something such as a little cigar in a cartoon needs to be censored, while pretty much everything out there nowadays is far more provocative? My point is, why are they trying to sugar coat certain things while kids are pretty much going to see a lot more of it in reality anyway? Get rid of images of smoking in cartoons? Silly. People smoke. That’s the reality. It may not be healthy, but there it is. Who are we to manipulate “morals” on others?
It reminds me of the time when I read an article about a certain group of parents who were trying to change the old standard Fairy Tales to make them “less scary and violent”– or the kooks out there who insist that Harry Potter promotes witchcraft. Ridiculous.
Well put, shaz. I personally am aghast at this. How awful that revisionist history is happening. This, of course, is not new, but it still upsets me that our history and pop culture is being sanitized. Looney Tunes cartoons were horribly violent, but I wouldn’t change them for the world - they were representative of the time and place when they were created. And, frankly, I still love watching Wile E. Coyote go splat! then bounce right back to keep chasin’ that danged Road Runner. *devilish grin*