The Sedated Ape

I mean the cartoons are shockingly racist, not the reviews. The reviews are only slightly racist.

I got a DVD set of old  really bad cartoons at Wal-Mart. They cost a dollar per disc. They seem to be mostly from the 1930’s and 1940’s. There’s 150 cartoons all together.

I bought it because some of the titles seem like something Zippy The Pinhead would have came up with.

Alliteration is a big consideration in naming old cartoons. Like: Picnic Panic, Circus Capers, Spooky Swabs and Ding Dong Doggies.

Puns are popular too, like: Bride and Gloom, Crystal Bawl or Snow Foolin’.

Other cartoons have names that sound like porno movie titles like: The Three Sisters, Cupid Gets his Man,  Nursery Scandal, and Ancient Fistory.

But my favorite titles are the ones that are just a really odd thing to name a cartoon: Be Human, Fire Cheese, Flat Heads, Floor Flusher, The Fresh Vegetable Mystery, and (my very favorite ) Pudgy takes a Bow-Wow.

Rules for 1930’s era cartoons -

- There is nothing in the world funnier than animals playing musical instruments while other animals dance.  In several cases that’s the entire cartoon.

- Huge heads –  tiny hats.

- Stuck for an ending? Just have everyone run away then say “the end”

- Backgrounds, even the horizon line,  can just disappear for whole minutes and no one minds.

- There are a lot of mice in this world, and just because some other cartoon company owns the rights to the most famous mouse is no reason you can’t have mice in your cartoon. And your mice can look an awful  lot like the famous mouse and that’s fine,  because in real life a mouse looks a lot like every other mouse. The same standard applies to cartoon mice.

- Are you a huge racist? So racist that you make skinheads blush?  Then 1930’s cartoons are for you!

 Ok the First Shockingly Racist Cartoon.

It’s a different cartoon than the Tom and Jerry cartoons they show on television. You can tell because neither of these guys resemble a cat or mouse very much.  I’m not sure which is which, so I’m calling the tall guy “Tom”.  I was going to call him “Giuseppe”  but I was afraid that might cause confusion. So, we’ll call him Tom. Notice the hat/head ratio.

Here are our guys. Tom says “If we make this non-stop flight to Africa we’ll be heroes!”.  Apparently the requirements for being considered heroic were a lot lower in the the 1930’s.

The little guy in the back is a bit of a Casandra, but for clarity we’ll just call him “Jerry” instead. He points out that they weren’t going to be safe in Africa. They consider this for a minute then come up with a disguise…

 

Yup. Black face. And from this point out they start talking like Amos and Andy for the rest of the cartoon.  A typical line is something like “Lawsdy, I sho’ am sceered, i done wishes wes never done gone ta no Afrycia”.

Before we go further some advice: If you’re going into place with a lot of black people and you don’t feel safe: DO NOT WEAR BLACKFACE. It will just make things worse

The plane then crashes into the ocean off the coast.  They don’t say why it crashed. The wrath of an angry God, maybe.

 

So they’re floating in the ocean on the wing of their plane.

After watching some looped animation of a wave for a minute, an octopus climbs onto the  wing and makes unwanted sexual advances on Tom.

 I wish I could tell you that Tom fought the good fight, and the Octopus let him be. I wish I could tell you that, but a 1930’s cartoon is no fairytale world Well, maybe “Little Lulu’s Fairy Tale World” is a fairy- tale world. I haven’t gotten that far in the DVD set yet. But 1930’s cartoons usually are no fairy tale worlds.  He never said who did it…but we all knew. Things went on like that for a while. 1930’s cartoon life consists of routine, and then more routine. Every so often, you just get ass raped by an Octopus.

Anyway, they eventually get away for the octopus and the expected cartoon sea animals – swordfish, shark, whale etc, and swam to the shore where all the token African animals were waiting.

Plus a couple that are so badly drawn that I’m not sure what they’re supposed to be

and

So the boys run and hide in a cave where they hope to find safety,  and maybe a cheap animation shortcut.

They found the shortcut.

Now let’s say you were a bigot and a cartoon producer.  There obviously needs to be something in the cave to be scared of. But what? Tigers? Bats?

How about a skeleton? Aw heck, make it four. Now that’s scary!  But it’s still not racist. So lets put the skeletons in blackface too! How can you paint the face of somebody who no longer has any flesh on their skull? Leave that for the guys on mythbusters to figure out. It’s scary and  it’s racist, that’s what matters.

Know what would make it more offensive and push the bigot-o-meter off the charts? Have the skeletons sing an old negro spiritual while tap dancing!

Tom and Jerry decide that they would rather take their chances outside the cave instead of hanging around watching the decayed minstrel show. Only to find themselves ambushed by the only human residents of 1930’s Africa: Savage cannibal spear chuckin’ pygmies!

 

How will they survive? Who knows? Remember the rule:  Just have everyone run away and then say “the end”

Coming up tomorrow: A review of a cartoon that takes a whimsical look at the slave trade! It’s at least 50 times worse than this one.

This weekend: Nazi Indians, or Jews in disguise?