BWahahaha!!!

I bought SchoolHouse Rock on DVD a few years ago.

Ahh, the memories.

They weren't gay and neither is Richard Simmons.

:(

Exactly.. :(

I still love Sesame Street...adults mess things up for no reason sometimes..

example: taking off saturday morning cartoons and replacing them with the drivel that's on now. :mad:

Well I bought the DVDs and I LOVE them.

A lot of the segments that Sesame Street ran were positively timeless. If I was still a teacher, I would definitely play the DVDs for my kids.


On a related note, I DID play a tape of Vegetable Soup for my first graders a few years ago. (If you don't recall, VS was an even more multicultural version of Sesame Street.)

Well, the ONLY part I thought wasn't so appropriate was when they defined what an OREO was! And I don't mean the cookie!

Yes, that was a very race-aware show.

I loved Kukla, Fran & Ollie. Those shows from other countries were the coolest.

I agree with this 100%. The parents that are screwing up childhood TV are the same ones that grew up watch SS and the likes. I'm still mad that Looney Tunes got taken off the air and put on Boomerang. Kids have no cartoons if they don't have cable.

Animate....just sort of a flipside...u ever seen any of the uncut Looney Toons stuff?

You would be surprised.

Altho I agree that a lot of that stuff is safer and saner than this garbage that is on now...Looney Toons really wasn't about the kids

Check some of the WWII toons if you ever find any.

Matter of fact:

Stereotypes
A handful of Looney Tunes shorts from the World War II era are no longer aired on American television nor are they available for sale by Warner Bros. because of the racial stereotypes of African-Americans, Jews (especially in the earlier cartoons, despite the fact that all four of the Warner Bros. were Jewish as well[2]), Japanese, Chinese people, and Germans (especially during WWII, as in "Tokio Jokio") included in some of the cartoons. Eleven cartoons that prominently featured stereotypical black characters (and a few passing jokes about Japanese people, as was the case with "Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs" and "Jungle Jitters") were withdrawn from distribution in 1968 and are known as the Censored Eleven. This has caused dismay among some animation enthusiasts, who feel that they should have access to these shorts. There has been some success in returning these cartoons to the public; in 1999 all Speedy Gonzales cartoons were made unavailable because of their alleged stereotyping of Mexicans, but because the level of stereotyping was minor compared to the World War II era cartoons as well as the protests of many Hispanics who said they were not offended and fondly remembered Speedy Gonzales cartoons from their youth, these shorts were made available for broadcast again in 2002.

In addition to these most notorious cartoons, many Warner cartoons contain fleeting or sometimes extended gags that reference then-common racial or ethnic stereotypes. The release of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 3 includes a disclaimer at the beginning of each DVD in the volume given by Whoopi Goldberg which explains that the cartoons are products of their time and contain racial and ethnic stereotypes that these days would be considered offensive, but the cartoons are going to be presented on the DVD uncut and uncensored because editing them out and therefore denying that the stereotypes existed is almost as bad as condoning them.

A written disclaimer, similar to the words spoken by Goldberg in Volume 3, is shown at the beginning of each DVD in the Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 4 set:

The cartoons you are about to see are products of their time. They may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in American society. These depictions were wrong then and they are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of today's society, these cartoons are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming that these prejudices never existed.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looney_Toons#Stereotypes

I watched Bugs Bunny every Saturday of my childhood when it was on CBS. Some of the cartoons were definitely cut to make them more kid-friendly. They NEVER showed any of the WWII cartoons or any of the ones with Black stereotypes. Tom & Jerry, on the other hand, I do remember a few of those - they had a "mammy" type housekeeper, who of course was seen only from the waist down (cat's-eye level).

I, for one, applaud your early descent into curmudgeonry - we'll sit around a $5 Pai Gow table, drink whiskey and water, and bitch about the rain and traffic . . . all by age 30(ish)!

Seriously though, Sesame Street sucks for kids, and kind of always has - Blue's Clues, as inane and tottering as it seems, is like 30x better for kids' learning and parents' eyes glazing over on Vicodin.

Also this is all the old generation's fault, not the kids' - the Baby Boomers and early Gen Xers can lick my balls, and the reaction to their excess will likely be hysterical (to me, anyway). The kids always win, whether it's opium, Woodstock, promiscuous sex, MySpace, or women's suffrage.

Those cartoons were sooooo racially charged. Nothing more than racist propaganda comparable to the days of penny novels that spewed hatred to the masses.

Some of the cartoon images that immediately come to my mind are:

The Africa baby with the bone sticking out of her hair.

The blackface depictions, particularly when "is you is or is you ain't my baby" was sung.

The faceless mammy in Tom and Jerry.

Not to mention Speedy Gonzalez. Was that looney toons or warner bros. Oh well.

These things were an overtly racist sign of their overtly racist times.

You should be so much more selective.

You hit it right on the head....I actually had a video tape of some of the WWII propoganda toons...sadly I lost in when I moved back in the 90s


And now I hear that for the last 2 years Disney has been wrapped up in a controversy about a DVD release of a little movie known as 'Song of the South"

Exactly @ DaemonSeid and Animate.

Cartoons were a reflection of society at the time. Yes, they are offensive now, but then, they weren't. (ex: the late night Black and White cartoons on CN that show some propaganda from WWII featuring a character called Snafu. DEFINITELY not for children, but a lot of those cartoons were shown to the GIs in training and the military often used Disney and WB to create training films. Very interesting if you can catch some of them)

And remember that these cartoons were often shown as previews to regular movies, which were seen by mostly adults.

And I miss Speedy Gonzales and his cousin Slow Poke Rodriguez. :(

Oh, gosh, YES @ Song of the South. Most of that stuff went RIGHT over my head (I was a sheltered military brat), but now I want to see it.

They were offensive back then, as well. They were meant to be offensive, brainwashing propaganda. They remind me of the Klan cartoons that never made mainstream but were widely viewed and aired on public access TV.

What are some images in today's children's shows that are offensive? And are they truly offensive or are we too conscious (or sensitive)?

When I really got my eyes opened to a lot of the stuff going on in toons (and don't forget everyone...a lot of these things were shown in movie theaters before TV) that is when i learned that just because it's animated, doesnt mean it's for kids...I know a South Park: The Movie fan in here that knows what I mean....hehe

A lot of the WB toons had a lot of adult content in it that flew right over our heads abd because we were lil kids at the time we never really grasped that Bugs was a crossdresser or that Porky made fun of people speech impediment and etc.

We just thought it was funny.

Ironically enough, back on the South Park Movie tip, it parodied that fact that people who don't pay attention to what their kids watch on TV will eventually grow up being bad people and that over protective parents sometimes made things even worse.

Now....did anyone here who saw this movie in the theaters see any other parents there with kids and noticed any kind of reaction when the movie got started?


if there was..did it mirror what was going on in the movie itself?

Again, animation altho it entertains, is still a part of social commentary for the times.

Just imagine 20 or 30 years from now when things like Family Guy and Boondocks will probably fly over the heads of another set of youngsters.....