Would you say this is a bit hypocritical for animation?

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samonosu

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I thought about this for awhile, now it is time for me to bring it up on here. Now, I have known a few people who can take a joke when it comes to cartoons. But the type of jokes I'm talking about are the blackface jokes for animation. I know that there are a few people who can't handle these types of jokes, but I know a few people(who are black) that can handle it. Now, whenever a blackface gag is shown in lets say a Disney cartoon or even any golden age cartoon in general. A small uproar is on the matter forcing the studios to edit out that particular part, although there are a few DVDs that have the blackface gags that contain a bit of a warning for the viewer before the cartoon starts.

I am noticing that most humor that is on blacks doesn't seem to be much of a bother. Now I bring up the big one. Ralph Bakshi's Coonskin(or Street fight) got banned by Al sharpton. However years later Seth Macfarlane makes an animated show with black characters and he doesn't get into trouble with it. I understand that the blackface was a joke at the time when racism was being done. The thing is. If people cant handle stuff like the blackface gags in golden age cartoons and Bakshi's coonskin, how can other things get away with black jokes in general? I am still questioning why nobody has even dared to attack Seth for creating the cleveland show.
 
Yes I know there's a difference. But I'm just saying that because Ive run into a few people who are a bit hypocritical about the whole blackface thing.
 
I think because the general public views old Disney cartoons and golden age cartoons as "for children" or maybe "for the whole family", while The Clevland Show and other MacFarlane shows are clearly for adults.
 
Personally it doesn't bother me one bit, I just don't care. But, the people who do, they seem to run the show, and the way it works today, people who otherwise would not care pretend to because it's the cool thing to do.
 
Hypocritical how so? There's a world of difference between blackface, a dated and offensive practice, and making satirical, non-hateful jokes involving black people.
 
I think maybe the point is that is it hypocritical for the old blackface jokes to be censored, while we have modern shows that make racist jokes all the time? I haven't seen Cleveland Show, so I can't comment on whether or not it happens in that show a lot or not.

But I think the difference is that the old shorts get censored because people have an expectation for those shorts being aimed for children, so jokes like that would be deemed inappropriate, while the adult shows have a rating in the corner and they expect parents to abide by it (And if any parent complains, the network can just point at the rating).

Although, I've never found blackface jokes to be terribly offensive or horrible. We get shown images like that in school for history, with propaganda images from WW2 or the Civil War, or whatever the reason is, and children aren't shocked and appalled to see them. It's not like the joke is as outrageous as having a fully nude, visible girl in a cartoon. I don't think the children take as much offense to blackface jokes as the parent does.
 
Slight correction: Seth MacFarlane didn't create The Cleveland Show. Mike Henry did. Seth only used his clout with FOX to help get the show greenlit and on the air.

Getting back to the subject: why would Seth or Mike Henry be attacked for creating The Cleveland Show? I'm not really getting why you were anticipating an uproar over TCS or why you put The Cleveland Show in the same category as blackface. As others have pointed out, there's a vast difference between blackface routines and shows with black characters.

Just a guess, but does the furor you expected somehow have anything to do with the fact that TCS was created by a white man, and Cleveland's voice actor is white? If that's the case, then it raises the questions: is it somehow OK to caricature whites but not blacks, and is it somehow not OK for whites to create cartoon shows starring blacks or for white actors to voice black characters? Again, I don't see how any of these things are in any way controversial. There's nothing wrong with non-blacks creating black characters for fiction, provided that they're portrayed as characters and not just offensive stereotypes (but it's not OK for blacks to do that either), and black voice actors such as Cree Summer and Kevin M. Richardson have voiced white characters, so why shouldn't white voice actors do the reserve?

Forgive my rambling, but I'm not sure what the exact issue is here.
 
I haven't really watched the Cleveland Show much either, but I assume its humor is similar to Family Guy's, stereotypical but served out to all groups and with the purpose of mocking racism itself rather than mocking black people. And usually when people sense racist undercurrents in something today, there will be a fuss (see Phantom Menace, Revenge of the Fallen, Last Airbender, etc.). Not censorship, but a fuss. Now censorship is simply wrong wrong and there's often some hypocrisy going on when old cartoons are censored (I mean, why is Song of the South covered up by Disney when Dumbo and Peter Pan aren't?), but I'm not totally seeing the points and equivalencies Bonke is making.
 
Censorship is the wrong word because it refers to government crackdowns, not a business making a calculation that releasing parts of their library would be more damaging than helpful to their brand as a whole. In that respect, SotS is not much different than the Pokemon epilepsy episode.

But it comes down to cultural context. I had friends who thought Haunted Mansion was racist because Eddie Murphy was being spooked by ghosts, shades of Stephin Fetchit. But I saw it more in terms of international markets, where Variety reported it was a surprise that it did well in Japan. I can't imagine it would've been too different a movie with Tim Allen in the lead.

TPM and Revenge certainly echo old Hollywood racial stereotypes in scifi "drag" of sorts but Last Airbender... I wouldn't be surprised if that racebending wasn't some bit of mad genius- to have all the parts played by different races than those in the original cartoon but unless a sequel with a black Toph gets made, I'll never know for sure.
 
"Genius"? Making all the heroes with names white even if the rest of their tribes weren't while making the bad guys brown and mostly Middle Eastern seems more like unfortunate implications than genius to me.
 
1, how do you think it would've played if they'd kept Jesse McC as Zuko and, by default, kept his whole family white?

2, We know how the story ends- that it was an issue of bad leadership, not a bad nation- as well as Zuko's journey to being a hero. Presumably, all the viewers went in knowing, or with someone who knew, that Zuko was ultimately a good guy.

3, Casting sends a message. Imdb some pf the movie actors and VAs from the show.
 
1. Still would have been bad.
2. Yeah, but it'd still be "white people saving brown people from themselves," and doesn't change the whole "Sokka and Katara are the only white people in a sea of Inuits" thing which makes no freaking sense.
3. Not sure what you're saying there.

Finally, if what you wanted out of all this was a black Toph (which Shyamalan said wouldn't happen, and knowing how everything else with this movie went I honestly wouldn't be shocked if they made Toph a guy), but this was how the movie handled it's few black actors: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gJAOWRNoBY

Yeah, nobody in the whole village is brave enough to fight one Fire Nation guy. ONE GUY! It's just one guy, and its not like non-Avatar state Aang would be more powerful than any regular bender at this point. But of course they can dance!

But yeah, we've had this whole debate before, so maybe time to get back on topic.
 
I'm assuming I'm the only one on this thread who has watched a good amount of The Cleveland Show.

The Cleveland Show isn't rascist at all, in fact after a while I started thinking this show was on the block only so FOX could appear politically correct. A notable amount of African Americans make up part of the fanbase as well.

Even if I had been de-sensitized to the point I don't think anything is rascist, refer to N-word priveleges as an example.
 
The reason Black face is, and will always be, offensive is because its purpose was to tell the story of one of two people of color. The black listless who was too dumb to function without someone telling them what to do, or the black person who loved their simple life of servitude. The whole point of black face was to go "Look at those poor simple blacks, aren't you glad we're white? It's okay to put them down continuously because they're so stupid."

Now black jokes fall under a different classification, The Cleveland show is not derogatory in nature to Black people. It's merely a sitcom formula starring a black family. It's intention is not to constantly put down blacks as a whole.

Now, as for the censorship of old cartoons, I don't agree with it because I don't understand the point? I rather like how it's done now with a disclaimer.
 
I think some of those people who get offended by old cartoons that feature black-face caricatures just forget that they're merely products of their time.

The world of entertainment has come a long way since the days of the black-and-white minstrel shows.
 
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