If Bugs is "racist", how do his modern counterparts shape up?
| None of the black characters in cartoons are the main characters – they are always part of the gang. |
Last week TV Channel, Cartoon Network ended its four-day homage to animated favourite Bugs Bunny.
As an honour to securing the rights to all of the carrot-eating trickster's capers, the channel had originally planned to show every single Bugs cartoon ever made.
However twelve had to be pulled because they were deemed to be racially insensitive.
My great fear," said Mike Lazzo, the channel's senior vice president of programming, "is that a 6-year-old stumbles upon one of these cartoons and doesn't have the wiring to understand the environment these cartoons are made in."
One of the 12 banned episodes called All This and Rabbit Stew features a black hunter who has over-sized lips and shuffles his feet. Though the cartoon would cause much offence today, when it was made in 1941 such images were commonplace.
The 11 other banned cartoons, created between 1941 and 1960, contain images that are offensive to many other racial groups. After much debate, the network now plans to make a documentary featuring the banned clips but with a historian putting them into will put them in context.
| | Comic facts What we discovered | | Marvel's Comics first black superhero was called Whitewash. | | One of the black crow characters that featured in the classic Disney film Dumbo was called Jim. Jim Crow was the nickname for the system of legal racial segregation that once existed in America. | | Bugs Bunny once appeared in an advert for U.S. Savings Bonds with the slogan: "Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat." | | Comedian, Bill Cosby's all-black animated series Fat Albert began on American networks in 1969 and is TV's third longest running original TV series. | | In the late sixties all-American hero Captain America was given a black side called The Falcon. | | Storm from the X-Men first appeared in Marvel comics in 1984. | | Disney's 1992 film Aladdin outraged some Arab Americans with the song lines: "Where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face/It's barbaric but hey, it's home." The lyrics were eventually changed. | | Wesley Snipes made history when he starred in the 1998 film, Blade, a half-vampire, half-human superhero who developed from a comic strip. | |
|
But how far has black representation in cartoons improved since the days of the early Bugs?
Pretty well, but there's definite room for improvement say cartoon fans Onome and Ebru Edgeworth. Both point to old favourite Tom and Jerry, which still features the black mammy character. Though viewers never see her face, just her stocky legs and floppy socks as she tells off the troublesome animated pair.
"I think it's bad that in the old Tom and Jerry cartoons when they have a black person, like the mammy you don't see their face but in other cartoons when they have white people we see them," says Ebru, 9.
Things have come a long way since Disney made the cartoon feature, Song Of The South which featured singing and dancing happy slaves.
These days while the most popular cartoons on British TV usually have white characters at centre stage, series like, Recess, RugRats, X-Men, The Simpsons, all feature one or more black characters.
Rugrats for example has Angelica's gapped-toothed best friend, Susie Carmichaels. While the Recess posse has Vince, the high-topped basketball whizz whose brother balances any stereotypes by being a bookish nerd.
Says Onome: "None of the black characters in cartoons are the main characters, they are always part of the gang, like in Recess, though some of the episodes will based on that character or that character's family."
Ebru adds: "Although there's only one main black character in Recess there are others in the background, which is a change. And they do focus on Vince quite a lot."
However black characters can still be hard to find even when we know they're there. "In the Rug Rats we hardly ever see Angelica's best friend, she's hardly in any episodes he complains and its really rare to see her in it", says Ebru.
The Simpsons is another long-running cartoon with a long history of including multi-ethnic characters like the wise-cracking, Dr Julius Hibbert.
Says Eubru: "The doctor in The Simpsons is funny and smart and that's a good change and he's in quite a few episodes. The Asian shopkeeper is funny as well, he's dumb though, but not as dumb as Homer."
Yet when it comes to superheroes whether animated or real life actors - Batman, Captain American, Spiderman, and Superman all share a common theme once they've taken off their various costumes - they're all white underneath.
The boys don't think there are enough and struggle to name but a few. "It's like black people can't be superheroes", says Onome, "or that they aren't."
"Most of them are bad guys", adds Ebru "they are supervillans like Charcoal of The Avengers who went from good to bad."
Neither of these cartoon addicts are impressed with the fact that there's only one main black character in the X-Men, the weird-eyed Storm, who was played by Halle Berry when the cartoon-strip and animated TV series was made into a feature film last year.
But how would the general public react to a black Superman or Batman? Says Ebru: "If they cast a black Batman it would be a big change but a lot of people would say 'why is he black when he's normally white?"
Onome reckons the reaction would be one of amazement. "People would think, 'this isn't right, it's silly,' and they'd start complaining about it. But it doesn't matter, he's still a human, or super-human, and that's all that matters.
About the team
This article was produced by the Children's Express London bureau. It was published as part of Teen Talk, the Children's Express page in New Nation.
