[Dean's World] Dean: Censoring Old Cartoons

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Posted by Dean:
Censoring Old Cartoons
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1166739514.shtml


   I'm on a kick to rescue William Hanna & Joseph Barbera's best
   work--the 1940s & 1950s MGM-era Tom & Jerry cartoons. These are often
   unappreciated because from the 1960s through 1980s hundreds of truly
   awful Tom & Jerry cartoons were produced strictly for television, and
   none were a tenth the quality of the originals.

   And, on top of those terrible new Tom & Jerry cartoons, for about 20
   years television networks would also sometimes take the high-quality
   Tom & Jerry cartoons from the golden age, but chop them up to match
   television censorship standards, removing anything of an even mildly
   sexual nature, any reference to alcohol, tobacco, anything that might
   seem at all racially offensive, and to remove most violence. As you
   might imagine, the results of such travesties bore little resemblance
   to the originals.

   To give you some idea just how bad those '60s and '70s versions were,
   Tom & Jerry were not allowed to work any direct violence upon each
   other. Try to wrap your mind around that if you've ever seen the
   original cartoons. They got shafted by history.

   Fortunately, in the last 10 years or so animation fans have been able
   to get ahold of [1]good DVD collections of some of the original
   cartoons unedited from the golden era. Also, [2]Cartoon Network now
   often shows original golden age cartoons--although they still censor
   them in one important respect: race. Here's a good example:

   [EMBED]

   They will show this cartoon on Cartoon Network. But they take out the
   voice of the great black character actress [3]Lillian Randolph, and
   replace it with the voice of white voice actress [4]Julie Kavner.

   Not that I have anything against Ms. Kavner, who is a very talented
   actress and voice artist. But I find this a travesty. That black maid
   was a recurring character who appeared in many original Tom & Jerry
   films. But now she's been given a middle-class Californian white
   woman's voice. Lillian Randolph--who appeared in many film and
   television shows, and even appeared semi-regularly on Sanford & Son
   and had a film and television career that spanned 5 decades--gets the
   boot. Why? Well, apparently she sounds "too black."

   We can't have that, can we? Someone might be offended!

   They try to keep her out of the DVD collections as much as possible
   too.

   What a crock, eh?

References

   1. http://www.amazon.com/Tom-Jerry-Spotlight-Collection/dp/B000ADWDK2/sr=1-1/qid=1166739030/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-4713790-9667245?ie=UTF8&s=dvd/deansworld01-20
   2. http://www.cartoonnetwork.com/
   3. http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/2071/Lillian_Randolph_a_film_and_television_jewel
   4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julie_Kavner