Picture from Tralfaz

When you settle down to watch an episode of Tom & Jerry you wait for the above title card to come up on the screen, if it doesn’t you don’t watch any further because you know that Tom & Jerry without Fred Quimby is a complete waste of time. These are the great cartoons, possibly the finest example of cartoon slapstick comedy of the 20^th century, that were satirised so brilliantly by The Itchy & Scratchy Show, beloved of Bart Simpson. Extreme violence, explosions, death and destruction abound in every breakneck episode. There are other aspects of these cartoons too of course, and that is the fact that they don’t fit in with today’s standards of what can be shown to an audience.

Picture from Animated Toast

These old episodes have already been in trouble before of course, in 2006 the television channel Boomerang edited out scenes that depicted smoking. While I can understand their motives, children’s television never portrays smoking these days, I’m sure that parental common sense should also be employed. If a five year old asks what the character is doing just simply tell them that they are smoking and that it’s bad for you and you shouldn’t do it because you’ll die. This won’t work as well if you are a smoker, but if you are a smoker then your kids will probably not have asked seeing as they will know and of course the absurdity of a cat or mouse lighting up will not escape them, because (newsflash) cartoons aren’t real.

The cartoons are back in the news this week as it was reported that Amazon have taken it upon itself to include a warning that the episodes are a product of their time. Some of them may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in American society. These depictions were wrong then and wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros view of today’s society, these animated shorts are being presented as they were originally created, because to do so otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.

Picture from Wikipedia

There have been the usual protests of political correctness having gone mad of course, but if the demographic for a Tom & Jerry cartoon is under ten years old, (even though they can be enjoyed by the whole family), then will they even be aware of this issue? When I was little, one of the best things in the world was on a Saturday teatime when Grandstand finished and the classified football results had been read out. The BBC would sometimes run short of time and to fill the gap until The Late Late Breakfast Show was due to start they would bung on a Tom & Jerry cartoon. When I was of that age it didn’t occur to me that the character Mammy Two-Shoes (that is her real name) was a racial stereotype, for the simple reason that it didn’t occur to me that she was supposed to be black. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention to her arms, I just noticed a fat woman, and politically correct or not, fat is funny.

Mrs Two Shoes, a white character edited into old cartoons by some video distributors. Surely that's more racist?

Although it is obvious that these cartoons would never make it past the pitch meeting these days, I am glad that they are being shown as they were made. As the warning says, it would be as bad as denying it ever happened, (these were actually the words of Warner Bros themselves in a previous DVD release) and it should be up to the individual whether or not to decide to watch them or not. Not only did I miss the fact that she was black, it didn’t occur to me that she was the maid because she was the only human being seen (or am I remembering it wrong?) in the cartoons so as far as she was depicted, it could have been her house and as such I can’t blame her for wanting the cat to catch the mouse and get rid of it. I’d expect the same of my own cats, although the difference between my house and the one in Tom & Jerry is that in my house the cats have to go outside to smoke.

Warner are right to point to the fact that this was of its time, as similar warnings are occasionally given out at the beginning of 1950s radio comedies when broadcast on BBC 4 Extra and I have seen them used before sitcoms from another time. If they had censored out the Mammy Two Shoes character then the floodgates would have opened for calls to remove similar characters across the board. The character was based on (although also heavily ‘borrowed’ from the Disney cartoon Three Orphan Kittens) the maid ‘Mammy’ in Gone With The Wind played by Hattie McDaniels, who would also have to be edited out, as would Lillian Randolph’s role in It’s A Wonderful Life and hundreds of others. It didn’t even seem racist to me when I saw as a child the Laurel and Hardy film Pardon Us, in which our heroes escape from prison and hide out in a plantation by blacking up. The reason this didn’t occur to me as racist is because racism isn’t something you’re born with; you have to be taught racism and I wasn’t.

Pictures from Buzzfeed

If we are to remove elements of the past that no longer sit well with our current standards, then we might as well just set fire to the archives as there is all manner of references in literature, film, television and theatre that we wouldn’t get away with today including advertisements that in today’s sophisticated world we can gasp at the audacity and laugh at the ridiculousness.

===

My daily blog can be delivered straight to your Kindle for 99p a month (link)

Listen to The Sunday Alternative here

All donations received via the PayPal button above will be used to fund creative projects such as podcasts, short films, documentaries, comedy sketches and a whole lot more. You are under no obligation of course, but thanks in advance if you do drop something in the pot.