TJR TOONS - BANNED - Scrub Me Mama With A Boogie Beat - The most racist cartoon ever made?

[@RockMusicBear]

If we're getting into racist stereotypes, how's about "Seaside Woman" by Linda McCartney?

[@majidwahid7793]

Great Video. Yes it is racist but I don't think that it should be scrubbed from history. I think that you put it perfectly. It is a time capsule. We shouldn't censor the past, instead create a future that we want to live in.

[@tyejustis]

Thank you very much. I completely agree. It's history, if were were only to accept and learn about the pleasant parts of it text books would be two pages long.

[@robcat2075]

Note that this cartoon has NEVER been censored and it's not going to be. "Censorship" is a word inserted too freely in these discussion as if some sort of constitutional violation is happening. This cartoon has been criticized by audiences, edited by its owners, and withdrawn by distributors but none of that is censorship. Censorship is something a government does to legally limit or stop certain speech. Hasn't happened in this case. (I'll note that many state and local still had movie screening boards at this time that with powers up to and including banning a film from local exhibition. It's *possible* it got censored *somewhere* but I'm not aware of any such board ever taking action on a cartoon such as this.) No one's right to free speech is violated by the owners et.al decision to not promote this cartoon any more as if it were jus' plain fun like any other.

[@jensenhealey907efi]

Wow, how did you manage to find the pictures of the original story boards? Amazingly good research

[@tyejustis]

Thank you! I had to dig and dig, there are some really good resources online but these came up at an auction sometime ago and I found the traces of them, so a little luck as well. There is so very little out there but the Walter Lantz Archives at UCLA has much of what's left. The book "The Colored Cartoon" by Christopher P. Lehman has some good finds on the subject and his research index is top notch. Thank you again for watching.

[@andyeasy3320]

Tye, I'm not sure who these cartoons were made for. I assume theatre's were segregated in most parts and even if they were not segregated by law in other states there was de facto segregation because towns and cities were quartered according to ethnicity ie how many white people went to the theatres in Harlem? So were these cartoons distributed to 'black theatres' only or to all theatres. Surely black Americans would boycott a showing?

[@tyejustis]

They were meant for everyone, every age, every color, everywhere. There was no rating systems beyond the Hays Code and it didn't touch on racial depictions. Black people simply didn't have the pull socially to do anything. The NAACP tried to get many offensive shorts pulled from circulation when they premiered but they were ignored. The only reason this one got taken down in 1949 once it was reissued in 1948 was because the NAACP got a little help from the Jewish Labor Committee (just this time, racial images in films and cartoons wasn't really their milieu) otherwise no one would listen to black people when they would speak up about injustices in media. The black performers in these shorts would have been completely blacklisted and never work again in the main stream if they took anything but an accepting stance on the matter. Black Americans in the South were even still being lynched then, as horrifying as that sounds, so it's not hard to reason as to why it took so long, until the late 1960's, for shorts like this one to be taken out of circulation.