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Conclusion: The Legacy of Animated African American Expression
- University of Massachusetts Press
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120 CONCLUSION The Legacy of Animated African American Expression As animation studios struggled to stay open over the next two decades , they tried to retain their formulas for caricaturing blacks without drawing black figures. Having served as the foundation of the theatrical cartoon industry for over fifty years, African American culture had become inextricable from animation. When Friz Freleng sought to modernize the fairy tale Three Little Pigs for a “Looney Tunes” episode, he cast the pink animals as bebop musicians, dressed them in zoot suits, gave them slang words to speak, and called the film Three Little Bops (1957). “Southern” animal characters of the 1960s such as Terrytoons’ Deputy Dawg and Possible Possum inherited the “Negro dialect” once spoken by sambos, mammies, and other black characters. Nevertheless, these revisions of African American expression failed to reverse the fortunes of theatrical animation. Having failed to attract new artists with fresh ideas, the studios found fewer exhibitors for their cartoons and finally closed their doors. The last of the holdouts were Walter Lantz Productions and Terrytoons, both of which shut down in 1972. African American representation, which had helped make possible the existence of American animation, had become the art form’s albatross.1 Network television initially shunned cartoons starring black figures, not daring to risk the wrath of civil rights groups. To be sure, networks were willing to broadcast old theatrical cartoons, since few studios were producing cartoons for television in the 1950s. Walt Disney and Terrytoons reaped fortunes by licensing ABC and CBS to air their films (as Disneyland and The Mighty Mouse Playhouse, respectively). Walter Lantz also had success in packaging his films as The Woody Woodpecker Show, but ABC barred black figures from the series—a decision that ruled out the broadcasting of “Swing Symphonies” episodes, among other films. The Legacy of Animated African American Expression 121 Then, in the late 1960s, television animators found new ways to depict African Americans without using the old characterizations. By this time live-action television programs such as Julia and Room 222 had appeared, featuring integrated casts of principal characters. Cartoon studios soon followed suit with television series such as The Hardy Boys and Josie and the Pussycats. Unlike the live-action shows, however, the cartoons did not mention race, nor did racial conflict figure in the plots. Nearly a quarter century after the House Un-American Activities Committee examined Brotherhood of Man for communist content, studios were still skittish about openly discussing racial equality. Integrated apolitical cartoons soon became standard fare not only on television but also in feature films. The trend continues in movies such as The Incredibles. In the early 1970s studios gave urban black imagery a contemporary look when they began co-producing television cartoons in association with African Americans. Blacks now had unprecedented control over their own images on television; for example, the comedian Flip Wilson produced, wrote, and starred in material for his own variety series, which aired on NBC from 1970 to 1974. Capitalizing on this trend, the recording company Motown supervised production of the cartoon series based on the singing group the Jackson Five in 1971, and the following year comedian Bill Cosby not only oversaw but also starred in Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. Both series featured modern rhythm-and-blues music scores, and the characters dressed in popular clothing styles of the day and often uttered slang words and phrases of the 1970s. Unlike the old cartoons starring zoot-suited musicians, the new cartoons did not poke fun at the culture. As with the integrated shows, these all-black animated programs avoided discussions of race, although such apolitical content was also consistent with the absence of social commentary from both Motown songs and the stand-up routines of Cosby. The last frontier in animated black representation was black politics, which white animators had diluted in films beginning in World War II. While strong black political views had been featured in live-action comedy television shows such as In Living Color since the early 1990s, the animation industry was slow to adapt racial political humor to its medium. Then in 2005 Cartoon Network brought black cartoonist Aaron McGruder’s comic strip “Boondocks” to animation. With McGruder controlling the [44.206.248.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 04:01 GMT) 122 Conclusion content of the show, the series echoed the comic strip’s liberal political rhetoric and discussions of social problems plaguing blacks. Yet Boondocks also resurrected racial taboos...