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Walter Lantz was a major league asshole and a huge racist.
So fuck him. I refuse to watch his cartoons. They suck anyway.
Do you have any more info on that? If the Wikipedia article is to be believed, it sounds like he didn't think it would be offensive and tried to correct his behavior after universal announced that it would be pulled due to being offensive. It sounds like McEvoy was the real PoS for attempting to justify the cartoon to an NAACP representative.
Agreed, hes not exactly clean from wrongdoing but based on the wiki i dont think he was hatefull.
The controversy was a shock to Walter Lantz, who prided himself on avoiding problems with the censors. He repeatedly stated that his cartoons were never meant to offend anyone. After the 1949 decision, Lantz made a major effort to exclude any offensive caricatures of racial or ethnic groups in his cartoons. He also promised that Scrub Me Mama would never be distributed on television; however, according to eyewitness accounts, the short was broadcast on TV during the 1950s and continued to be seen as late as the 1980s.
We are going to need a proper conversation about this. People can act a certain way without completly being that way. All racist behavior is bad but I personally draw a line at do they actually carry hate or disdain. Some people are just ignorant and others nondiscriminatory don’t care about anyone thats not themselves which ain’t good either but still not Fascist.
We are going to need a proper conversation about this. People can act a certain way without completly being that way. All racist behavior is bad but I personally draw a line at do they actually carry hate or disdain. Some people are just ignorant and others nondiscriminatory don’t care about anyone thats not themselves which ain’t good either but still not Fascist.
Yeah, I agree with this. There are way too many people who see life in 1bit (black or white) when life isn't even greyscale; life is in color. Additionally, there were so many racist, sexist, homophobic people even just 20yrs ago, that if you start demonizing them for actions they took 20yrs ago, you'll very quickly run out of people to support. It's also very easy for people to get caught in the current and get dragged places they didn't mean to go because it was normalized in their community.
I'm not ashamed to admit that I haven't always been the most tolerant person out there (I'll get to that in a moment). I was pretty homophobic and transphobic as a teenager because I grew up in a time where that was normal, in an area where it was accepted. I was usually an outcast and didn't have many irl friends, and so most of my friends were online. Some of my """friends""" almost led me down the alt-right rabbit hole while I was in college, and as much as I want to say I left that group voluntarily, the truth is that I was too lonely and afraid of losing the only friends I had (the leopards eventually tried to eat my face, which was the slap in the face I needed to get out of that). My parents didn't support gay marriage, my grandparents were skeptical of the lesbian couple that moved in down the street from them.
But we changed.
After the leopards ate my face, I stopped and reexamined my life. I thought about the direction I wanted to go in and who I really wanted to be. I now identify as trans. I support BLM. I have a lot of friends in the LGBT community. I'm a fucking furry. My parents now support gay marriage (they still view homosexuality as being a sin, but now they don't see it as being any worse than any other sin and support your right to be gay). My grandparents have expressed sadness that "that lesbian couple down the street" are moving away (sadly unsurprising since it's Texas). That's why I'm not ashamed to admit that I wasn't always a very tolerant person; I've changed and fuck you, I'm proud of that. There's nothing wrong with admitting that; it doesn't make you any less of a person for doing so.
Humans aren't an immutable, unchanging hunk of stone. We can change so long as we're willing. Hell, others can change you even if you're unwilling to change, so long as you aren't holding hate or fear in your heart (though ironically, sometimes, sometimes that can actually make it easier for someone to change you, for better or for worse).
Why are people so insistent on defining present you based on past you? Like, I'm sorry I was a shit when I was younger, but I'm not that person anymore. Can we move on please? That's part of the reason why things like this bother me. I see part of me in situations like this. Maybe Lantz really was a racist pos throughout his life. Maybe he just cleaned up his public behavior but was still a racist fuck behind closed doors. But maybe he was caught up in the current and didn't realize where he was until life slapped him in the face.
Edit: I feel like a lot of the people who insist on coloring in broad strokes are probably people who had the privilege of growing up in places where people who are LGBT and/or BIPOC were accepted. Not everyone had that privilege. I also suspect that some of them may have some level of bigotry that they're either blind to or ashamed of, but for one reason or another, are unable to let go of.
Direct your attention to @flyingsquid's second reply above.
No we don't need a conversation.
He's a product of his time, his ignorance isn't excusable and he isn't around anymore so who cares about him or his legacy and creations. He's racist, he made racist cartoons and we don't need him or his ilk anymore so move on from them or defending them.
Not about him no but in general we do.
No one is truly black or white. Where all complex and layered individuals.
Racists/facist are people who hate others.
Hate is the emotion that makes people want to hurt or even kill when given the chance.
Everyone can act racist, even you. Especially when this is normalized in your surroundings you may never even realize it is racist. The majority of such people can be helped with better education making them aware of the suffering that systematic stereotypes cause.
Real racists don’t because they already know. their intention is to hurt. The only way to fix them is with vast therapy.
Personally i am a far left anarchist. No masters, no slaves, no violence and no borders is my ethos. But if i start calling everyone who is simply worried about immigration a fascist then, i am quickly going to end up with no one to collaborate with.
Ah the racist playbook. Even in the 1940s.
The "Nobody complained to me!" Method
On October 29, 1948, a representative of Universal wrote to the NAACP. He pointed out that none of the company's theaters had received complaints concerning the film.
The "If this passes, you'll never work again!" method
McEvoy offered to let the NAACP contact the West Coast offices of the company, but he warned that in consequence for taking action, "removeds" would be prevented from getting work in the industry.
The "It was just a joke!" Method
McEvoy pointed out that caricatures of Negroes, Jews, Germans, and Irish used to all be top entertainment.
We're talking about Lantz, not McEvoy. We've already established that he was a piece of shit for attempting to justify it to the NAACP when they told him the cartoon was racist.
He did other racist cartoons.
I don't want to link to them.
One is called Just Spooks.
There is absolutely no way, if you watch that cartoon, that you would not think black people would be offended by it. Again, I don't want to link to it, but it's available to watch on the Internet if you're curious. His claim of innocence was just a lie.
Edit: To whomever downvoted me- Scrub Me Mama With a Boogie Beat takes place in an all-black town called Lazytown where everyone is big-lipped, lazy and stupid but addicted to jazz. They also love eating watermelon. Do you really think Walter Lantz wasn't a racist piece of shit?
My dude, I looked it up, that was made in 1925, putting it long before Scrub Me Mama. Additionally, as much as I hate to agree with a shithead who tried to tell the NAACP that Scrub Me Mama wasn't racist, McEvoy wasn't wrong when he said that racial stereotypes were very common in cartoons at the time. Hell, Walt Disney made Song of the South, and he didn't even get to claim ignorance because there's plenty of documentation that he knew what he was doing, but did it anyway (and from what it sounds like, there are still references to the movie in Disney World, like Splash Mountain, despite Disney trying to erase it from history). Dr. Seuss also made a number of very racist books early in his career, however he grew as a person and changed, eventually disowning his offensive books.
Lantz grew up during the Jim-Crow era, which didn't end until the 1960s. That's going to have some effect on you. I like to think people can change, which is why I was wanting a source showing that he continued to make blatantly racist cartoons or hold racist beliefs uncommon for the time, even after the controversy. It sounds like, from the Wikipedia article, that it hadn't occurred to Lantz that his sense of humor was offensive, and that the controversy was the slap in the face he needed to stop and rethink was he was doing.
Lazytown‽ RIP to my boy Robbie Rotten, number 1 pirate.
His name be praised
The cartoon, you can watch it from the page, is absolutely horrifying. We all know that that kind of stuff existed, but i was still unprepared for how insane it is
You weren't joking. Imagine the animators working on frame after frame of that and being okay with it...
Holy shit. I had to turn it off. WTF.