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Overview
Tweety Bird is yellow because censors felt the original pink made the bird look nude. Betty Boop's dress was lengthened so that her garter didn't show. A segment of Mighty Mouse was dropped after protest groups claimed the mouse was actually sniffing cocaine, not flower petals. These changes and many others like them have been demanded by official censors or special interest groups. How the slightly risque gags in some silent cartoons were replaced by rigid standards in the sound film era is the first misadventure covered in this history of censorship in the animation industry. Other topics include racial stereotyping (and the studios' efforts to end the practice), uncensored cartoons such as Lenny Bruce's Thank You Mask Man and Ralph Bakshi's Fritz the Cat, the censorship of television cartoons, and the many animators who were blacklisted from the industry in the 1950s for alleged ties to the Communist Party.Synopsis
Cohen (an independent film distributor who also teaches animation history at San Francisco State U.) explores the history of censorship in American animation from the early 1920s to the present time. He comes at the topic from a number of thematic viewpoints, discussing racial stereotypes in animation, differences in standards between television and film animation, reactions to "uncensored" films such as Fritz the Cat and Lenny Bruce's Thank You Mask Man, the issue of self-censorship, and animators blacklisted during the 1950s Red Scare. The presentation is marred by low quality reproduction of photos, but other illustrations are relatively clear. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR