Pre 1970's Controversial Cartoons

Overt depictions of racial stereotypes such as the pickaninnies or blackface routines all but died out in the years following WWII (1).  Racial stereotypes and the blackface routine persisted however in cartoons.  Sometimes this was to directly poke fun at minorities and other times this character depiction was only incidental, playing to the racial formation of the time.

Some of these cartoons deemed offensive by either the FCC, the film distributors, or media executives have even been banned or not optioned for release.

"All This and Rabbit Stew" and the "Censored Eleven"

"All This and Rabbit Stew" is one of these early motion cartoons which has sparked much controversy in the past. It is a Warner Brothers film produced in 1941 which stars Bugs Bunny and depicts an African-American Elmer Fudd type who hunts after Bugs (2).  This cartoon along with ten others makeup what are called the "Censored Eleven," a list of films United Artists decided to no longer air for reasons of racist themes (Ted Turner continued this ban upon his aquisition of UA in 1968) (2).

This link: All This and Rabbit Stew is to the cartoon made available on Yahoo.com.

Theories of a racial formation are evident in many places in this cartoon.  It opens up with a character who is hunting rabbits so that he may make a stew.  Large lipped and coal black, this hunter speaks in a dialect meant to approximate a black southern uneducated culture, full of poor grammar and simple syntax.  He is a manifestation of the pickanninny character archetype made popular by Minstrel Theatre and the blackface routines which are addressed at length in the documentary "Ethnic Notions."  Bugs goes on to outsmart this hunter, playing upon racial stereotypes the whole way.  The closing seconds of the cartoon bring the iconic circular implosion of the scene to a single point and the curtains actually close around Bug's lips making them much larger, evoking the image of the stereotype blackface (2).

It is interesting that the blackface character is portrayed here as a hunter.  This was a common theme in the blackface performances following the American Civil-war, a theme which Roedigger attributed to some idealized pre-industrial American pastime (1).  Perhaps herein lies a key to the popularity of Rabbit Stew in the early 1940's.  The blackface hunter was a character which children and adults could simultanouesly mock and envy as a relic of simpler times, of an America before the war and depression which so heavily influenced the popular culture of the period.  This dumb character was a safe figure to be singled out as non-white and different from the ideal American, while he was also a safe figure to inspire reminiscence of an idealized time before troubles (1).  While Roedigger was speaking of an audience disenchanted with industrialism and nostalgic of antebellum days, one could argue that this catharsis was even more readily embraceable by an American populace seeking to escape the daily spectre of war and to distance themselves from association with the Japanese, German, or Italian peoples (1).  This theme is also evident in other of the "censored eleven" cartoons. One of these cartoons, "Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips," (Warner Bros. 1944) borders on propiganda, portraying very caricatured Japanese soldiers hell-bent to bomb, shoot, and sumo wrestle Bugs into submission.  Bugs goes on to defeat the soldiers in typical Bugs Bunny fashion.

Above is a screen shot from "All This and Rabbit Stew" (Warner Brothers 1941)

of a pickaninny character pointing a gun at Bugs Bunny.

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