NEWSFLASH: Squarepants Murders Fudd

The internet is a wonderful tool. It is a wealth of information on any and nearly every topic you can think about looking up, often with some degree of credibility in the academic field. But mostly the knowledge found online is for the trivial.

That said, who would have thought that one of my internet forum sites would be the source of revived nerdom from the dead zone caused by stress and frustration? Certainly not I!

It all started innocently enough. I was reading a forum thread that was a game involving word association. Well, someone playing the game didn't know who Elmer Fudd is, as the character's name came up when associated with the word rabbit. A tangent happened where one person was so surprised at this that they immediately blamed Spongebob for the murder of classic cartoons.

And then this is what I posted in response:

what do you expect? You are witnessing a generation where comedy can't be "too much" for children in animation despite the fact we have mature animated comedy shows that have a self-awareness of what media they are in. That's why we have to deal with Chowder not showing anything that resembles a human being and Foster's Home for Imaginary friends forcefully adding a Goo because someone complained about there not being any blacks on that cartoon despite the several times people of color would show up. We are living an era where cartoons now are being bracketed off like the movie ratings. If it has this and that, it's for the teen block. If it has this or that, it's for the kid block. But if it is designed for kids or has a kid-friendly aesthetic but has something that is not? Well, don't expect it to last very long.

Case and point, the Speedy Gonzales cartoons. They can no longer air ANY of them (that's right, all of them) because the Mexican community finds it grossly offensive in how they stereotype Mexicans as lazy, party-hungry, womenizers. Frankly, I thought it was because he used "Arriba" in the wrong context. The same applies to some Tom & Jerry cartoons featuring Mammy Two-Legs (Tom Cat's original owner), most of the Road Runner cartoons, and the first two seasons of Sesame Street. Those items are no longer "kid friendly" because of how we've become "too sensitive" when dealing with children's emotions.

Pixar has the right idea. They believe that you shouldn't talk down to kids. Most of the time, they are smarter than adults even if they don't understand the Webster definition for the big adult words we use. That's why their movies are the best family movies in contemporary entertainment.

The kids on that forum were more than shocked to learn this. One person claimed that they never knew about the controversy with Mammy Two-Legs, but found any women character from that era depressing. To which I replied:

Both of Tom's owners were very depressing as far as representing women of their time. Mammy Two-Legs was a Sambo plantation kitchen slave type of character. Tom's second owner was the Betty Crocker good ol' American house wife who is deathly afraid of Jerry Mouse.

It's a wonder why people are still upset with the Neo Feminists out there. You still see those gross female stereotypes everywhere. Just look at Mary Jane from Spider-Man. Even Kristan Dunce said she doesn't like playing the screaming dame in distress, and what role does she get?

Yeah, total nerd alert.

But much to my benefit, the fact that I was able to nerd out in a context such as the one presented to me was something that I desperately needed in order to feel better about what I was doing in my thesis. It's a shame that I cannot go into these kind of subjects with my thesis right now, as illustrated in Seminar 2 when I tried this. The branches of controversy and subversiveness in any "classic" cartoon are things that I could easily spend my whole life on, both researching and exploring artistically. And that's a good thing.

As was the case in the forum I posted in, this information is nothing new. It's just been forgotten about since contemporary cartoons now have a formula and a bracket system that helps outline how to design an animated show for a target audience while still being able to air it with little to no controversy. (Selective time slots help a lot in some cases.) But a lot of people are growing up not knowing about these things or even why something that makes others smile and laugh but a very vocal few flail in disgust and offense.

To paraphrase Sweeney Todd, I feel alive again.