THE CENSORED 11

The classic Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons have been a part of TV forever. But there are a handful out of that collection that never aired on TV.

THAT’S ALL FOLKS

In the 1950s and early 1960s, individual TV stations that bought the rights to air old Warner Bros. cartoons had the right to decide which ones they would—and would not—air. Originally, the cartoons had been produced for adult audiences and were run before feature films—which is a lot different from airing them on television for kids. Some themes that were acceptable in the 1930s and 1940s simply would not fly in the era of the civil rights movement. Result: A lot of those old cartoons were edited to remove racially “sensitive” material, which usually meant removing blackface jokes. Other cartoons had so much objectionable material that many stations chose not to air them at all.

In 1968 United Artists secured the rights to the Warner Bros. cartoon catalog. UA created a new syndication deal with TV stations that wanted those old cartoons. But by this time, social values and cultural awareness had changed so much that United Artists didn’t give the stations a choice. The company decided that 11 cartoons from the 1930s and 1940s contained so much racist material—primarily main characters with a blackface appearance or stereotyped, exaggerated African American features—that to edit them would be to reduce them to nothing. Those 11 cartoons were excluded from the syndication package and essentially banned from distribution in the United States. Cartoon aficionados call these missing shorts “the Censored 11.” They haven’t aired on American television since 1968, and they’re available only as low-quality bootlegs.

“Uncle Tom’s Bungalow” (1937). Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped jumpstart the slavery abolition movement with its depiction of the difficult, unfair lives of slaves. As much good as it did, it’s also so simplistic that its characters informed African American stereotypes for years, particularly Uncle Tom, a kind old slave who doesn’t want to cause any trouble with his white masters. This cartoon exploits that stereotype and others. A slave trader sells Uncle Tom to a white woman, but Uncle Tom escapes and gets rich playing craps (an old stereotype of black behavior).

“All This and Rabbit Stew” (1941). This one follows the typical formula of an Elmer Fudd vs. Bugs Bunny cartoon, except in this one Bugs is being hunted by a black character—or rather a black caricature, complete with exaggerated lips and mumble-mouth speech impediment. This cartoon also ends with a game of craps (Bugs, of course, wins).

Nazi Germany created children’s board games with titles like “Jews Out!” and “Bombers Over England.”

“Hittin’ the Trail for Hallelujah Land” (1931). A Mickey Mouse lookalike named Piggy has to get his girlfriend, Fluffy, and a character named Uncle Tom out of various dangerous situations. Several blackface characters sing the cartoon’s title song, which is an old African American spiritual.

“Sunday Go to Meetin’ Time” (1936). A blackface character named Nicodemus plays craps, gets knocked on the head, and dreams he goes to his final judgment. He’s found to be wicked, and sent to Hades, where a group of blackface demons bring him to the devil.

“Clean Pastures” (1937). In this religion-themed cartoon, God sends a slow-talking, slow-walking angel to Harlem to try to get people to renounce their wicked ways and come to heaven (called Pair-o-Dice). When that doesn’t work, God sends black jazz-musician angels instead.

“Jungle Jitters” (1938). A traveling salesman tries to sell housewares to a tribe of cannibals in the African jungle. The homely queen of the village falls in love with him, and to escape her advances, the traveling salesman throws himself into a cooking pot, implying he’d rather get eaten than marry her. Oddly, the African cannibal queen was drawn as a Caucasian woman because the Hays Code (the morality guidelines for the motion picture industry at the time) forbade depiction of interracial relationships.

“Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs” (1943). After legendary cartoon director Bob Clampett was asked by the cast of an African American musical—Duke Ellington’s Jump for Joy—why there were no black Warner Bros. characters, Clampett came up with this jazz parody of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs where all the characters are in blackface.

“The Isle of Pingo Pongo” (1938). A travelogue about the inhabitants of a remote jungle island. It has all the usual black stereotypes: natives with bones in their hair, rings in their noses, and plates in their lips, carrying spears—along with jitterbug dancers and a jazz orchestra.

“Angel Puss” (1944). An African American boy named Sambo gets paid “four bits” (50¢) to drown his cat, but the cat outsmarts him and escapes, then paints himself white and pretends to be a ghost cat. The frightened boy eventually wises up, finds a shotgun, and kills the cat.

Food for thought: Massachusetts and Illinois both have towns called Sandwich.

“Tin Pan Alley Cats” (1943). Another Bob Clampett jazz cartoon in which a cat who looks and sings like jazz legend Fats Waller is so entranced by a jazz band in a nightclub that he drifts off to a surreal fantasy land where he encounters World War II villains Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Hideki Tojo. When he comes back to reality, he’s so freaked out by what he saw in his dream world that he gives up the jazz nightlife and joins the religious band playing outside the club.

“Goldilocks and the Jivin’ Bears” (1944). A retelling of the “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” story, except the bears are blackface jazz musicians…and also Goldilocks (reimagined as a leggy young black woman in high heels) is nearly devoured by the Big Bad Wolf from “Little Red Riding Hood.” The jazz trio saves her by playing a song so hot the Big Bad Wolf jitterbugs himself to exhaustion.

FACTIEST FACTS

•Country with the longest name (one word only): Liechtenstein (13 letters).

•City with the longest average round-trip home-to-work commute time: Washington, DC (60.42 minutes).

•Deepest subway station in the world: Arsenalna Station, on the Kiev Metro line in Kiev, Ukraine (it’s 346 feet below street level; it takes a full five minutes for escalators to reach the surface).

•World’s busiest shipping lane: the Dover Strait, between the UK and France (500–600 ships pass through the strait every day).

•Skinniest tower in the world: British Airways i360 Tower in Brighton, England (it’s 531 feet tall—and just 12.7 feet in diameter, giving it a 40:1 height-to-diameter ratio).

•Deepest river in the world: the Congo River in central Africa (scientists have not been able to determine the Congo’s exact depth; the deepest they have been able to measure is 720 feet).

•Largest irrigation system in the world: the Sukkur Barrage on the Indus River, near the city of Sukkur in northern Pakistan (a barrage is a type of dam with controllable gateways used to divert water; the Sukkur Barrage is more than a mile long, has more than 60 gates, and irrigates 7.63 million acres of land).

•World’s widest human tongue: 3.37 inches (Byron Schlenker, Syracuse, New York).

•World’s widest human tongue (female): 2.89 inches (Emily Schlenker—Byron’s daughter).

Mini, but mighty: Caterpillars have seven times as many muscles as humans do.