June 4, 2001

Rascal or Racist? Censoring a Rabbit

une 3, 2001

Rascal or Racist? Censoring a Rabbit

AFTER Cartoon Network acquired the rights to all the Bugs Bunny cartoons, it announced, in early May, that it would celebrate by holding a marathon 49-hour broadcast of the entire Bugs oeuvre — the first complete airing ever. Then the network blinked.

Twelve cartoons would not be aired because they contained racially offensive material, the network said.

Animation fans hit the roof. "These are important historical documents, and they're being terribly abused," said Jerry Beck, an animation historian. "Adults should be able to see this work."

The whole episode afford insights into how popular culture channels popular values, and how media corporations like AOL Time Warner and Disney, which control the historical record of cartoons, will preserve or erase its objectionable chapters.

"All This and Rabbit Stew" is one of 12 cartoons pulled from the Bugs festival, which began Friday night and ends tonight. It is a seven-minute short, produced in 1941, in which a black hunter stalks Bugs Bunny. The hunter, all massive lips and shuffling feet, is the sort of crude stereotype guaranteed to generate outrage today. The 11 other banned cartoons, created between 1941 and 1960, contain similarly provocative images: bloodthirsty Native Americans, bumbling Japanese soldiers, savage Eskimos. Bugs's many encounters with French, Italian and Irish stereotypes will run uncensored.

Cartoons have always played to our most unfiltered, primal selves. "We're prone to cartoon stereotyping because that's how we think, how we hold images in our heads," said the comic artist Art Spiegelman. "It's preliterate thinking. They scare us because they cut deep, through all our layers of verbiage. It makes them seem charged and dangerous, and they are. But that just means you have to treat them with respect."

For media companies, such raw expressiveness is cause for anxiety. The early cartoons were created for adult audiences in movie theaters. But by the 1970's, as the same shorts came under new scrutiny as childen's programming, networks and studios began to cut and snip.

Disney removed scenes of its Pecos Bill character smoking cigarettes. ABC, which ran many of the Warner Brothers cartoons, cut scenes of violence, though with baffling inconsistency.

"One year, even a reference to a gun would be out of a cartoon," said Greg Ford, who produced Bugs Bunny cartoons in the 1980's and 1990's. "The next year it might be back." Cartoon Network continues to edit selectively.

The cartoon directors were rarely consulted. "The networks were lousy editors and lousy child psychologists, too," said Chuck Jones, 89, who directed many of the great Warner Brothers cartoons and three of the banned Bugs shorts. "They just went ahead and chewed the things to pieces."

Feature films were also affected. When Disney rereleased "Fantasia" in 1991, the studio deleted scenes of a pair of female centaurs drawn as African-American stereotypes. (The black crows in Disney's "Dumbo," one of them named Jim, have so far escaped the knife.)

OTHER cartoons were simply removed from circulation. Warner pulled about 20 cartoons, including "All This and Rabbit Stew," for their racial stereotypes. Disney retired its 1946 feature, "Song of the South," based on Joel Chandler Harris's stories and filled with images of happy slaves. An Oscar- winning 1943 Donald Duck short called "Der Fuehrer's Face," in which Donald dreams he is a Nazi, surfaces now only on unauthorized tapes.

As entertainment companies become conglomerates, the old cartoons, which generate modest earnings on niche cable outlets like Cartoon Network or the Disney Channel, create potential liabilities. If our image of Donald Duck includes a swastika, we might rethink that trip to Eurodisney.

Kevin S. Sandler, editor of "Reading the Rabbit: Explorations in Warner Bros. Animation," said Disney has been particularly vigilant about protecting its image.

"Disney erases memory by making their older cartoons unavailable to newer audiences," Mr. Sandler said. "They're able to maintain the globalized image of Disney as patriotic, diverse, all-inclusive and respectful of others' identity."

When Disney's 1992 film "Aladdin" drew protests from Arab-American groups for the song lines, "Where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face/It's barbaric, but hey, it's home," the company changed the lyric.

Disney executives did not respond to repeated requests for comment

For Cartoon Network, a division of AOL Time Warner, this year's Bugs Bunny festival was a chance to plug some of the gaps in animation history. Then company executives started viewing the clips.

"We had a very raucous debate within the network," said Mike Lazzo, senior vice president of programming. He said the network felt no pressure from its parent corporation.

Some cartoons, like the Oscar-nominated "Hiawatha's Rabbit Hunt," which features hapless Native Americans, struck Mr. Lazzo as benign. Others, including "All This and Rabbit Stew," took him aback.

THE network considered grouping the 12 offending shorts together and airing them with a disclaimer. But ultimately, the fact that the audience would consist mostly of children under 11 decided matters.

My great fear," Mr. Lazzo said, "is that a 6-year-old stumbles upon one of these cartoons and doesn't have the wiring to understand the environment these cartoons are made in." The network has commissioned a 30-minute documentary, produced by the historian Jerry Beck, featuring clips from the banned 12.

But cartoons, like other unruly eruptions from the subconscious, are likely to frustrate the efforts of studios, networks and other grown-up institutions to control them.

Already, the banned cartoons can be found on the Internet, which seems fitting. The Internet is a sprawling, unbridled, inchoate world — a global id. Bugs, Daffy, Tom and Jerry and the rest should feel right at home.