Exhibition Catalogue Black Character Revolution Exhibition Catalogue Table of Contents
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Black Character Revolution A Retrospective Of 1970’s Saturday Morning Animation Art Featuring Black Characters Exhibition Catalogue Black Character Revolution Exhibition Catalogue Table Of Contents Curator’s Statement 3 Historical Overview 4-5 Exhibition Review 6-8 In The Beginning... 9 1970‘s Black Character Timeline 10-12 Exhibition Firsts 13-15 Key Animation Studios 16-21 1970’s Black Animation Timeline 22-29 1970’s Black Animation Timeline By Category 30-38 1970’s Black Animation Fun Facts 39-49 ! ! 2 Black Character Revolution Exhibition Curator’s Statement As a kid growing up in the 1960’s, I saw images of Blacks being beaten and tortured. I saw the aftermath of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and I couldn’t understand why people who looked like me had been treated in this manner. Then the 1970’s arrived and brought an explosion of color to Saturday Morning cartoons. As a pre-teen, I could see positive Black characters that looked like me and real people that I admired, like the Jackson Five and The Harlem Globetrotters. I was glued to the television. I couldn’t wait to see these animated characters fill the small screen. These cartoons changed my life...filling me with pride and self esteem. They brought adventure, mayhem and fun to a generation of Black children. Forty years later, my perspective on these cartoons is a little different. Besides being an integral part of Black children’s lives, these cartoons also benefited white children and the broader society as a whole. A number of these cartoons addressed issues like cultural differences, racism and multiculturalism. It is my belief that these cartoons are national treasures. They are an important part of American culture, and in particular the Black experience. I fondly remember the decade when these revolutionary Black cartoon characters made their mark on animation history. Sista ToFunky Curator - The Museum Of Uncut Funk ! ! 3 Black Character Revolution Exhibition Historical Overview From 1900 to 1960, over 600 cartoon shorts featuring Black characters were produced by some of Hollywood’s greatest White animators and biggest film studios. These film shorts portrayed Blacks in a racially derogatory and stereotypical manner as cannibals, coons, mammies and Stepin Fetchit characters with exaggerated features and ignorant dialect. In the 1950’s, several of these racist cartoons were shown on television. As a result of the Civil Rights Movement, in the 1960’s the racial content of many of these cartoons was edited out or the cartoons were pulled from television altogether. Notably, The Censored Eleven, a group of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons were banned from broadcast because they were deemed to be too offensive for contemporary audiences. In the case of The Censored Eleven, racist themes were so essential and so completely pervasive in the cartoons that no amount of selective editing could ever make them acceptable for distribution. After sixty years of negative cartoon images, it wasn’t until the late 1960‘s / early 1970’s that Saturday morning television cartoons started to feature image affirming Black animated characters with a modern look and positive story lines that delivered culturally relevant messages. For the first time, Black people like Bill Cosby and Berry Gordy led development of animated television programming featuring Black characters, from concept through to art creation and production. For the first time, Black children saw cartoon characters that looked, talked and acted more realistically like them, such as Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, as well as more positive depictions of their favorite Black music icons and sports heroes like The Jackson 5ive, The Harlem Globetrotters and Muhammad Ali in I Am The Greatest. ! ! 4 Black Character Revolution Exhibition Historical Overview For the first time, Black children had cartoon role models who taught positive messages like family values, the importance of education, friendship, civic duty, personal responsibility and sportsmanship. Also, for the first time cartoons like Josie and The Pussy Cats, Star Trek and Kid Power featured strong Black female characters and multicultural casts. Characters of all races lived, played and worked together as equals, which provided very different images for white children as well. This 1970‘s revolution in how Black animation characters were developed and portrayed in Hollywood represents historic change and the ultimate manifestation of Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream. Not surprisingly, 40 years later, the Black Character Revolution generation would be the first to produce and elect the first Black President of the United States. ! ! 5 Black Character Revolution Exhibition Exhibition Review The Museum Of UnCut Funk has an impressive collection of oxymoronic art. Why oxymoronic? Animation is an art form with caricature as its foundation. However, nearly all of the cartoons represented in this collection, which feature African American and African caricatures, attempt to negotiate the entertainment value of the characters’ designs with accuracy in depicting African American performance. Cartoonists considered African American music and dance a perfect fit for animation. However, the artists chose to approximate the movements of actual entertainers instead of animating their own ideas of how African Americans performed. By the 1970s African Americans had started coaching the studios on how to animate them. Before then, cartoons like Clean Pastures from Warner Brothers were common from Hollywood’s animation studios. Artists depicted African Americans with bulging eyes and lips that took up either the bottom third or the bottom half of a caricature’s face. Instead of hiring the African American entertainers they caricatured like the Mills Brothers or Cab Calloway, studios hired actors and singers to mimic the vocal styles of the famous performers. To their credit, the animation facilities provided work to African American voice-artists for these imitations. They rarely hired European Americans for the singing and the dialogue of African American figures. Animation studios caricatured African American entertainers who had established popularity with European American audiences. They did not experiment with obscure artists or performers who only had a following among African Americans themselves.The figures in Clean Pastures were caricatures of mainstream jazz artists. Four decades later, animators drew from various forms of entertainment for their animated television series and took the most mainstream African Americans from each one. The Harlem Globetrotters came from the world of basketball. The Jackson Five brought the top- selling pop music act into animation. Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids presented a visualization of characters from Bill Cosby’s stand-up comedy routines. In the case of the latter two, African Americans (Motown Recording Corporation and Bill Cosby) ! ! 6 Black Character Revolution Exhibition Exhibition Review co-owned the series with the cartoon studios and oversaw the depictions of the characters. In addition, Nichelle Nichols of the live-action Star Trek lent her voice to the animated version. Muhammad Ali voiced his own caricature. Robin Harris followed Cosby’s example by bringing his own stand-up characters to life in Bebe’s Kids. Animators also strove for accuracy in their feature films. To be sure, the 1970s animated films Coonskin and Hey Good Looking return to some of the visual stylization of the 1930s. On the other hand, African American actors perform the voices, and they star as live-action versions of the characters they voice in live-action segments within the movies themselves. Meanwhile, the character Valerie from Josie and the Pussy Cats was William Hanna and Joseph Barbera’s first African American female figure since the mammy of the Tom and Jerry cartoons they had directed two decades earlier. Valerie’s svelte figure, Afro, and standard speech contrasted sharply with the mammy’s full figure, bandanna, and “Negro dialect.” The Museum Of UnCut Funk is preserving art that signifies the respect that European Americans had for African American performance, if not necessarily for African Americans themselves. Some animators may have enjoyed the African American entertainment they caricatured. Others may have simply wanted to capitalize on the popularity of the entertainers and have a hit cartoon. Regardless, their efforts demonstrate the cultural importance of African American creativity to the nation.i Copyright 2011 by Christopher P. Lehman. Not for citation or reproduction without permission of the author. _____________________________ i For further information about African American animated caricature, read The Colored Cartoon by Christopher P. Lehman, University of Massachusetts Press, 2007. ! ! 7 Black Character Revolution Exhibition Exhibition Review Christopher P. Lehman Christopher P. Lehman is a professor of ethnic studies at St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, Minnesota and has held the position of Visiting Fellow at the Summer Institute of the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He holds a B.A. with Honors in History from Oklahoma State University, and M.A. in History from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a doctorate in Afro- American Studies from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His book The Colored Cartoon: Black Representation in American Animated Short Films won a Choice Outstanding Academic Title