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Welcome back kids! It’s time for the first Tom & Jerry cartoon in my Banned Cartoons series!
Tom & Jerry have a ton of shorts where large parts of them are either cut, edited, or even re-dubbed. For instance, any blackface or Native American references are altered or cut out entirely. The most obvious change that we see today is the new voice of Mammy, the maid that worked in the house. Her voice was re-dubbed in a less offensive women’s voice that speaks without any grammatical errors.
Warner Home Video bought the rights to Tom & Jerry and decided to release the complete uncensored and unedited shorts that were directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera in three volumes. The duo made 114 shorts but the collection excluded two of them: Mouse Cleaning and Casanova Cat.
It is believed that Mouse Cleaning was excluded because there was too much to be edited and hardcore fans would demand another callback (Volume 1 had a major callback issue thanks to accidental inclusion of edited shorts). Mammy has several speaking lines and the last scene has what Americans would call one of the most racist depictions in any cartoon.
As always, I think that cartoons should be kept as they are. Children that watched them 20 years ago haven’t become racist and they know that acting on racism is bad. Today, children are taught the same thing. There is no need to change history. All we can do now is produce politically correct cartoons and still enjoy the old ones that we all love.
Has anyone jumped on the Twitter train. I thought it was lame and stupid, but now I think it’s fun and stupid. It’s kind of like Diet Blogging. Check it out.
I’m over the anonymity thing so I don’t care. It’s not like someone is going to steal my identity or anything (I hope I didn’t jinx myself).
Anyway checkout my profile. I’ve got a photo+tweat thing going on at the moment.
P.S. Big ups to my big brother for getting married on Thursday. Sadly, I couldn’t be there but at least I heard it over the phone.
City of God is a Brazilian movie directed by Fernando Meirelles and written by Braulio Mantovani. Based on a true story, this movie was an adaptation from a novel by Paulo Lins with the same title. The main characters were “Rocket,” played by Alexandre Rodrigues, “Li’l Ze” was played by Leandro Firmino, “Benny” by Phellipe Haagensen, and Douglas Silva as “Li’l Dice.”
Almost all actors in the movie, major or minor, have little or no experience at all. To provide the movie with authentic acting and displays of action and drama, many of the actors were actually from the infamous town the movie was based on. The intended audiences were fans of the novel, which chronicled the author’s life in Cidade de Deus, a shantytown or ‘favela’ in the Brazilian cit of Rio de Janeiro. Read the rest of this entry »
I found this on YouTube. It’s a great song sung by someone who is not known by a huge number of people, although a few of her songs are very familiar to us.
Asmahan was Fareed Al Atrash’s sister, born Amal. She had a beautiful voice and, after finding this video, I see that she was gorgeous as well.
This song is called Emta Hataaraf and it was for the second and last movie she made, Gharam Wa Enteqam. She died in a dramatic car accident (crashed into the Nile) before production ended. Asmahan was only 26 years old.
Richard Avedon was an American photographer who began his career in the 1940s. He is well known for being a successful photographer who worked for high fashion magazines such as Vogue, Life, and Harper’s Bazaar. He was also very interested in portraiture and took many portraits of celebrities in the movie and music industries. He believed that portraits were the best way to look into and discover a person’s soul.
After building a reputation for being a great photographer to the stars, he decided to find other subjects to shoot. Avedon was deeply intrigued by the blue-collar workers of the West in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This resulted in a multi-state trip across the West photographing people in various states of appearances and financial statuses. Read the rest of this entry »
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahri recently called for attacks on Danish targets in response to the publication of caricatures in Danish newspapers depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
WTF. Seriously, have these people run out of reasons to kill people in the name of God? They heard us the first time. They probably won’t do it again. Enough!
We need to stop this right now. Support for terrorist groups have not gone down at all and the proof is that there are still many brainwashed recruits signing up.
We need to promote peaceful Islam. Updating religion books in our schools is a start. Education is the only way to go.
