Llyrwenne

Hopes and Dreams SAVE the World
Member
Oct 26, 2017
1,209
What you serious about people wanting a bloody disclaimer?! What the hell?
Most of the people who brought up a potential disclaimer also said that it wasn't needed or required, and that it should not be held against the developer in any way if none is added.

Also, you made a post in that thread! The only way you missed this is if you entered that thread and made your post without reading any of the actual discussion. There is literally only one page in that thread that doesn't have the word 'disclaimer' on it, and that page comes after your post.
 

CenturionNami

Attempted to circumvent ban with alt account
Banned
Nov 2, 2017
5,230
Most of the people who brought up a potential disclaimer also said that it wasn't needed or required, and that it should not be held against the developer in any way if none is added.

Also, you made a post in that thread! The only way you missed this is if you entered that thread and made your post without reading any of the actual discussion. There is literally only one page in that thread that doesn't have the word 'disclaimer' on it, and that page comes after your post.
I vaugley recall posting in the topic but I dont remeber people asking for a disclaimer. I thought people were generally laughing the topic off.
 

Llyrwenne

Hopes and Dreams SAVE the World
Member
Oct 26, 2017
1,209
I vaugley recall posting in the topic but I dont remeber people asking for a disclaimer. I thought people were generally laughing the topic off.
Across the first few pages, there's maybe four comments I'd interpret as 'laughing the topic off', and those all rightfully got official warnings or temporary bans for drive-by posting and belittling the concerns of others.

If you're going to post in a discussion thread, then at least read the discussion. Knowing what is being discussed, why it is being discussed, and how it is being discussed can give you context or insights that might be relevant to what you want to post. It allows you to better connect to the ongoing discussion without coming off as a drive-by post.
 

Xenon

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
1,266
First off, I'm wondering why you chose not to use the reply button, as the way you quoted this post removes the Wikipedia page that I linkedwith that sentence. Let me post some snippets from that article and you can tell me if what I said was "hyperbolic crap".







Those are right from the beginning. I'm also going to quote you the original lyrics of Old Folks at Home, which became Florida's state song in 1935, five years after the cartoon that directly inspired Cuphead.



That should give you an image of American culture at the time. Now, let's get back to your post.



Here's where I'm confused. Giving you the benefit of the doubt, I think maybe you could have gotten the idea that the statement you quoted was about 1930s cartoons and not minstrel shows.

Now, that sentence was linked to a Wikipedia article on minstrel shows, so I'll be pretty amazed if you managed to miss that. A few sentences later I stated "Early cartoons were made before this style of entertainment became an old shame that people wanted to bury, and often drew directly from it", which should have also cued you in that the hundred years was referring to the art history that early cartoons are built on and not to the cartoons themselves. So I feel like if you had actually read the post you quoted and not gotten outraged at the first sentence, you would have been able to figure that out.

If that isn't the case, than what I'm getting is that you're trying to claim that stuff like this:

minstrel_posterbillyv8coda.jpg


That stuff like this was an expression of life in general and did not exist solely to make fun of black people. But I think you know better than that, you specifically mention cartoons so I don't think it can be that.

I didn't hit the quote button because your opening statement was false, no need to get the rest. I also can't see how I took it out of context since it was in a paragraph about how animation was created in a time when these shows existed, at least it's implied that is the case. But minstrel shows stopped being popular at the end of the 19th century.

You asserted that the main form of entertainment for a hundred years in America was making fun of black people and provided a link to one form that was completely racist. This is where I'm having a problem. It's just a completely unfounded, unsubstantiated, unresearched, hyperbolic statement.

Now I'm almost sure that of all the entertainment of that era that you researched it was probably the main one. Which is the problem I had that
the original article that spawned these threads. The authors limit experience with that form of animation was focused on the negative aspects relating to race. So of course when he looks at cuphead that's what he sees. Which is most likely why he wrote the article. I don't have a problem with the article existing, since it spawned a conversation in which I learned more about that arts history good and bad.
 

Bigg

Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,977
I feel like there could be an essay written about what the fuck happened to Ian Miles Cheong

In 2014 he came out against Gamergate and seemed to have liberal views, and was even friends/acquaintances with some journos I like

Then he vanished for a little bit and came back as "The Hero of the People" and just went full blown Gamergate 24/7, with gaters seemingly willing to ignore his past because they have the memories of goldfish

I really have to imagine it's a Glen Beck situation where he doesn't believe most of the shit he says but he says it anyway because gaters are super exploitable and now his site gets way more revenue. Just super super gross.
 
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Fhtagn

Member
Oct 25, 2017
5,615
I feel like there could be an essay written about what the fuck happened to Ian Miles Cheong

In 2014 he came out against Gamergate and seemed to have liberal views, and was even friends/acquaintances with some journos I like

Then he vanished for a little bit and came back as "The Hero of the People" and just went full blown Gamergate 24/7, with gaters seemingly willing to ignore his past because they have the memories of goldfish

I really have to imagine it's a Glen Beck situation where he doesn't believe most of the shit he says but he says it anyway because gaters are super exploitable and now his site gets way more revenue. Just super super gross.

I think the "he doesn't really believe it" read is a charitable one; he comes across as legit not-smart to me. He flipped his shit about a kotaku review earlier this year that was blatantly obviously an intentional self-parody on the part of kotaku and he wasn't even able to back down after being shown that there was a legit review of the same game posted weeks earlier. He wasn't able to understand that the thing he was pissed off about was a comedy effort. He's just not clever enough to be Glen Becking.
 

Bigg

Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,977
I think the "he doesn't really believe it" read is a charitable one; he comes across as legit not-smart to me. He flipped his shit about a kotaku review earlier this year that was blatantly obviously an intentional self-parody on the part of kotaku and he wasn't even able to back down after being shown that there was a legit review of the same game posted weeks earlier. He wasn't able to understand that the thing he was pissed off about was a comedy effort. He's just not clever enough to be Glen Becking.
I'm just baffled by the massive 180 he did on his reporting and political views. I feel like that's not something you generally see unless you're trying to be opportunistic to exploit a gullible audience (see Milo, who publicly disliked video games before becoming the Patron Saint of Gamergate). Maybe he is just a dumbass, idk. Either way he's a piece of shit.
 
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ItsBobbyDarin

Banned
Oct 28, 2017
1,905
Egyptian residing in Denmark
I'm a huge fan of Fleischer animation, and used to have a pretty good collection on VHS back in the day (along with other vintage cartoons). When I saw the style of Cuphead, I fell in love with it. I really can't wait to play it (I'm hoping for a non-Windows Store version... but I'll probably cave and get it anyway).

Like pretty much every other artistic medium at the time; yes, early animation was very racist at times. It was also sexist, homophobic and discriminatory in any other way you could look at it. Even when they were trying to be inclusive and progressive, it is shockingly offensive by today's standards. Fleischer wasn't even the worst. Disney, Looney Toons, Universal and Paramount have some FAR more racist content IMO. Disney had some outrageously racist content up into the 60s, and still had problems through to the 90s. I love that this game has brought this era of animation into broader awareness, and allows us to have a conversation about the time. If you made a 30s-styled movie, album or comic book, it would be appropriate to discuss the context in which the inspiring material was produced. Anyway, here's some recepts.jpg etc (avoiding the wartime propaganda stuff, that's too easy):

Sunflower from Disney's 'Fantasia' (1940):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nx4ekJ0i_w
A super racist portrayal of a black centaur character. Instead of being a horse her lower body is a donkey, she features exaggerated features and waits on the white centaurs like a servant. This character remained in cuts of Fantasia up until the end of the 60s, but is now ignored by Disney.

Noveltoon's 'Santa's Surprise' (1947):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4I0A1csQaI
By today's standards, the children are raging, offensive stereotypes. The black kid shines Santa's boots "to a boogie beat", the Polynesian girl uses her grass skirt to sweep the floor as she performs a hula, and the Asian kid does the laundry... If you made this cartoon today, you would be rightly tarred and feathered. But then for the time, you could argue that it was fairly progressive for them to include children from various races/cultures working together to do something good.

Fleischer also made a lot of innocuous cartoons which aren't racist. 'The Kids in the Shoe' (1935) is one of my favourites; it's full of cute little gags with a great song. :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRmDFzoYwBk

'Somewhere in Dreamland' (1936) is also adorable, uses some cool animation techniques and features a cute song I sing to my daughter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYw-YiZ7CW0

I really hope Cuphead spawns a renewed interest in classic animation, including improved archival/distribution of rare, classic content and hearty discussion of content. If people are keen for some more crazy racist cartoon content, or a few safe ones you can enjoy, I could dredge up some more examples.

A little bit off topic, but you really know your cartoons. Can you help me find a specific one?
Its about 2 mice(or other small animal), they are well dressed, and the go in to a party (no people around) and start eating evrything at the table. At one point, one of them gets their head stuck in jelly-0. One falls into a glass of champagne and drinks it all but gets stuck in the glass. I really hope you can helo me with this.
 

L Thammy

Spacenoid
Member
Oct 25, 2017
52,007
I didn't hit the quote button because your opening statement was false, no need to get the rest. I also can't see how I took it out of context since it was in a paragraph about how animation was created in a time when these shows existed, at least it's implied that is the case. But minstrel shows stopped being popular at the end of the 19th century.

You asserted that the main form of entertainment for a hundred years in America was making fun of black people and provided a link to one form that was completely racist. This is where I'm having a problem. It's just a completely unfounded, unsubstantiated, unresearched, hyperbolic statement.

Now I'm almost sure that of all the entertainment of that era that you researched it was probably the main one. Which is the problem I had that
the original article that spawned these threads. The authors limit experience with that form of animation was focused on the negative aspects relating to race. So of course when he looks at cuphead that's what he sees. Which is most likely why he wrote the article. I don't have a problem with the article existing, since it spawned a conversation in which I learned more about that arts history good and bad.

First:

I also can't see how I took it out of context since it was in a paragraph about how animation was created in a time when these shows existed, at least it's implied that is the case. But minstrel shows stopped being popular at the end of the 19th century.

Already you're either being disingenuous or failed to read the post you're outraged at. The fact that they were no longer as popular as they were at the end of the century does not mean that they stopped existing, or that their racist tropes did not continue in other forms of American media such as cartoons. It does not mean that they were no longer socially acceptable. And that's already been demonstrated in a post you replied to - again, in 1935, over a hundred years after the beginning of the minstrel show, Florida declared a minstrel song as their state song. What really killed it off was the Civil Rights movement, which was over a hundred years after Americans started minstrel shows.


Beyond that, you keep asserting that it's false that racism was the great American pastime for a hundred years without anything to back that that up after I already posted things to demonstrate it. You said that assertions like that scare you from entering these threads. For now, I don't care if you're scared, I will continue to assert it:

The minstrel show.

By 1848, blackface minstrel shows were the national artform, translating formal art such as opera into popular terms for a general audience.

Blackface minstrelsy was the first theatrical form that was distinctly American. During the 1830s and 1840s at the height of its popularity, it was at the epicenter of the American music industry.

The coon song.

Coon songs were a genre of music that presented a stereotyped image of Blacks. They were popular in the United States and the United Kingdom from around 1880[1] to 1920,[2] though the earliest such songs date from minstrel shows as far back as 1848.[3]

By the mid-1880s, coon songs were a national craze; over 600 such songs were published in the 1890s.[4][5] The most successful songs sold millions of copies.[4] To take advantage of the fad, composers "add[ed] words typical of coon songs to previously published songs and rags".[6]

Coon songs were popular in Vaudeville theater, where they were delivered by "coon shouters", who were typically White females.[6] Notable coon shouters included Artie Hall,[26] Sophie Tucker, May Irwin, Mae West, Fanny Brice, Fay Templeton, Lotta Crabtree, Marie Dressler, Emma Carus, Nora Bayes, Clarice Vance, Elsie Janis, Trixie Friganza, Eva Tanguay and Julia Gerity.[6]

As with minstrel shows earlier, a whole genre of skits and shows grew up around coon songs, and often coon songs were featured in legitimate theater productions.[6]

The origins of ragtime:

In 1895, black entertainer Ernest Hogan composed two of the earliest sheet music rags, one of which ("All Coons Look Alike to Me") eventually sold a million copies. The other composition was called La Pas Ma La which was also a hit.[17] As fellow black musician Tom Fletcher said, Hogan was the "first to put on paper the kind of rhythm that was being played by non-reading musicians."[18] While the song's success helped introduce the country to ragtime rhythms, its use of racial slurs created a number of derogatory imitation tunes, known as "coon songs" because of their use of racist and stereotypical images of blacks. In Hogan's later years he admitted shame and a sense of "race betrayal" for the song while also expressing pride in helping bring ragtime to a larger audience.[19]

A little more about that song:

When the ragtime championship was held as part of the 1900 World Competition in New York, semifinalists played Hogan's "All Coons Look Alike to Me" to prove their skill.[9]

And further on.

The popularity of early film brought with it the propagation of racial stereotypes to large audiences around the world. Early silent movies such as The Wooing and Wedding of a Coon in 1904, The Slave in 1905, The Sambo Series 1909-1911 and The Nigger in 1915 offered the existing stereotypes through an exciting new medium.

The premiere of Birth of a Nation in 1915 marked a change in emphasis from the pretentious and inept Jim Crow stereotypes to that of the Savage Negro. In D.W. Griffith's film, the Ku Klux Klan rescues the South, and Southern women in particular, from savage Blacks who have gained power over Whites with the help of Northern carpetbaggers. Griffith later admitted that his film was designed to, "create a feeling of abhorrence in white people, especially white women, against colored men."

Between 1930 and 1950, animators at Warner Brothers, Walt Disney, MGM, Merrie Melodies, Looney Tunes, R.K.O., and many other independent studios, produced thousands of cartoons that perpetuated the same old racist stereotypes. This period is now known as the golden age of animation, and until the mid 1960s, cartoons were screened before all feature films. Later, these same cartoons would cycle endlessly for decades on broadcast TV or cable syndication.

Eventually the worst of the racist cartoons were removed from television or heavily edited, but many are available on the internet if one knows where to look. To modern audiences, many of these cartoons are quite shocking and graphically illustrate how pervasive and institutionalized racism was in our culture just a short time ago.

The most popular radio show of all time was The Amos 'n' Andy Show. The characters were created by Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll; two white actors with blackface and vaudeville experience. NBC began broadcasting Amos 'n' Andy on radio August 19th, 1929 and it was an instant success. It was the first radio program to be distributed by syndication in the United States. The show ran as a nightly radio serial from 1928 until 1943 and as a weekly situation comedy from 1943 until 1955. Portraying blackface racist stereotypes on radio was a bit of a challenge because there were no visuals. The stereotypical voice characterizations needed to be even more exaggerated to help listeners distinguish between characters.

Although Amos and Andy is cited most often as an example of blackface radio performances, there were many other stereotypical blackface characters in old time radio shows like Two Black Crows, Beulah and Aunt Jemima. Two Black Crows were based on coon stereotypes while both Beulah and Aunt Jemima were based on the "Mammy" stereotype. Beulah was a supporting character on the popular Fibber McGee and Molly radio series and became a spin-off show. The show was broadcast on radio from 1945 to 1954, and originally portrayed by White actor Marlin Hurt. Hattie McDaniel eventually took the role on radio and was one of four black women to play Beulah on the later television series.

When integration became Federal law in the 1950s it put small Black theaters out of business and that brought an end to the production of race movies. Blacks continued to play servant roles in mainstream movies but the only Blacks to appear in early television were those who performed racist caricatures. Much of early television's variety entertainment was transplanted from vaudeville, while many situation comedies came from radio. Popular radio shows like Amos and Andy and Beulah were an instant success on television. But it wasn't long before a backlash developed from Black leaders who objected to the racist stereotypes and especially the fact that they were the only portrayals of blacks on TV.

Even as the TV series Amos 'n' Andy premiered in June 1951, the NAACP was in federal court trying unsuccessfully to get an injunction to prevent CBS from televising it. In 1951, Amos 'n' Andy ranked 13th in the Nielsen ratings and in 1952 it won an Emmy award. The NAACP responded by initiating a boycott of its sponsor, Blatz beer. By April 1953 Blatz withdrew its sponsorship and CBS announced "The network has bowed to the change in national thinking." Yet the series was in syndication more than 4 times as long as it was broadcast on the network. It remained in syndication for 13 years after it was withdrawn from the network schedule. As late as 1963, it still played on 50 US stations. The programs were finally locked in vaults as of 1966, but videotapes and DVDs continue to circulate among collectors.

NAACP protests also resulted in blackface scenes being cut from TV showings of such films as Babes in Arms and Holiday Inn. 15 years passed from Amos 'n' Andy until the introduction of another Black situation comedy (Julia in 1968). The series failed to gain an audience and that may explain why during the 1970's, stereotypical "coons and mammies" were again featured in shows such as Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, Good Times, What's Happening and Diff'rent Strokes.

The 1970s also saw a resurgence of movies tailored to Black audiences in a genre called "Blacksploitation" films. Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) starred Melvin Van Peebles, who also wrote, produced and directed. In the film, his character is a black prostitute who is forced to go on the run after he saves a young Black Panther who was being beaten by two corrupt White cops. The film is often credited with the invention of the Blacksploitation genre, because its success proved that there was a lucrative market for such films. The film cost only $150,000 -- most of it put up by Peebles -- and grossed over $15 million. Superfly, Shaft, Blackula, Black Caesar, Hell up in Harlem, Black Gestapo, Foxy Brown, and many others quickly followed.

Most Blacksploitation films were small, independent productions that dealt with crime and the effects of illegal drugs on the inner cities. The cause was usually portrayed as being a result of White racism and exploitation of poor Blacks. Most White cops and politicians were portrayed as corrupt, forcing Black antiheroes to take matters into their own hands. Heavy on graphic sex scenes, gratuitous nudity and violence, as well as stereotypes of pimps, whores, and black criminals, the films eventually generated a backlash led by Black leaders that put an end to Blacksploitation films by 1980.

America has a long history of entertainment mediums - not just one medium or genre, but multiple that draw inspiration from each other - rooted in black stereotyping, whitewashing of history, or exploitation
 
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Nov 4, 2017
7,974
A little bit off topic, but you really know your cartoons. Can you help me find a specific one?
Its about 2 mice(or other small animal), they are well dressed, and the go in to a party (no people around) and start eating evrything at the table. At one point, one of them gets their head stuck in jelly-0. One falls into a glass of champagne and drinks it all but gets stuck in the glass. I really hope you can helo me with this.
Sounds like "The Country Cousin": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U7adg_yPLM

I remembered the cartoon but took me ages to track down the name ><