You really have to hand it to WWII era minorities for NOT KILLING EVERYONE EVER.

[kjpepper]

I think I should start a blog about old movies/shorts that make you die a little bit inside while watching them. For poops and ha has and while recovering from losing my shit and cleaning like a maniac all day (nothing like bleach and coffee to kill brain cells!), I called up The Good Earth on TCM OnDemand.

Wow. I mean... wow. Somehow white actors made up to look Chinese (and cringe-inducingly badly to boot)? Bothers me worse than blackface. I feel like just to maximize the horror I need to wash this down with the "Gallivanting Around" sequence from Showboat on repeat for a while, with an additional chaser of Coal Black and de Sebbin Dwarfs.

Comments

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Oh, god. When I saw Coal Black for the first time, I felt like I had to take a shower to wash off the racism. What the bleeding blue FUCK.

I have not seen the others you mention. Perhaps this is a good thing.

[nekosensei.livejournal.com]

Oh my God...that was awful. I think I'm going to lose my dinner.

I'm 31, and I don't remember seeing that on tv as a kid. I'm hoping it was because they got a clue and took it off the air by the late seventies / early eighties. Thank God! On the other hand, I do remember them showing ones that didn't portray Asians (particularly the Japanese) too kindly when I was little. I distinctly remember them showing a slanted-eyed Bugs Bunny wearing a conical, straw hat.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

HELL yeah they recognized the awfulness. It's one of the Censored 11--eleven Warner Brothers cartoons which were taken off the air in 1968 and have been out of official broadcast circulation ever since.

Disney isn't so hot, either. Some of their WWII propaganda films are rather painful to watch, too. And I bet you haven't seen Sunflower the Centaur in Fantasia. She got cut around the same time the Censored 11 did.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

... And the compy ate the last line of the previous comment, which was "Seeing things like that in my beloved cartoons was not exactly the highlight of learning about animation, I can tell you that."

[morlock.livejournal.com]

for racism of truely awesome proportions, check out "the birth of a nation" by the KKK.

its actually heralded as one of THE films of the 20th century.