Little Black Sambo
Whenever I see this short, the same thoughts run through my head: Good God, Sambo’s mom doesn’t even look human. This is the worst “sexless-mammy” depiction I’ve ever seen. The shine on her arms makes her look like living sausage.
It still amazes me that Sambo was originally from India (hence the tiger), but somehow morphed into a nappy-headed pickaninny when the stories came to the States. Say, where is this supposed to be taking place? Black talcum powder for black behinds. Ha ha. Oh, I didn’t see that one coming.
Like most of Ub Iwerks’s shorts, this is a pretty harmless cartoon. What’s interesting is that aside from the black talc bit, Iwerks didn’t go with the regular practice of using the characters’ blackness as a jumping-off point for gags. If anything, it’s just a cartoon remake of the Sambo story, minus the pancakes.
I really love this phase of Iwerks’s work. The characters are still kind of rubber-hosey, but they’ve got a bit of the feeling of mass that would eventually become the norm. It’s just elastic enough, and just solid enough too. It’s a shame that Iwerks was still kind of timid when it came to depicting speed, though.
- Emru Townsend
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On November 16th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Black powder is gunpowder and though there is no explosion gag, the gag is using gunpowder as talcum powder. Oh, and speaking of an inhuman mother, who says, “Go out and play…and beware of the tiger?
On November 17th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Well, where I’m from it’s, “go play on the freeway”…I used to get that alot.
On November 18th, 2006 at 12:00 am
It’s funny you should mention this, because when I was a kid the Little Black Sambo book that my mother read to me starred a Hindi Sambo. Needless to say, I was a little confused when I found out that animators had race-swapped the character.
At any rate, kudos to Emru for offering his opinion of those tacky old racially insensitive cartoons. It’s refreshing to see them from the perspective of a black animation fan.
There was a Tex Avery cartoon from the 1950’s which I really enjoyed, called Mad Maestro or something to that effect. The only downside was the tasteless rendering of Nat King Cole, but the cartoon was even worse when Turner removed it and tried to splice the footage together. I kind of wish they had just digitally enhanced the footage, redrawing Nat King Cole so that he actually looked like, you know, Nat King Cole.
JR
On November 18th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Actually, it wasn’t the animators that changed Sambo’s ethnicity; it was changed when the story migrated to the U.S. in the late 1800s.
You touch on one of the reasons I was quick to jump on this opportunity. As someone else mentioned earlier, in the many discussions on these types of cartoons in recent years, it’s usually a case of white people talking to other white people. Not that there hasn’t been commentary from black critics as well; it’s just that, it’s just that it doesn’t occur enough in the same forums.
On November 19th, 2006 at 12:00 am
“…in the many discussions on these types of cartoons in recent years, it’s usually a case of white people talking to other white people. Not that there hasn’t been commentary from black critics as well; it’s just that it doesn’t occur enough in the same forums.”
I suspect the reason why is that blacks are generally underrepresented in the field of animation. I don’t follow the industry as closely as I probably should, but the only African-Americans I know who strongly influence modern animation are Aaron MacGruder and Dwayne McDuffie. You could include Bill Cosby too, if you were willing to go that far back.
You can add Phil LaMaar, Kevin Michael Richardson, and Cree Summer to that list as well if you count voice actors. LaMaar and Richardson really seem to care about their work as VO artists, and I believe that they have at least some creative control over the cartoons they’ve done. Summer just seems to be there for the paychecks, if dogs like Drawn Together are any indication.
JR