Re: Bosko — a quandary indeed; visually caricatured to an extreme degree, but otherwise virtually an anti-stereotype (by 1933, he could heroically behead the white bad guy in BOSKO’S PICTURE SHOW).
I’ve seen efforts to sanitize the character in more recent depictions by tinting his entire face (including the intended whites of his eyes) light brown. Unfortunately, this does nothing to help the blackface effect of the visual representation when one sees the actual cartoons.

At the age of seven, I watched PD Bosko shorts on a local public access channel. For a little while, the character was my hero. I’ve still got crude drawings I made of myself admiringly meeting Bosko in some imaginary realm.
Learning that Bosko was intended to be black caused me to seek out black friends first at a new school where I was just then starting. It was with those friends that I first discussed racism in cartoons; we considered Bosko exempt, if only because none of us really understood the significance of his facial design.

It’s difficult to be an apologist for something that only seemed harmless because I was too naïve to understand it, I guess.

I believe that these cartoons should be available to interested parties due to their historical value - they offer a unique window into the history of animation as well as the social history of the United States - but I would, at the same time, cringe to see them on the shelves of the local Blockbuster without being framed in the appropriate historical context.

Take a cartoon like Bob Clampett’s “Snow White and de Sebben Dwarfs.” It’s a brilliant piece of work, so overloaded with the stereotypes of the day that it almost mocks them by sheer excess. Is it offensive? Absolutely. Should a mass-market audience be exposed to it? Probably not. But looked at as a slice of then-contemporary humor, it’s invaluable. When I watch it, I don’t laugh at it because of “the funny Negroes” - I laugh at how Clampett has taken every staereotype he could get his hands on and beaten them all into the ground.

Thanks again for providing an intelligent and thought-provoking forum for this rarely-seen slice of American animation history.