Sinkin In the Bathtub
Before Bugs, before Daffy, before even Porky, there was Bosko: Warner Bros.’ first breakout character, and star of Sinkin’ in the Bathtub, the very first Looney Tune.
Sinkin’ in the Bathtub is one of those shorts that seems fairly benign—after all, none of the gags are racially based, and there are no overtly racist intonations to the portrayal of Bosko and his girlfriend Honey. Unlike other shorts of the day, there’s nothing to suggest that Bosko or Honey are lazy, untrustworthy, stupid or given to base urges simply because of their skin colour.
At the same time, Bosko and Honey perfectly exemplify what’s wrong with the way blacks have been depicted in cartoons. Their design is so grotesquely exaggerated that if it weren’t for two clues—Bosko’s speaking voice and Honey’s tightly braided hair—the viewer would be hard-pressed to guess just what they’re supposed to be. That’s not conjecture; in his book That’s Enough Folks: Black Images in Animated Cartoons, 1900-1960, Henry T. Sampson reports that early reviewers weren’t entirely sure either, with Billboard’s reviewer assuming Bosko was a monkey. Just a little over sixty years later, when Babs Bunny discovers Honey in an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures, a recurring gag is that people ask, “What are you… some kind of bug?”
This is the problem inherent in this kind of blackface stylization, which has close relatives in pickaninnyand golliwog imagery: It visually equates black people to subhuman creatures.
- Emru Townsend
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Black History Pages
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On November 13th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Two problems to report - the cartoon isn’t downloading into iTunes and Emru’s links are coming through as HTML tags on the homepage, even they format as links on the RSS feed and on this page when I clicked on the “comments” link.
On November 14th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Sorry for the downloading problems. We’ve been having continual issues with our server and are working to have it fixed ASAP! Yesterday’s short seemed to be touch-and-go early on, but now seems to be downloading OK.
Also, I fixed the links in the posts. Sorry about that guys! (that was me, not Emru)
On November 14th, 2006 at 12:00 am
I’m afraid I can’t make the downloaded cartoon work, either. My computer complains that it’s not a file that Quicktime understands.
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.
On November 14th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Thanks for making these cartoons available in the context of a sensitive, well thought-out blogpost.
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.
On November 14th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Here’s an update for those of you with technical difficulties. Delete the today’s and yesterday’s downloads from your library and then unsubscribe and re-subscribe to ReFrederator. Then, you should be able to get those two cartoons. We’ve switched over servers and this seems to be fixing the problem!
On November 14th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Emru - glad to have you guesting on here. Too often discussions about these toons take place without a single black person present. My take had always been that since cartoons rarely even attempt to be realistic in the first place (and often rely on a “vocabulary of cliches”), they’re sort of immune to accountability. I realize it’s not so simple. One thing that was an eye-opener … you get spoiled on a blog like this where most people are well-read and put some time and thought into their comments. But I stumbled on “Scrub Me Mama With A Boogie Beat” on YouTube, listed under the name “Racist Cartoon #4″ or something like that, which I’m sure attracted the worst of the worst, and some of the comments make me ashamed to be a member of this (white) race, let alone species. So yeah, putting these out without context would be a BAD THING.