Comments on: Jingle Jangle Jungle

By: Garrett

Garrett — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

WPTZ’s grab bag of animation was something my brother and I woke up early (as in, before the station even signed on for the day) on the weekends, and while I don’t remeber this particular short (in part because I found most of the Famous material to be extremely bland even then), it doesn’t shock me in the least. WPTZ commonly showed the Mammy Tom & Jerry shorts uncut, and that’s just for starters. (It should be noted that there were no WB shorts on the weekends, probably so as to avoid offending the Burlington, VT CBS affiliate, which was by far the biggest and best-run station in the area at the time.) As a white kid whose only exposure to minorities was on television (and after Benson and the cast of Star Trek, most of the minorities were cartoon characters or sports stars), I’m certain that cartoons like this skewed my perceptions. The sad thing is, “Jingle Jangle Jungle” is not very good, and was a fossil even upon its original theatrical release.

By: pixelwks

pixelwks — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I used to love this cartoon as a child. It never occured to me that it was racist and it never gave me the idea that blacks really acted this way. Still, it’s offensive (and not very good either).

By: J Lee

J Lee — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

This cartoon aired in New York in the early 1960s, before being yanked by WNEW (now WNYW), which also edited out stereotypical images from other Paramount and WB cartoons, along with banning any WWII-themed shorts.

As far as the cartoon itself, it’s interesting to note that “Civilization (Bongo Bongo Bongo)” was one of the only contemporary songs ever used by Famous Studios in its revival of the Fleischer bouncing ball (they even got to animate an atomic bomb blast in the second chorus). The Fleisher series always used songs of recent vintage; out of of this number, popularized by Danny Kaye, Famous stuck with either dated songs from the studio’s music library or songs already in public domain.

I doubt the crews there could have been all that thrilled to have to write and animate gags based on music from 1900-1920, so I would guess they jumped at the chance to work on this cartoon, which is a little more energetic than your average Screen Song. That doesn’t excuse the sterotypical racial gags — Famous could do boring Screen Songs with sterotypical characters just as easily — but if Paramount or the folks at Famous had at least tried to use more songs from the 1940s, the series might have turned out better than it did.