ReFrederator Blog

I’m always amused by old movies, cartoons and comics that try to sell us on the idea that a white person can pass as black just by applying burnt cork, coal dust, or—as in Plane Dumb—oil that just happens to be lying around a plane’s cockpit. The funny thing is that the weakness of that idea is really apparent in live action and even in comics, but transformation is animation’s playground, so it becomes fodder for a laugh. I chuckled when first I saw how when Tom and Jerry applied oil to their faces, it also transformed their lips, hair and voices. (For the record, the best such transformation is actually from a live-action show; in an episode of the British comedy The Goodies, our heroes repeatedly fall into a photo-developing chemical bath, and re-emerge the opposite colour as when they went in.)

I’m not a huge fan of Tom and Jerry cartoons in the first place, so I wasn’t terribly surprised to see that overall the cartoon goes nowhere plotwise. It’s mostly an excuse to string together gags that reinforce the notions that (a) Africa is a dangerous, savage place, (b) Africans are dangerous, savage creatures, and (c) Tom and Jerry are idiots.

- Emru Townsend

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