Tad Pole . . . much more so than those animated propaganda shorts in the "Private SNAFU" series churned out by Convicted Expense Account Chiseler Leon Schlesinger, who probably lengthened the conflict by months if not years with his rip-offs from the U.S. Taxpayers' War Bonds Program and the Army's Munitions Budget. COAL BLACK AND DE SEBBEN DWARFS is carefully crafted to turn the Aryan Blueprint for Hitler's Genocide by the German Brothers Grimm on its head by incorporating the All-American Essence of Harlem AGAINST Adolph's White Supremacists. This brilliant counter-attack to combat the ranting and raving Fuhrer naturally rubbed Ted Turner and his then-spouse "Hanoi Jane" Fonda the wrong way, since they want America to lose ALL of its wars. Therefore, on the fatal night when these Tondas got soused on their veranda with six pitchers of mint juleps and red-lined a random grouping of the 1,000-plus Looney Tunes to become the infamous "Censored Eleven," they included this masterwork which more than offset the damage done by Looney Tunes Fifth Columnist Schlesinger by inspiring guys such as Brad Pitt's FURY tank commander to take down Hitler's so-called Third Reich.

Tweekums I wasn't sure what to expect with this (in)famous Warner Brothers' spoof of Disney's Snow White, I can understand that the style of the animation looks racist today but had the character design been a bit different it would have probably have been acceptable with only one or two other changes.In this version of the tale the wicked queen is jealous of "So White" so calls Murder Inc. to "black out So White", they grab her but later let her go, we can guess why as they have lipstick on them. She then meets up with the seven dwarfs who are in the army. The Queen then sends a poisoned apple to So White, this puts her to sleep and Prince Chawmin' tries to wake her with a kiss (several times) after he gives up one of the Dwarfs kisses her and she wakes up, he is asked how he did it and he replies suggestively that that is a military secret.I suspect this cartoon was aimed at an adult audience as So White is drawn in a way that is more sexually provocative than a character one would expect in a children's cartoon. The most offensive joke is Murder Inc's advert saying they will rub out anybody for a dollar, midgets half price and Japanese people for free, and it used a derogatory term for the last.I must admit that I found it fairly funny, certainly not as offensive as I thought it might be.

sameolggp Although it has some interesting commentary on the war and is certainly a good tool for teaching and sparking discussion about American race relations, it is certainly not something that I think deserves the outright praise that some of you have been giving it.It is still wrought full of stereotypes (specifcally the over-sexualized black female and the hyper-sexed black male pimp) that are sadly still represented far too often today in music videos, movies, and the like.This is a good cartoon, but not for its entertainment value, but for its close-up on racism as it stood during that era and a representation of how racial stereotypes masked as entertainment are enacted today (and often in modalities directly targeting children).

Dino_Imblurski Coal Black's obscurity helps cartoon buffs to describe it in gushing terms. Animation historians call it one of the greatest cartoons that Warner Brothers put out. It's a product of its time, they write—it came from an America that still enjoyed a minstrel show. Hollywood was giving the public black mammies, Steppin Fetchit, shucking and jiving, Amos and Andy. We can view those live-action films with a sense of historical distance— the film stock looks ancient, the acting looks hammy, and the actors themselves are generally dead. However, cartoons don't age like that. Though the film needs restoration, Prince Chawmin' looks to be as ludicrously vibrant today as he was in 1942— just more shocking.To those who say, "The film exists and it's wrong to deny that…" Well, yeah. That doesn't mean we should put this into rotation on Cartoon Network. Your average viewer doesn't know or care about context. Coal Black provokes a visceral reaction. It churns up the ugliest parts of American history, reminding us that we're still a long way from having racial inequities worked out. Maybe Clampett was just having fun, but in today's climate and without commentary (i.e., without couching it in a documentary), Coal Black can look degrading.Bob Clampett's style was to exaggerate, stretch, distort, and rubberize. Applying this style to the racial stereotypes of the day—even if he did so in fun, or even in admiration—Clampett produced some truly grotesque character designs. It makes Coal Black hard to reconcile. Freeze-frame it at some points and it looks like racist propaganda. Watch it as a cartoon, however, and it rollicks along good-naturedly.Coal Black is Clampett's celebration of black culture and jazz, and to make it he fought with the studio to bring in as many black musicians and voices as he could. It's a jubilant film, and to watch it ignorant of race is to enjoy a bunch of rubbery cartoon characters in a twisted, high-speed parody of Snow White (there's even a jab at Disney's overuse of rotoscoping—check the beginning of the dance number). Jazz and action bounce along in wonderful syncopation, and seven minutes fly by so fast that they feel like two. Rod Scribner's animation is often astounding.It's worth hunting for, it's worth talking about, and in ten years maybe it'll be time for Cartoon Network to dust it off, restore it, and put it on an official DVD. In the meantime, enthusiasts can have the satisfaction of tracking down a rare, paradoxical cartoon made by a brilliant collaboration.