From Mark Steyn’s latest Chicago Sun-Times column:
The average multiplex is surely not long for this world. Already, 85 percent of Hollywood’s business comes from home entertainment — DVDs and the like. Suits me. Or so I thought until, on the way home from the hell of Harry Potter, I stopped to buy the third boxed set in the ”Looney Tunes Golden Collection.” Loved the first two: Daffy, Bugs, Porky, beautifully restored, tons of special features. But, for some reason, this new set begins with a special announcement by Whoopi Goldberg explaining what it is we’re not meant to find funny: ”Unfortunately at that time racial and ethnic differences were caricatured in ways that may have embarrassed and even hurt people of color, women and ethnic groups,” she tells us sternly. ”These jokes were wrong then and they’re wrong today” — unlike, say, Whoopi Goldberg’s most memorable joke of recent years, the one at that 2004 all-star Democratic Party gala in New York where she compared President Bush to her, um, private parts. There’s a gag for the ages.
I don’t know what Whoopi’s making such a meal about. It’s true you don’t see many positive images of people of color on ”Looney Tunes,” but then the images of people of non-color aren’t terribly positive either (Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam). Instead, you see positive images of ducks of color, roadrunners of color and tweety birds of color. How weirdly reductive to be so obsessed about something so peripheral to these cartoons that you stick the same damn Whoopi Goldberg health warning on all four DVDs in the box. And don’t think about hitting the “Next” button and skipping to the cartoons: You can’t; you gotta sit through it.
FWIW, I was a bit miffed by the Whoopi intro as well — and I wondered if anybody else out there, perhaps including Whoopi herself, was a bit miffed at the sheer tokenism of the whole thing, the way that some executive at Warner Brothers presumably said, “Hmmm, we need to hire someone who is (a) a person of colour and (b) a woman to soothe our collective liberal guilt.”
I much prefer the approach Walt Disney has taken with its latest “Walt Disney Treasures” sets. Those cartoons which contain the potentially offensive stuff are bracketed off, in a special section on the second disc which contains a brief introduction by animation historian Leonard Maltin. And the rest of the cartoons are just there for the viewing, without any annoying intros.
FWIW, the rest of Steyn’s column includes comments on Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, The Interpreter and Stealth.
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