What "race" do you consider non-humanoid cartoon characters to be?

this is kind of a silly question

but

https://media.tenor.co/images/6127f8b549251659121bb3c0441ba5bf/tenor.gif

This certainly isn't something I did as a kid - like in adulthood the first time someone mentioned that Panthro was black my reaction was "oh yeah, shit". Nowadays I might do because I understand how accents are coded a lot better than I did aged seven, but only if they audibly talk like humans (so maybe Bugs Bunny or obviously someone like Pepe Le Pew but probably not Roadrunner or Donald Duck).

also i don't think you can generalize and think non-blacks were mostly "whites" because cartoon characters play off caricatures from different european countries; eg pepe le pew

matt otm

basically if they try really hard to sound different or their character is based on not being the same as the other characters, i would notice

I suppose I did identify mumm-ra as egyptian

Skeeter from Doug, definitely. The rest, I dunno...Elmo, Cookie Monster..? Luigi from Mario Bros., who has always been a white Italian guy?

― frogbs, Thursday, May 25, 2017 8:38 AM (nineteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there was another guy from doug where they actually specifically mention he is pakistani, i don't remember his name right now

Panthro was a black panther

also many jewish characters, i mean how do you not notice?

bobby's world
rugrats

for starters

all the rabbits in Watership Down = Jews, but then this is an obvious allegory

Foghorn Leghorn is depicted as a large, anthropomorphic white adult Leghorn rooster with a stereotypically Southern accent, a "good ol' boy" speaking style, and a penchant for mischief.

Interestingly, despite seeing the voice actor and knowing where he got the foundation for Jar Jar's patois from, I never actually considered Jar Jar to be black. Boss Nass, though, is 100% black.

Also, why the hell would we talk about Rugrats and Bobby's World in a conversation about non-humanoid cartoon characters?

Foghorn Leghorn has always coded as one of those Good Ol' Boy Southern Dem Senators (LBJ etc.)

i remember trying for foghorn leghorn in a post some years back and not quite being prepared for djps reaction

the beast in beauty and the beast is latvian

new york italian gang?

https://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/hanna-barbera/images/f/f8/Top_Cat_and_Gang.jpg

also half the Autobots and a quarter of the Decepticons

now I'm curious which Decepticons

Also, why the hell would we talk about Rugrats and Bobby's World in a conversation about non-humanoid cartoon characters?

― PJD PDJ DPJ (DJP), Thursday, May 25, 2017 9:08 AM (one minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

because doug went unchecked, and i always thought they were more or less human

Foghorn Leghorn began as a direct parody of a Southern character, Senator Claghorn, who was on Fred Allen's popular 1940s radio show.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senator_Claghorn

xxxp Top Cat is explicitly Phil Silvers in cat form though, right?

oh okay

not read up on it

chickens are NOT alieans

I wouldn't count Doug either but at least characters on that show have skin tones that one doesn't actually find in real life:

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/600x315/5d/4f/b3/5d4fb37c27e9a93b2aa4aa14cdae983f.jpg

cryptospiridium makes a liar of you there tbh

!! I had no idea about Claghorn, thx for the tip good doctor

xxp

thank you morbz for mentioning senator claghorn.

the old looney tunes could be, uh... kind of problematic when it came to race. they don't show those cartoons anymore.

honestly the only non-human cartoon character who i definitely thought of as black was frylock. when i was a kid i didn't really think of any cartoon characters as black, probably because i didn't grow up around anybody who was black. although i don't know. i guess snuffleupagus is black, though not a cartoon of course.

I remember once seeing a message board argument about whether Knuckles from Sonic the Hedgehog is black, and it was like 50 pages long

some anime characters even when localized in the us kept a generic "asian accent"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6-JddDUnyY

Knuckles is definitely black

knuckles is red

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=redbone

xp

that is true

shadow is black

xp

oh ya rachel dolezal

new york italian gang?

Come on, Choo-Choo is totally Jewish!

lol

i did forget about choo choo

it's the whole hat and vest that throws me off

huh

i actually browsed through that vice article, and it's pretty sketchy

i'm confused about this:

Luigi (from Mario)

what mario show are they referring to?

why would luigi be african american?

the luigi from the show i know of was voiced by canadian danny wells

all of the ninja turtles are definitely black

I actually think all the Donald Duck clan might be black including Scrooge

have any characters morphed race over the years?

michael jackson

thinking about some of the stuff in this thread:

the poochies of 90s platforming

I wonder if these characters coded as black to ppl, or just some kind of generic 'cool' that included african-american pop culture stuff?
("I feel we should rasta-fy him by 10% or so")

though Poochie was also part surfer dude iirc, I guess that would code as white?

Gummi Bears whitewashed ? or has Gruffy supposed to be black

i don't see cartoon race

was scrooge ever outed as scottish in dickens canon or was that a retcon by disney?

Disney yeah idk Mickey and Donald seem v ethnicity-neutral to me.

By neutral you mean Caucasian?

xp. no ebenezer scrooge is not of scottish decent. i had always assumed it was just due to scots being known for their thrift/maybe biographically influenced a little by andrew carnegie?

mickey mouse was originally a racist caricacture, iirc

By neutral you mean Caucasian?

no I mean that their ethnicity is indeterminate, ie, I do not detect any ethnic signifiers, beyond them speaking English (nominally, in Donald's case). Dunno how much weight you wanna put on the language they speak.

(xp) also the most ironic screen Scrooge was Kelsey Grammer Alastair Sim, who was Scottish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R3cvbLsbAk

you can skip to 3:04

The non-humanoid cartoon characters, that is.

What about just non-humanoids? We figured out my wife codes all North American forest animals as regional varieties of white people.

Groundhogs = Appalachia
Squirrels = New England
Beavers = Minnesota
Deer = Southeast, also "old money"
Bears = Jeff Bridges

Re: Boop's Jewish signifiers, the essential reading here (which I think I've linked on ILX before?) is Amelia Holberg, "Betty Boop: Yiddish Film Star," in American Jewish History, no. 4 (1999): 291-312. She points out, e.g., the "Old Country" father with yarmulke-shaped bald spot in "Minnie the Moocher," and the way "כּשר" (kosher) pops up visually as a comic aside. To Holberg, "it was exactly this inability to lose all trace of ethnicity and vulgarity which prevented the Fleischer cartoons from becoming as popular as Disney’s."

On the 'urban' in Fleischer and lack thereof in Disney, see Stefan Kanfer, Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from Betty Boop to Toy Story (New York: Scribner, 1997), pp. ~63-73; and especially Norman Klein, "Fleischer: Cities, Machines and Immigrant Life," in Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon (New York: Verso, 1993).

I mashed all of these together in a term paper a few years ago, trying to tease out the "urbanity" of these different cartoons; to the extent that depictions of the characters' milieu matters for "reading" their race - and I think it does - then hopefully this is germane to this thread. Basically I think Disney's cartoons look like the world that WASPs who moved west to Los Angeles (as Disney did) thought they would find there. Broadly, to quote myself, "Betty’s world is urban: the street, the apartment, the cabaret, and sometimes the suburb. Donald’s is pastoral: the sea, the wilderness, the farm, the small town." If you'll indulge me:

Specifically: Betty Boop appeared in one hundred twenty film shorts between 1930 and 1939. By my count of the one hundred and thirteen surviving shorts, thirty-nine (35%) are set at least partially in a visibly urban milieu. Donald Duck, between his 1934 debut and the 1944 drafting of Dialectic of Enlightenment, made eighty-three non-trivial appearances in Disney shorts. Only fifteen of these (18%) take place in unambiguously “urban” settings, with three more hesitatingly suggestive of a city.

These numbers do not tell the full story. As Klein puts it, of Fleischer’s cartoons, "none was more packed with urban imagery than Betty Boop." Boop’s city is fully populated with background signifiers familiar to an urban audience: laundry lines strung between tenements, boarded-up Depression shop-fronts, alley cats, densely-packed high-rises, street performers, cigarette girls. “Betty Boop For President” (1932) features haywire trolley cars, a long-shot of a Manhattan-esque island, and throngs of celebrants at a ticker-tape parade. While some later Boop appearances mimic Disney’s nostalgic Americana (and many confine her to a domestic interior, urbanism unknown), others maintain her cosmopolitanism: in “Grampy’s Indoor Outing” (1936) she lives in a streamlined concrete apartment building, complete with abstract-art rug; “So Does An Automobile” (1939) revolves around an “auto hospital” in a loft building with elevator; and “More Pep” (1936) takes place in downtown Manhattan – both as cartoon and as live-action footage. Boop’s urban spirit is apparent even in cartoons with garbled scenography, such as “Riding the Rails” (1938). Here, Betty somehow rides a subway from a Disneyesque suburb to a downtown toy store – but the humor derives from subway inconveniences familiar to an urban audience, like overstuffed cars and oversized fellow passengers. Even cartoons set far from the city are made more urban than necessary: “Poor Cinderella” (1934) is set largely in the “townish” parts of the fairy tale, complete with buzzing crowds, and many of the small-town shorts quickly relocate the action to a vaudeville theater interior.

Donald's infrequent urban adventures are a mixed bag: sometimes the city is as bright, colorful and clean as Donald himself, but not always. In “Mickey’s Trailer” (1938), Donald and his friends begin the day’s drive by abandoning their urban stopping point in front of a grotesque city dump. “Officer Duck” (1939) sees Donald sent to the wrong side of the tracks to arrest a hardened criminal at his gray, run-down house in the shadow of a dour brown gasometer. And in “Donald’s Lucky Day,” (1939) Donald’s job as a bicycle deliveryman in a rough dockside district puts him in mortal danger, as gangsters hire him to deliver a package (shoved through a speakeasy door-slot) containing a live bomb. But much more often, Donald appears on the farm, or in the American wild, where he usually has some ill-fated recreational ambition (picnicking, camping, moose-hunting). The most typical Donald setting is a loose amalgamation of rural, small-town and suburban signifiers: cheery detached houses with backyards and picket fences give way rapidly to rolling hills, dirt roads and leafy woodlands, with occasional stops by a swimming hole, skating pond, or one-room schoolhouse. This world is typical of Disney from the middle Thirties on; Mickey, Goofy and Pluto all occupy similar terrain.

(See again Klein and Kanfer. By the way, you can find basically all of these shorts on YouTube if you search by name.)

This can be illustrated by a comparison of Duck and Boop cartoons with similar premises, for example “Donald’s Gold Mine” (1942) and “I Heard” (1933), both set in mines. The Boop cartoon is introduced by African-American jazz conductor Don Redman, and caricatures an industrial mining operation. With a backdrop of smokestacks, an endless series of workers trudge in and out of the mine, arriving at “Betty Boop’s Tavern” where Boop and Redman (as a canine waiter) perform and serve up chow. It is the way a miner or a factory worker would understand mining. In Disney’s cartoon, the mine is an artisanal operation populated only by Donald and his donkey. It has a conveyer belt, but no operators and no foremen. While both cartoons must logically take place in remote settings, Boop’s is fundamentally more “industrial” and thus arguably more "urban."

To me, all of that would have - for a 1930s-40s audience - certainly made Donald and Mickey more "white," just considering the demographics of access to the landscape of picket fences and easy living that the Disney shorts depict.

I love ILX

I Love Cultural Studies

I Love Doctor Casino

xp. no ebenezer scrooge is not of scottish decent. i had always assumed it was just due to scots being known for their thrift/maybe biographically influenced a little by andrew carnegie?

― -_- (jim in vancouver), Thursday, May 25, 2017 2:58 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There seems (based on the force of the article arguing against this) to be an attempt to read Scrooge as Jewish.

I see Bugs Bunny as "Brooklyn" (Italian and/or Jewish), but as said upthread, Mel Blanc's voicework has a lot to do with that.

I can speak to the white liberal guilt theme: years ago I decided Magilla Gorilla was rooted in anti-black stereotypes, and haven't watched many cartoons since.

Not Irish?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgZlw4O1qzk

as a mouthy member of a race best known for producing huge families, he's practically the bunny dmac

I Love Doctor Casino

awww <3

Always thought Destro from GI Joe was supposed to be black, but from looking into it, it appears he's white (thought the live action version might have been white washing). It's just one of the main voice actors was black and the way he was drawn sometimes. I can't be the only one who thought he was a black character.

Found this about the black voice actor Arthur Burghardt.

http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2014/02/26/the-voice-of-gi-joes-destro-was-a-badass-imprisoned-for-draft-resistance

The walrus ghost played by Cab Calloway is obvs Cab Calloway

Don't have much more insight other than, you know, as I get older I really appreciate the urban tradition in American kid's entertainment Dr Casino mentions. Trolleys and tenement blocks and street scenes in Boop cartoons and, for someone of my age, the reference points are Sesame Street and Ghostbusters and Turtles. There was also a homegrown Thomas-like series called TUGS which featured various tugboats living the life on the Hudson Bay. I have a distinct childhood memory of demanding to go and look at the statue of Madonna and being disappointed that it was in New York which was in another country.

Being white I have no idea how well or how badly any of this stuff handles race per se, but it feels like a big positive step to have general urban life celebrated.

http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/tugs/images/1/17/Zebedee.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20100921010724

Looks like Bob Hoskins.

as a mouthy member of a race best known for producing huge families, he's practically the bunny dmac

― heck i've even been an 'oyster pirate' (bizarro gazzara), Saturday, 27 May 2017 18:16 (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Eyyyy

xp The model-making on TUGS was first-class. Details like using planks of wood as shock absorbers along the hull because the usual rubber car tyres were too expensive in the Depression, and those tower cranes and warehouses. Soot and dirt everywhere. One of the characters was a dredging platform.

This man played Barney the dinosaur for 10 years — here's what it was like pic.twitter.com/RbdrQ5UxBD

— Business Insider (@businessinsider) June 7, 2017

I assume all of the Backyardigans are black. Maybe not Pablo.

The California Raisins are black

Does Audrey Jr. in Littel Shop pf Horros count?