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

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

yeah idk I think that's a stretch

what race do you think michigan j. frog is, shakey?

I mean you could just say that the context these cartoons were created in was totally racist and that's correct, but I don't think Mickey conforms to a specific blackface stereotype, nor was he intended to.

there is all kinds of racist crap in Disney (and other major and minor studio) cartoons of the era, obviously.

Michigan J. Frog is an explicitly racist caricature

jeet heer on blackface as an element in cartoons in the 20s and 30s: https://sanseverything.wordpress.com/2009/08/11/felix-the-cat-blackface/

he mention mickey, felix and bosko

1: bosko was obviously and explicitly a racialised cartoon from the off
2: with mickey it's more blurred, not least by what he would become for imperial-phase disney (=the most iconic cartoon character of all, an instant silhouette index sign of the disney ideology): early on, he's happy-go-lucky and naturally musical, both characteristics of blackface, but less obviously a caricature than bosko, who rivalled him in popularity in the early 30s
3: felix is the most complex, really: he's very obviously a cat in his very first outing, feline follies in 1919, but become more enigmatic as he became more anthropomorphic -- his popularity had faded by the time sound arrived, so the musical dimension (which is a key to the ambiguities of blackface) was much less present

more uncertain territory - Song of the South

lol

This does open the door back up for me to make the "Br'er Roadrunner" joke that I was too late to post earlier in the thread, though.

surprised no one's mentioned krazy kat yet, where posthumous research into george herriman's life and identity have provoked a lot of interesting takes on the original work:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Herriman#Race_and_identity

ppl we are overlooking a more urgent question hidden as a link halfway down the vice article viz: "is spongebob squarepants the new che guevara?"

I do see him on a lot of T-shirts

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).

― Οὖτις, Thursday, May 25, 2017 12:04 PM (yesterday)

White culture is often/typically blind to itself, to its own distinct ethnic character. Therefore, relative to white culture, to be "indeterminate" is to be implicitly white. E.g., a simple stick figure reads as a "white guy" to many/most white people. In order to seem, for instance, black or female, it needs some othering detail.

I can't speak for everyone, but I suspect that Bugs Bunny seemed (invisibly) white to most white kids of my generation - and moreso to my parents. He's a caricature of a once-common 20th century stereotype: the white working-class Brooklyn boy, loud of mouth and small of stature. He was created and voiced by (Jewish) white guys, and the rare appearances of distinctly "black" nonhuman characters in those old Warner Brothers cartoons are very differently stylized.

I don't think Bugs was created by Jewish guys btw.

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?