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

now I'm thinking about how there are black transformers. "Jazz" So , on Cybertron, there was ethnicity variations? I mean there wasn't "race" in a skin tone sense as they are all different colors of car. Why did Jazz have the mannerisms and speech of a 20th century black person in america? Did he grow up on earth before going to cybertron?

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

lol

I thought that vox was familiar its Scatman Crothers !

fleischer bros' betty boop also based on a black singer, baby esther -- possibly indirectly, via helen kane's blatant appropriation of baby esther's shtick (kane attempted to sue the fleischers but lost)

― mark s, Saturday, 27 May 2017 2:06 AM (nineteen hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

With my 4yo daughter having become a massive betty boop fan, i know that there's a very early cartoon of her leaving home to become a singer, and her parents are absolutely stereotypes of 1930s jewish immigrants in new york

When I was a kid I knew next to nothing about other cultures, so I thought of them as sui generis.

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

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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?