Mabuse

There’s a certain type of racist that loves when Aunt Jamimah goes bye bye or when Tin Fey does this or when Disney locks Song of the South in the vault indefinitely. It makes it much easier to pretend it never happened.

The left is engaging in the same behavior the right did in the forties, fifties, and sixties. Full on witch hunts. And if you’re suspect you can't work anymore.

Anyone seen this?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilty_by_Suspicion

brayzie

In the case of Apu, I understand the problem. I think that the comedian guy who made the documentary was just trying to get his name out there, but yeah, Apu was a problematic character if you were an Indian in school at the time. Indian kids were a minority back then, and I heard kids of different ethnicities make fun of Indian or Arab kids, saying stuff like, "Thank you, come again!" in the Apu voice, and talking shit about their parents probably owning a Kwik-E-Mart.

As far as Cleveland from Family Guy, I don't watch the show, but I thought that Cleveland sounded like a regular dude, nothing stereotypical about his voice or way of speaking, unlike Hank Azaria's portrayal of Apu. But the voice actor for Cleveland said “persons of color should play characters of color.” He didn't say that characters' races should match with the actor playing them. That would obviously discount say, black actors from playing or voicing white characters. But it's pretty vague to say that "persons of color should play characters of color." It's almost like "People of Color" has become a singular race. Is it okay if a light-skinned Latino voices a black cartoon character? What about an Asian voicing Mexican character?

I saw a gif of it. It looks cringey. Hopefully Tropic Thunder gets pulled from all streaming services too. I mean, that's the most prominent and popular example of blackface in entertainment in recent times.


This is the opposite of being "proactive." They're responding to something AFTER it happened. I'm genuinely glad that Tina Fey is in a position where she can get stuff pulled from the net that's now, potentially harmful to her career and her upcoming, 1-hour 30 Rock special. But it's not coming from a place of being "better." It's not like racism and police brutality just started happening in 2020.

When you word it like that, yeah it sounds weird...and racist on the part of the people complaining. But when you word it like, people are complaining about episodes of 30 Rock being pulled it's a little more understandable.

It screams..."I need my racism in my show" from the average Joe? What does it say about the people who actually created the racist content, repeatedly, for this show? They got criticized for it at the time, and still continued with it. Why did they feel the need to do blackface multiple times on the show?

mike7162

Kevin Michael Richardson and Bree Summer have voiced dozens of white characters between them - what happens when someone says they can't play a certain character?

brayzie

De Niro made a period film about McCarthyism?? I have to check this out.

The difference with today is that every random person out there has an outlet (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook) to put their voice on equal footing with professional media in general. So if you're someone who wants to get likes and followers, dig up some shit from 20 years ago about a popular performer and BOOM, your post goes viral and you're Twitter famous. If you're an unknown living in Russia and want to fuck with U.S. elections, make up a story and BOOM suddenly "Hillary has AIDS" is trending. And in the case of Tina Fey, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, etc they're gonna be okay. Unlike the people in Hollywood who were accused of being communists. But I get your overall point on some of the similarities.

In that regard, I don't blame Disney, Tina Fey, and these other people doing what they can to avoid bad publicity that can potentially impact their projects and revenue. It's too easy for randos to start some shit with a Tweet, have it go viral, and fuck things up. Up and coming rapper Doja Cat was getting popular, and some random person made a Tweet making her out to look like a self-hating black, white supremacist who attacks "Women of Color." I looked into it, and a lot of the things that the Twitter user was claiming was exaggerated or hearsay. But there was a huge backlash because of it.

movieguru

I guess eventually they'll pull the entire series of The Dukes of Hazzard since it has a Confederate flag on the top of the car. Just about every episode of All in the Family can be pulled as it could be considred offensive. Would the pull The Jeffersons for being racially offensive to white people? In so many of those episodes George Jefferson refers to white people as Honkeys and a mixed race woman as a zebra.

brayzie

Amazon Might Pull ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ From IMDb TV Free Streaming Service Over Confederate Flag Imagery

It's a possibility.

Is 30 Rock Racist?
an opinion piece from 2010 in the Huffington Post.

A more recent article about 30 Rock's use of blackface and subsequent avoidance of discussing the issue. Quite a good read.
Tina Fey’s Problems With Race Extend Far Beyond ‘30 Rock’s’ Blackface

movieguru

It gets a bit silly to have to remove things just because it might be offensive to someone. When I managed a retail store years ago, I had an old lady come up to me demanding that I remove a product off of the sales floor because she considered it offensive. The product: An American Greetings gift bag that had a picture of a kid picking his nose with the caption "I picked out something especially for you". She was irate, yelling and screaming, about how offensive it was because she was a retired school teacher who had to constantly tell children to stop picking their nose. I had to explain to her that if I removed everything from the store that anyone found offensive, we would have an empty store. I would have to remove Uncle Ben's rice, Aunt Jamima syrup, Proctor and Gamble products due to their possible link to Satanic cults, gossip magazines (really all magazines, because someone could find something offensive with all of them), birth control products, mouse/rodent traps due to Peta, etc. There would literally be nothing left in the store to sell. The same thing will happen if we start to pull every tv show or movie out of circulation that someone finds offensive.

Count Dooku

Ever since the Meghan Kelly controversy, I have seen many commentators and read some articles explaining why, in their opinion, any instance of a white person putting on make-up to appear as a person of color is racist, and I have never been convinced that it is true. And these latest developments only have convinced me more that I am correct.

Think about Jimmy Fallon and Billy Crystal doing impersonations of Chris Rock and Sammy Davis in comedy sketches in "blackface."
Do you think Fallon and Crystal are racists? Do you think they hated Rock and Davis? Do you think they wanted to mock Rock and Davis because Rock and Davis are black? Do you think these comedy sketches mocked and degraded people of color as a whole group, or even Rock and Davis in particular? Do you think there was any agenda, on the part of anyone involved in the creation of these comedy pieces, to communicate a message that people of color are "less than" in any way?

Or do you think that Fallon was doing a celebrity impression, and when performers on SNL do impressions, they almost always try to make themselves look as much like the person as possible?

I know that there are people who see Jimmy Fallon made up to look like Rock, or Jimmy Kimmel made up to look like Karl Malone, and say that they think it is racist.
And I believe that they think that, but I also am absolutely certain that their belief does not make it so, and another person can believe something different.

If Fey wants to scrub some episodes of her show because she does not want to risk offending people who might be offended, then she can do that.

And if Fallon and Kimmel want to apologize for offending people who were offended, then they can do that.

I don't think it is right, or even a beneficial idea, to decide that doing this thing is always a racist action. Just like I know that every time a white person speaks "the N-word" is is not racist. Sometimes you are just singing along with a song.

Mike86

The problem especially with comedy boils down to someone can find something they’re offended by in just about anything. It’s kind of the nature of comedy and some things might be uncomfortable for some people. I’ve always been of the mindset of if I don’t like something I just don’t watch it. Not one that’s: “I don’t like something so I have to be in an uproar and make it so everybody who does enjoy can’t any longer”.

I think we’ve gotten way, way too hyper sensitive. Are there injustices in society that need to be corrected? Absolutely, but to go and censor or outright pull things from the past just seems so silly. Learn from what happened and explain why something isn’t right instead of just brushing it under the rug.

candyrocket786

So removing an 8 second clip from The Office is considered progress? 🤣 Mine is still intact on my VUDU copy.

Now if they erase Tropic Thunder, South Park and Quentin Tarantino films from history, we're probably fucked.

They better not touch Justified or Nacho Libre.

Rob V

I guess every episode of Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia will be removed.

cultshock

Wouldn't it be better to work on fixing current problems rather than wringing ones hands about TV shows and movies from years ago and trying to retroactively "fix" them? That's just an easily applied band aid that doesn't address the larger problem, big whoop, we edited/removed some media, everything is all better now. That's the way this always goes and it solves little.

Meathead

Still intact in my complete series on iTunes... plus I have a backup copy. Still available for purchase on VUDU as well.

Mondo Kane

I thought physical media was dead?

candyrocket786

I'm guessing piracy and sales in physical media will start to surge soon.

I wonder how far off we are from the introduction of the Tetragrammaton and Prosecution of Sense Offenses

MLBFan24

I haven’t read all the posts, so I’m not sure if this has been said yet...

Maybe this is all a ploy by the studios to get consumers to purchase the physical media again, now that streaming services are removing select episodes.

Crocker Jarmen

Although I would have defended the way these shows used "blackface" as being making fun of racist thinking instead of being racist, seeing the number of shows that did this exact same joke now makes me realize it's really hacky and unoriginal, and shouldn't be done anymore for that reason alone.

morriscroy

More likely to be a ploy to quickly clear their warehouses of old inventory collecting dust for a long time.

Otherwise in the absence of current events, that inventory would eventually have been written off for tax purposes and subsequently sent straight to the garbage dump accordingly.

whotony

Was watching Silver Spoons and this came up in an ep. should they ban this too?

d2cheer

Agree none of this stuff should be pulled. People are pussy's end of story...

Sure...but everyone else that did it are??? For fucks sake.

brayzie

“One has to wonder why Fey and so many white liberal entertainers felt so comfortable performing ironic racism over and over and over again.”

It reminds me of Spike Lee’s Bamboozled, which came out in 2000, way before white entertainers like Robert Downey Jr, Sarah Silverman and Tina Fey were using blackface to teach us about racism.

Dscarpad

Well there goes the episode of all in the family .

clckworang

I don't agree with the pulling of episodes when a simple disclaimer at the beginning of the episode will suffice. To be honest, this just feels like another way of whitewashing history. The fact is you made that episode, and it aired. You can't and shouldn't be able to erase that. It's not like blackface is something that just recently went out of fashion. All of a sudden now it's racially insensitive?

It's funny that Silver Spoons got brought up. Growing up in the 80s, my first exposure to the n word was just watching regular network TV. It was used on family shows. Hard to believe.

Michael Corvin

They aren't erasing anything. They made it and you watched it. End of story. They have zero obligation to provide anyone with a copy of it.

atrium

This is just ridiculous semantics.

Refusing to allow people to view it (legally) is essentially an attempt to erase it.