Cartoon Network showed June Bugs with a minimum of racially-charged cartoons as planned and reported, but reportedly some of them will be shown in Toon Heads: The Wartime Cartoons, 1 July at ten PM--with no time zone given in the report I saw, which is apparently trickling around as email, then posted to FurryMUCK's bulletin board. So I'm trying to substantiate it.
Cartoonnetwork.com's schedule page doesn't offer a schedule for Toon Heads at all. That's not entirely surprising, since Toon Heads is the right show with which to showcase cartoons as historical, cultural works, and Cartoonnetwork.com is designed for the kids, to whom they couldn't show the banned cartoons during June Bugs.
Moreover has no mention of it with "toon heads" "wartime cartoons", though searching for simply "cartoon network" hit this NY Times article (try librariansrule:yestheydo courtesy the excellent librarian.net) reporting on the twelve cartoons' absence from June Bugs (and that Mike Lazzo, senior vice president of programming... said the network felt no pressure from its parent corporation
)... but then uberfans in alt.animation.warner-bros, in addition to discussing the whole thing, report one of the twelve, What's Cookin' Doc?, was scheduled and shown.
The NYT article comments on the Internet, closing with:
Already, the banned cartoons can be found on the Internet, which seems fitting. The Internet is a sprawling, unbridled, inchoate world--a global id. Bugs, Daffy, Tom and Jerry and the rest should feel right at home.
This is true given the wide swath of geeks and other Internet users who like cartoons and the general cartoony nature of the Internet as a medium. A real, immersive cyberspace wouldn't be as Gibsonian as Gibson's, but a mix of geeky in-jokes and cartoony fanboyism, the sweetspot Reboot hit a few times (such as with that raccoon character). You can tell as much by simply reading the Jargon File.
The Moreover search also turns up this South China Morning Post article on same. It points out the issue raised on aaw-b that there are other cartoons just as insensitive to, say, Scotsmen, Arabs, and Texans that are still shown.
But my good-enough confirmation comes from the Fresno Bee:
Some clips from the excised Bugs episodes will air later this year as part of "Toonheads Go to War," an installment in the Cartoon Network's series on animation. The episodes could also be part of a future documentary.
And there you have it.
Comments
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Whats are people’s problem now a days?! I saw some of these cartoons and I liked them. Why can’t they show them? Because they are racial. So what! They told the truth of how some Americans felt during this time. They also made a joke of the war so people could at least have a laugh. I am sorry to say I was not alive during this time. In fact I was not born untill 1984. Quit a few years after the war. But I still like funny and old cartoons even if they make fun of old controversies.