The Four Color Media Monitor

As though it weren't bad enough that DC's turning the Flintstones into a so-called "adult" rendition, now they're hijacking the animal cast of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon products and turning the pink-furred Snagglepuss into a homosexual playright in the 1950s. The writer, Mark Russell, gave the following interview to somebody who apparently believes, based on the character design alone, that the anthropomorph was literally meant to be homosexual when he was originally introdced in 1959:

HILOBROW: I was so happy to know that there was another home for you in comics after the untimely ouster of PREZ.

RUSSELL: Other than that unforeseen cancellation, working with them has been really great — and I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’m also writing a Snagglepuss comic for them.

HILOBROW: Oh. My. God. No, I had not.

RUSSELL: It’s Snagglepuss sort of reinvented as a gay Southern Gothic playwright?

HILOBROW: [Laughs] He is, he is!!

RUSSELL: Yeah, it was not much of a stretch at all. I envision him like a tragic Tennessee Williams figure; Huckleberry Hound is sort of a William Faulkner guy, they’re in New York in the 1950s, Marlon Brando shows up, Dorothy Parker, these socialites of New York from that era come and go. I’m looking forward to it; that’s what I’ll do after The Flintstones. [Russell’s contract in the gravel pit is for 12 issues.] I’ll go right from that into Snagglepuss.

HILOBROW: I’ve long admired the affirmative gayness of Snagglepuss.

RUSSELL: Yeah, it’s never discussed and it’s obviously ignored in the cartoons ’cuz they were made at a time when you couldn’t even acknowledge the existence of such a thing, but it’s still so obvious; so it’s natural to present it in a context where everybody knows, but it’s still closeted. And dealing with the cultural scene of the 1950s, especially on Broadway, where everybody’s gay, or is working with someone who’s gay, but nobody can talk about it — and what it’s like to have to try to create culture out of silence.

The only tragedy here is SJWs pulling a cultural appropriation, exploiting past creations for their own political views, further confirmed by the following:

HILOBROW: Amazing. So this has been publicly announced?

RUSSELL: Yes, in fact, an eight-page sampler comes out in March in the Suicide Squad/Banana Splits Annual [laughs] — it’s about Snagglepuss being dragged in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities! Then the series will begin in September or October I think. It’s gonna be very different from The Flintstones, it’s more about the creative process; much more of an intimate story, much less about social criticism.

HILOBROW: You’ll go from the political to the personal.

RUSSELL: I wanted to go from the telescope to the microscope, sort of.

The only place he's going is to the political Social Justice soapbox. The committee was formed to deal with communism; I don't think it ever decreed that homosexuality was dangerous to state security. Yet it's clear what the birdbrains who're writing this nonsense want to do: claim that their detractors consider homoseuxality un-American! How much more agenda-driven can they get?

Warner Todd Huston, when addressing this, said:

Snagglepus was a giant, pink, anthropomorphic cat introduced in 1959 that hit kids’ cartoons years before the Pink Panther debuted (1963). But Snagglepuss was far more chatty than his pink cousin, sporting catch phrases such as “Heavens to Murgatroyd!” “Exit, stage left,” and “Heavens to Betsy.”

Few noticed anything strange about Snagglepuss when he appeared on such Hanna-Barbera cartoons as The Yogi Bear Show and The Quick Draw McGraw Show, but years later, gay activists decided that the character’s flamboyant and theatrical tendencies meant he was secretly gay.

Or, put another way, they looked around for whatever slang and acts they decided would fit their agendas, and hijack/culturally appropriate them for their own use at everybody else's expense. That's why slangs like "queer", which was just synonymous with "strange", "bizarre" and "peculiar" became less commonly used after the mid-60s, because it became mostly embarrassing as the words were increasingly associated with homosexuality. I wouldn't be shocked if the Pink Panther underwent similar misuse since that time either. They don't even care that Hanna-Barbera themselves never claimed Snagglepuss was meant to be gay, or consider that the color pink of Inspector Clouseau's famous cat that served as the name for a diamond was meant as a joke, and Snagglepuss most likely was given pink fur for the same reason.

Russell didn’t say how presenting a pink lion being persecuted because he is gay is a commentary on today since being gay raises few eyebrows these days, especially in the entertainment media. In fact, in many ways, being gay is far more often portrayed as a badge of honor.

That's just the problem. It's basically presented as perfectly acceptable to reject the opposite sex, which is insulting to the opposite sex because it makes it sound as though the opposite somehow is worthless and unsuitable. As I was writing this, I thought of the disgraced Muppeteer Kevin Clash, who was forced to resign from Sesame Street after he was accused of having sexual relations with two underaged teens. He was married and had a child, but later divorced the lady, and what's irritating about that is that he was basically rejecting her because she was of the opposite sex. Seriously, I think it's an offensive example to set, and only lowers the bar in society ever more. Needless to say, with the discovery Clash pulled some dirty stunts 2 decades or so ago, he's damaged the reputation of Elmo, and some of the catchphrases associated with the little red monster puppet, explaining why they may not age well, and the cartoons with Snagglepuss may lose appeal to parents looking for older stuff to buy for their children's viewing.

Besides the sleazy propaganda this Russell and his interviewer are pushing, they also, oddly enough, make it sound as though they don't like the Flintstones as a cartoon series:

HILOBROW: There was something like that critique in the Flintstones cartoon too, because Fred was such a buffoon, and now in your book he’s like the Arthur Miller-esque everyman who’s trying to make sense of existence.

RUSSELL: In a way it was a really subversive cartoon, even though I don’t think it was intentional on their part, to portray the average American family living the American dream in such an unsympathetic way — there’s nothing really redeeming or likable about Fred, and Wilma is sort of a materialistic shrew. For me, I feel that [the cartoon’s] portrayal of society is incredibly optimistic, and [its] portrayal of the human beings that the story is actually about is incredibly pessimistic. I wanted to do the opposite; I wanted to portray Fred and Wilma as I see real people, who are usually noble, and thoughtful, and with really good intentions, but somehow, all these noble people with good intentions accumulate into a society which has gone horribly wrong. That’s kinda the central problem I’m trying to examine; how can people be so good one-on-one, and yet so awful as a group.

Gee, look who's talking, a guy who's forcing his ridiculous politics on older creations, and making them unrecognizable. Speaking of which, they also brought up - surprise! - their political biases:

HILOBROW: A question of even more urgency in this country since November 8th. A workable inquiry into how we can stay ourselves but come together. Since the election I’ve thought back a lot to Vendela Vida’s quote after Bush 2 first got in, that “Our lives remain our own great cause,” but that bespeaks a kind of insularity that no one can afford any more…

RUSSELL: That’s kind of a statement of privilege, because a lot of people, their own lives will be deeply and irrevocably affected by virtue of the fact that Trump’s president — much more so than in the Bush Administration. It’s funny because, a year ago, I would’ve thought that was the nadir of American political possibilities. In 2012, when the Republicans lost, Bobby Jindal was remonstrating that “we can no longer be the party of stupid.” But the problem apparently, is not that they were stupid, but that they weren’t stupid enough, and they just needed to take that extra step to win over a critical mass of American voters.

HILOBROW: It’s a good maxim for survival, if not optimism, that things can always get worse.

RUSSELL: They literally needed a wrestling villain to put on the ticket in 2016 in order to prevail. The political philosophy behind Trumpism seems to be that the way to deal with the corrupting influence of money in politics is to replace all the politicians who took bribes with all the billionaires who made bribes.

Sounds to me like the usual liberal blame-only-the-rich-when-it-suits-them routine. And look who speaks of insularity; the kind of people who shun anybody whose politics don't coincide with theirs. Anybody who's that blatant with their leftism is only making clear where they're going with the very comics they're now writing. It'll be no surprise if the Flintstones comic has subtle leftism going around, one more reason why it's needless, and explaining perfectly why the Hanna-Barbera cartoons should've remained in the past.

Labels: animation, dc comics, licensed products, moonbat writers, msm propaganda, politics