The Four Color Media Monitor

The Washington Examiner (via Pamela Geller) says Disney Plus has traveled further down the moral panic road, and made it harder for young children to view 2 notable Disney films of the past:

The move comes after Disney placed warnings on certain children's movies for “negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people and cultures.”

Children under the age of 7 will now no longer be able to watch the movies, including Swiss Family Robinson and The Aristocats. Adults with Disney+ accounts will still be able to watch the movies.

Disney explained why the movies were pulled, saying in the case of Dumbo: “The crows and musical number pay homage to racist minstrel shows, where white performers with blackened faces and tattered clothing imitated and ridiculed enslaved Africans on Southern plantations. The leader of the group in Dumbo is Jim Crow, which shares the name of laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States.”

Peter Pan was pulled because “the film portrays Native people in a stereotypical manner that reflects neither the diversity of Native peoples nor their authentic cultural traditions. It shows them speaking in an unintelligible language and repeatedly refers to them as ‘redskins,’ an offensive term. Peter and the Lost Boys engage in dancing, wearing headdresses and other exaggerated tropes.”

The Aristocats will no longer be available to children because “the (Siamese) cat (Shun Gon) is depicted as a racist caricature of East Asian peoples with exaggerated stereotypical traits such as slanted eyes and buck teeth.”

What are the chances the films will be removed from their broadcasting site altogether? In eventual time, there won't be anything left for them to offer the public. At this point, they'll probably deconstruct much of their theme parks to boot, right down to the company founder's monuments, and virtually strip the whole enterprise of its name. The Jewish Press addressed the crisis while asking if the Bible will be the next target of the cancel culture mob:

How else to explain the rash of wild book banning and movie cancellation of late?

First they came for Jean and Laurent de Brunhoff’s books on Babar the Elephant, which were deemed as “celebrations of colonialism” because the title character leaves the jungle and later returns to “civilize” his fellow animals.

Then they came for H. A. Rey’s Curious George books, targeted for cancellation because the premise of a white man (with a yellow hat!) bringing home a monkey from Africa was said to be demeaning to Africans and especially African Americans.

Then they came for children’s movies, leading Disney Plus to pull Peter Pan, Dumbo, Aristocats, Lady and the Tramp, The Jungle Book, and Swiss Family Robinson from its offerings for children under seven. Disney labelled these as movies that contain “stereotypes and negative depictions of people or cultures” that could corrupt the souls of young people. (PBS also has put “sensitivity warnings” on Sesame’s Muppets).

In Dumbo, you see, the crows “pay homage to racist minstrel shows.” Peter Pan “portrays Native people in a stereotypical manner that reflects neither the diversity of Native peoples nor their authentic cultural traditions. Peter and the Lost Boys engage in dancing, wearing headdresses and other exaggerated tropes.” [...]

Then they came for Dr. Seuss, including his iconic books And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, If I Ran the Zoo and McElligot’s Pool – because of “racist and insensitive imagery.” What is “insensitive” here? An Asian person wearing a conical hat, holding chopsticks, and eating from a bowl, and a drawing of two bare-footed African men wearing what appear to be grass skirts with their hair tied above their heads.

An “academic” journal ridiculously has published “The Cat Is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss’s Children’s Books.” Theodor Seuss Geisel was accused posthumously of “racial transgressions across his entire publishing career.”

Undoubtedly next on the guillotine will be Berenstein Bears. Why? Well, here is a famous (and certainly-offensive-to-the-woke) paragraph from this beloved series of books by Stan and Jan Berenstain: “I’m a father. I’m a he. A father’s something you could be. I’m a mother. I’m a she. A mother’s something you could be.” Such horrible gender stereotyping. Burn all the Berenstein Bear books!

The problem here is not the cultural effort to diversify children’s book characters and their creators. The problem is the “cancellation” of well-meaning works out of an uncritical and violent embrace of “critical race theory.” It’s one thing to take a few truly bad books off the shelves. It’s another thing all-together to see racism and “gender-backwardness” everywhere and try to impose a new “woke” ideological straitjacket on society.

And the real segments they don't want to offend aren't heterosexuals and observant Judaists. Quite the opposite, it's LGBT advocates, atheists and all who fit the Orwellian brand the leftists in the US consider appropriate segments of society, lifestyles and belief systems. What's offensive about any targeting of Curious George is that illustrator Rey and his wife Margaret narrowly escaped the Nazis during WW2, and those who attacked their children's books posthumously insulted a couple who escaped the Holocaust, a tragedy far worse than what the little monkey protagonist of Rey's series went through. And with that told, just like indeed, the Berenstein Bears could be next on the hit list, DC/Marvel fans would do well to realize that many notable works under their ownership, superhero or otherwise, could also be next on the PC book burning list. Just think: the writings and illustrations of Siegel, Shuster, Kirby and Lee could indeed one day fall victim to this PC tidal wave no matter how or why they're scripted and drawn. Even Will Eisner could one day be victimized by this, all because, during three quarters of the Spirit strip's 1940-52 run, Ebony White was drawn stereotypically and had a heavy accent, even though he was otherwise respected by the other stars of the strip as a character, and the woke-mob could also use the excuse that Eisner, from what I know, found feminism unappealing, and was critical of Islam in his last graphic novel from 2004 ("The Plot"), to get his writings banned. But what really leads to this situation is when the people in charge of the creations and properties - which could include family relatives - refuse to stand behind their forefathers' legacies. One of Geisel's stepdaughters did speak in his defense, but another one did not, or at least didn't argue why it'd be better not to stop publishing them.

And since we're on this subject, HBO host Bill Maher made the following statement about somebody who's not making a fuss over Dr. Seuss books, while all this time, the USA has constant wokeness competitions:

HBO’s Real Time host Bill Maher warned of the rising influence of China globally and in the United States — a concern routinely ignored by Democrats in his own party. China, Maher cautioned, is growing in dominance as America continues to allow cultural issues, such as the political correctness of iconic children’s books, to distract from more pressing issues.

“You’re not going to win the battle for the 21st century if you are a silly people. And Americans are a silly people,” Bill Maher said during his monologue Friday night. “Do you know who doesn’t care that there’s a stereotype of a Chinese man in a Dr. Seuss book? China. All 1.4 billion of them couldn’t give a crouching tiger flying fuck because they’re not a silly people. If anything, they are as serious as a prison fight.”

Based on this, you could say the leftists who got cold feet over the illustrations in those 6 Dr. Seuss books - not to mention however the Aristocats is drawn - entered a moral panic without even publicly debating whether China's own populace cares or not. And it didn't even matter to them if the Chinese had no issue with Geisel's illustrations. But does Maher have the courage to admit the Democrats' embrace of all these petty ideologies led to this whole cultural disaster of the 21st century? Probably not. And leftists who don't have the courage to challenge their leadership's narratives only explain why the slide into considerable censorship is taking place at such an accelerated pace.

Labels: animation, censorship issues, Europe and Asia, good artists, good writers, misogyny and racism, politics, technology