SPOKANE — Local animation enthusiast Breyer Levins was excited to find that the golden age cartoon from the 1940’s he was watching miraculously had nothing problematic in it – whoops, spoke too soon on that one, sorry, sources experiencing Hollywood’s shameful past confirmed.
“I just woke up this morning and wanted to give myself a little boost of the Saturday Morning dopamine I grew up with, so I popped on a rip of an old ‘Cartoon Network Acme Hour’ to watch while I ate my cereal. Got a few Roadrunners and the Popeye where Olive Oyl is sleepwalking through a construction site at first… Honestly, it was smooth sailing for a good 15 minutes or so. But then, one started with a sign indicating we were in a country other than the U.S, and I got a lump in my throat. Out came the stereotypes and boy oh boy they were not subtle?” said Levins, as he pushed away his bowl of Golden Grahams to skip ahead in the video. “Just a total bummer, man. And this YouTube rip is from a block from 1994! What were they thinking putting this in regular rotation for children?”
Onlookers of a nearby duck pond were surprised to see a frazzled Levins run by and toss his laptop into the water after the incident.
“I was sitting there tossing some stale sourdough to the geese when I saw this bearded guy – just a beard, no mustache, mind you – huff and puff on by and chuck his Macbook into the pond. It was the damndest thing. He shouted out something about it being ‘of it’s time, but still’ and then ripped off the Mighty Mouse t-shirt he was wearing, as an act of, I guess, defiance,” said octogenarian Kendall Waldbaum, from his favorite bench. “After that, he vowed to only watch Pixar pictures from here on out… Whatever that meant. Anyway, that bastard spooked my geese, so he deserved whatever happened to him, I say.”
Professional animation historian Rosalynda Piers expounded on her tireless effort to bring attention to the general public’s possible problematic nostalgia for the 1990’s.
“Oh, everyone expects the occasional harmful stereotype from the stuff made by folks in the 30’s and 40’s, sure…but then you go to watch something from the 90’s and expect a certain decorum that simply isn’t there. Caricatures, stereotypes, people of other cultures voiced by the same 3 white actors doing questionable accents,” said Piers, as she combed through a 2004 block of Cartoon Cartoon Fridays in weary dismay. “I mean, Apu wasn’t changed until an entire documentary was made about the matter. You’re better off making your own cartoons at this point!”
At press time, Levins is expected to make another trip to the duckpond to toss his TV in once he discovers the amount of “gay panic” in even late-aughts SNL repeats.
