Tom & Jerry in trouble
for smoking
Tucker Carlson: Smoking in children’s cartoons is a ‘symbol of freedom and masculinity’
Sep 21, 2014
The hosts of “Fox & Friends” on Sunday expressed outraged that male comic book characters were being “wussified,” and that an effort was being made not to “sexualize” female characters.
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Smoking in Tintin cartoon breaks Turkish law
The Turkish government has fined a television channel for airing an episode of the Tintin cartoon that illegally showed criminal gang members smoking.
Snuffing out Goofy’s cigarette
By Jens F. Laurson and George A. Pieler, News.com
Jan 10, 2008
With today’s technology, anyone can be a video editor (or producer).
Like it or not, the YouTube phenomenon empowers folks with ideas, both good and bad, and the clueless alike. Video re-edits–Goofy as a sex-drugs maniac or the Hamas-ripoff of Mickey Mouse teaching Palestinian kids to blow up people–cause Disney much heartburn.
But technology empowers in both directions, as 2007 proved. Disney, joined by Universal, promised to ban smoking scenes from “youth rated films.” Those films include older, even classic, products stashed away in the Disney Vault. Yes, smoking is in disrepute, but should we fear tobacco-as-entertainment?
In July 2007, when Disney promised a smoking ban for its “G” and “PG” products, the news was yawn-producing. What’s a little revisionism if it satisfies today’s sociopolitical climate? Stalin’s helpers got rid of inconvenient Trotsky-photographs with the wave of an icepick (low tech works, too). Much easier for Disney to ensure that smoking won’t be seen by impressionable audiences. A noble cause if you find the (usually) perfectly legal act of smoking a cigarette more disturbing than, say, the gratuitous spraying of bullets in an action movie or the law-trashing car chases that even Herbie: Fully Loaded displays.
Tobacco-censors may have an easy time with The Shaggy Dog, The Santa Clause 3–The Escape Clause (no pipe for the old man, though!), and The Chronicles of Narnia–films where neither cigarettes nor smoldering bodies do much smoking. It will be tougher for Disney to extend the ban to its Touchstone and Miramax subsidiaries. Can’t not smoke in Hollywoodland or Renaissance (heck, it’s set in Paris!). No wonder Disney gave itself a “best efforts”-type loophole for adult fare.
Any company can define its market niche, and Disney’s Bob Iger was pandering to antismoking calls-to-action from Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), key video industry overseer, and the Motion Picture Association of America. Yet the social and political tendencies driving a company to promote the increasingly belligerent “correctification” of modern life–from prescribing whether or where people may smoke or eat trans fats or drive, or how they raise their children (and how not!) is troubling. It asserts that straitjackets lead to a better life, but more often they bring not the “perfect society,” but a stultifying and oppressing civil order that sacrifices its freedoms, agility, and inner resilience to the moral imperative du jour.
For truly healthy societies there needs to be room for human stupidity.
Can’t 21st century folks make their own decisions? The idea of a film studio contributing to a better world by not showing the deviant act of smoking on the screen is an absurd, yet frightening step into a dark, absurdist fantasy. Never mind that we might get a censored Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with a 100 percent smoke-free caterpillar, or Cruella DeVille with a patch, instead of a deliciously evil cigarette.
This is not hypothetical: Goofy already had his cigarette edited out of El Gaucho Goofy in Saludos Amigos, a U.S.-backed exercise in cultural diplomacy designed to counter Nazi influence in South America. Yet Jose Carioca, in the same film, kept his cigar–so far–and gets Donald Duck roaring drunk. American-ish cartoon characters set a bad smoking example, but not Portuguese-speaking parrots? The cultural contrast shows the impossibility of endless cinematic self-censorship–it inspires new, more radical forms of censorship.
Older technologies, too, have been instruments of censorship or suppression of historical truth, book-burning being the classic example. Should we not also care about deliberately-falsified history when a film made or set in the 1950s shows a clinically clean nonsmoking environment according to today’s cultural mores? What would Disney do to AMC’s hit Mad Men? Are Disney, Universal, and friends trying to protect us from health risks, or from historical realities that, today, make some uncomfortable?
The political underbelly to all this does not reassure. Markey holds a hearing calling for film industry censorship of smoking; the MPAA and its Washington, D.C., head, Dan Glickman, agree to consider smoking scenes in rating a films’ age-appropriateness; and Disney’s Iger rushes to lead the pack. No legislation needed, just propaganda.
Hollywood should choose. Do we believe in preserving the original “artist’s vision,” warts and all? Not incidentally, there’s a profound albeit subtle racial undertone in Disney taking Goofy’s smokes away while letting “ethnically different” cartoon characters smoke. It’s a particularly noxious case of political correctness and lifestyle prescriptions intruding into the lives of citizens, armored by impenetrable righteousness.
Yet there’s a fun follow-up: Chronological Donald Volume 3 was just released, with scenes of juvenile smoking (Huey, Dewey, Louie) pristinely intact. Disney, which actually made a similar no-tobacco pledge in 2004 but kept right on smoking, may be having the last laugh.
They probably deserve applause for this inconsistency: Promising to censor and then forgetting to actually do it may well be a surreal yet pragmatic answer to the whole problem.
The Great Disney Smoke-Out
August 16, 2007
By Starshine Roshell
Remember the hookah-puffing Caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland? The one whose cloudy exhalations made poor Alice cough, sputter and sneeze? His killer buzz just went up in smoke.
Disney president Robert Iger recently vowed to snuff out all depictions of smoking in the studio’s future family films. He said the company recognizes its profound influence over children, and while entire generations have been misled into believing that charming princes will rescue helpless but pretty girls, and that we should all adopt the life philosophy of a shiftless singing meerkat, he wants them to also know that a drag on a Marlboro will kill you dead.
Or something to that effect.
I suspect the decision was, in part, a nod to the ghost of Walt Disney himself, a chain smoker who died of lung cancer in 1966.
Advocacy groups have been hard-pressuring Hollywood to kick its on-screen smoking habit, and the Motion Picture Association of America announced in May that it would add smoking to the list of cinematic sins — including violence, profanity, nudity and drug use — that earn films harsher ratings.
Which is ironic, of course, when you consider the silver screen’s Golden Age, during which stars like Bette Davis and Humphrey Bogart were rarely seen without a cig in their elegantly lit, black-and-white fingers.
But if you add up the admittedly disturbing numbers — 75 percent of youth-rated movies depict smoking, and 175,000 Americans die from lung cancer each year — Disney’s decision makes both dollars and sense.
Sure, the ban is one of those wholly symbolic gestures that will benefit the studio more than any of its viewers. There never was much puffery in Disney properties to begin with: Cruella de Vil’s long cigarette holder, Peter Pan’s peace pipe. So an official smoke-out is a tiny effort to make in order to look like Hollywood heroes.
In some ways, the new policy is goofy. Iger’s reasoning is that “cigarette smoking is a hazard.” But so are sea witches, flying elephants and power-mad, hook-handed pirates. Disney films are full of behavior you wouldn’t want your kids to emulate: driving like Mr. Toad, lying like Pinocchio or stealing like Robin Hood — a common thief despite his right-hearted empathy for the poor and his sexy (I’m sorry, but prrrr) vigilante persona. Is it irresponsible for Disney to romanticize the artery-clogging pasta binge in which Lady and her high-cholesterol Tramp so carelessly engage?
Ultimately, though, I don’t want my kids lighting up any more than Bob Iger wants his stock dropping down. And since I’ve never bothered to complain that Disney flicks don’t show unprotected sex between unmarried mermaids, or depict needle-sharing between HIV-postive forest dwarves, then I really can’t lament the loss of realism when they choose to begin erasing other ugly habits from their otherwise immaculate scripts.
No, the problem isn’t in Disney prissing up its kiddie flicks; it’s in Iger’s promise to make a “serious attempt to eliminate” smoking in the company’s subsidiaries, Touchstone and Miramax. How would Miramax’ period films Gangs of New York, Chicago and The Aviator have looked with no cigarettes in them? How do you suppose Quentin Tarantino will react when they tell him that the characters in next year’s planned World War II flick Inglorious Bastards can maim as many people as they want, but they’d better not blow a single smoke ring?
The director’s bound to have some R-rated words for them, and I hope the movie-going public speaks up, too. Because when the Mouse House begins dictating which real-life behaviors grown-ups have a right to see — when cinema verite becomes cinema very-tame, and the exalting of squeaky clean role models become hazardous to my entertainment — then forgive me, Walt, but it’s time for us all to pipe up.
September 22, 2006
CLASSIC CARTOON SCENES GLAMORIZING SMOKING WILL BE REMOVED FROM BROADCASTS IN BRITAIN
BY SHELLEY EMLING
Gregory Mottola
Aug 23/06
OTTAWA CITIZEN
If children were inclined to imitate Tom and Jerry cartoons, they might blow each other up with firecrackers, attack each other with darts, pins, scissors and hammers, even slam each others fingers in piano lids.
Yet it is Toms lighting a cigarette in one episode and playing tennis with a cigar-smoker in another that caused a viewer in England to complain about the shows supposed unsuitability for children. In response, Turner Broadcasting is reviewing its archives with a view to editing out images that glamorize smoking.
The cat and mouse team born in the 1940s is still tearing across television screens. They were never models of behaviour, and appear even more cruel and callous by todays standards. The best way to appreciate them is as pieces of history, as pop art from televisions youth.
Some children are able to understand that, especially if parents explain it to them. Old films and TV shows portray behaviours and stereotypes that are rightly left out of childrens cartoons today. Parents can restrict their childrens viewing to modern programs if they want to avoid depictions of violence, bigotry and casual use of alcohol and tobacco.
But as children grow older, they will be exposed to old movies, books and television shows. The uncomfortable moments can become opportunities to explain to children that racism and sexism were once rampant and socially acceptable, and to talk with them about the implications of that today.
There is no way to turn Tom and Jerry into Dora the Explorer. Almost every frame of those old cartoons contains something objectionable. Take them as they are, or change the channel.
By Liz Kelly
