Articles on Animation &Commentary 05 Jul 2009 08:37 am

Violence & Joe Barbera

Having posted some photos yesterday for July 4th, let me turn to something animated.

- After seeing Ice Age 3 (or half of it, I had to leave), I began to think about children’s films. The pendulum seems to have swung again. There was a time when Variety and The Hollywood Reporter were filled with articles pro and con cartoon violence. (Violence can be ripping the hair off an animal’s chest or attacking dinosaurs.) Once the networks stopped airing their Saturday morning blocs of programming, no one seems to have taken much notice.

This is an article by Joe Barbera about why he should be allowed to smash Tom in the teeth with a golf ball. (It’s funny!)
I’m posting this as a reminder that there ARE consequences to what we show and tell our children.

Pick a cartoon gag. Any gag. Remember the one when Tom hit a golf ball off Jerry’s ear, only to have it ricochet off a tree and come back dead solid perfect off Tom’s teeth? Or how about the one in which the bad guy drops an anvil off the head of Huckleberry Hound, who shakes it off and wobbles away. Sound familiar? Remember when you were a kid, how you laughed at those? Take my word, you did. But those gags and others like them are only memories now because you won’t see them on cartoons produced today.

Today’s cartoon shows, believe it or not, are not allowed to contain gags of this type. Why, you can’t even throw a cream pie at a character. Explain that to Soupy Sales, who made it into a comic art form that gave us all a big laugh. These visual gags are considered too violent; too extreme; too negative an influence on today’s cartoon watcher.

For that you can blame, or thank, depending on your point of view, broadcasters, who have been effectively lobbied by small but exceptionally effective pressure groups. I’m sure they have all the best intentions in the world, but what they may not realize is that they are destroying the cartoon as we know it and diminishing the creativity that has made animation a successful, entertaining medium. Now cartoons are produced using what I call “compromise humor.”

It started a decade, ago when a concerned group of parents and teachers complained that cartoons were to blame for society’s ills. Television personnel took heed of the outcry of a vocal minority and put their collective foot down as to what is and what is not acceptable in today’s cartoon.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I understand everyone’s concern. But I don’t think they fully realize the consequences of these limitations. By placing the same restraints on the animation producers, the material is being flattened out. In other words, the creativity in what we can do is limited. Because the same “rules” apply to us all, there comes a feeling of sameness in all new cartoons produced, which television critics have noted this season. The little touches of style and timing that would separate each cartoon series and production house are not as distinctive as they once were, and that is a shame.

If the same set of rules were around 30 years ago, Hanna-Barbera would have never produced Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Quick Draw McGraw and the Flintstones as we know them today. What made those shows and others successful was exaggeration — the hallmark of animation. Cartoons are an exaggeration of real life. Cartoons are fantasy and fun. Cartoons are not real life. Cartoons are not the solution to the world’s problems, and it is my belief they should not be forced to pretend they are.

The cartoon is a visual medium, expressing universal humor that reaches all children of every nationality without the need for words. I still don’t know if adults realize that children have different standards as to what is funny and what isn’t.

Again, don’t get me wrong. There are still boundaries of good taste we should adhere to. Hanna-Barbera will never do a cartoon promoting drugs, for example. In fact, we produced a primetime special ABC aired this season called “The Flint-stone Kids, Just Say No.” The White House commended the special, which is now available on home video, with a portion of the proceeds to benefit the Just Say No campaign.

Obviously cartoons should not take the place of the personal guidance of parents and teachers. Situations that are real and factual are the job of schools, mom and dad, grandma and grandpa.

Let’s face it. Kids are not watching cartoons for educational input: They are watching to be entertained. You can’t have a cat chasing a mouse stop to teach it about American history. It doesn’t work. We tried it. We’ve worked with consultants and pressure groups but the kids were bored and turned us off.

If children don’t find something that entertains them on television, they pop a cassette of classic cartoons into the VCR and watch them instead.

While my partner Bill Hanna and I are on the road promoting the homevideo tapes we sell, we hear from hundreds of parents who make a special point of telling us how much they love our shows, and trust them. Many parents have confided to me that they are concerned about what their children watch, but think it’s completely safe for their children to watch a Han-na-Barbera show. They confess that they like to watch our shows with their children, but don’t find the cartoons of today very funny. They want to know when we are going to bring our good old ones back.

I think the kids who watch cartoons agree with me. ABC brought back Bugs Bunny and Tweety cartoons to Saturday morning this season. These are not new cartoons. Most of them were made more than 40 years ago, with good old exaggerated gags. The fact that the show is doing well in the ratings suggests that children like these cartoons. But if those cartoons were being produced under today’s strict standards, the same type of humor wouldn’t be there, and I guarantee the ratings wouldn’t be either.

Cartoons are supposed to start where reality ends. If you want to put three heads on a character, you do it. You shouldn’t have to stop and think about who would like it and who would find it distasteful. Something like that works better visually than it will ever sound in words.
We did a successful cartoon series in 1964 called “Jonny Quest.” It was the forerunner to Indiana Jones. It was a family action-adventure series with human characters, not animal characters with human traits. It featured Jonny Quest, an 11-year-old boy, who helped his father battle Dr. Zin and others with futuristic gadgets, lasers and submarines. Now we don’t expect 11-year-old boys to find their neighborhood submarine and leave home, but our watchdogs act as if those things were really going to happen. With the restrictions that inhibit imagination, the Indiana Jones-type entertainment would not be nearly as successful. In fact, if today’s standards were around back in the Golden Days of Television, I seriously doubt if Laurel and Hardy and Buster Keaton would have made it.

Children are entitled to their own entertainment. Today’s children exhibit signs of stress and pressures at younger ages. I would rather they found a release valve by watching cartoons purely for entertainment than be exposed to the sex and violence of primetime programs and the news.

So what is the answer? Let Hanna-Barbera and the other animation producers govern themselves. Let Hanna-Barbera take the experience of seven Oscars and eight Emmys and do what we do best. We know what makes a cartoon funny. We know the boundaries of good taste. Please don’t let “compromise humor” become the standard that governs creativity.

___________________

To end this, let me give you the lyrics of a great song by Stephen Sondheim from Into the Woods:

How do you say to your child in the night?
Nothing’s all black, but then nothing’s all white
How do you say it will all be all right
When you know that it might not be true?
What do you do?

Careful the things you say
Children will listen
Careful the things you do
Children will see and learn
Children may not obey, but children will listen
Children will look to you for which way to turn
Co learn what to be
Careful before you say “Listen to me”
Children will listen

Careful the wish you make
Wishes are children
Careful the path they take
Wishes come true, not free
Careful the spell you cast
Not just on children
Sometimes the spell may last
Past what you can see
And turn against you
Careful the tale you tell
That is the spell
Children will listen

How can you say to a child who’s in flight
“Don’t slip away and I won’t hold so tight”
What can you say that no matter how slight won’t be misunderstood
What do you leave to your child when you’re dead?
Only whatever you put in it’s head
Things that your mother and father had said
Which were left to them too
Careful what you say
Children will listen
Careful you do it too
Children will see
And learn, oh guide them that step away
Children will glisten
Tample with what is true
And children will turn
If just to be free
Careful before you say
“Listen to me”

9 Responses to “Violence & Joe Barbera”

  1. on 05 Jul 2009 at 2:07 pm 1.Pierre said …

    There was a wonderful interview with Steve Gerber in an old issue of Comics Interview magazine (#1 to be precise) that I’ve kept in my files precisely because of this issue. This was Mr. Gerber’s assessment of children’s television in the 1970′s and 1980′s (and I’ll paraphrase a bit):

    “The censors…make sure all of the various pressure groups are not offended by anything that gets on the air…Anything that gets a kid’s pulse racing, anything that might bring a lump to his throat or a tear to his eye is prohibited because when the child has any reaction at all to what he sees, it’s interpreted as disturbing the child.

    They cite studies that indicate that children play “more aggressively” after watching “violent” programs…the conclusion that’s drawn is that the children are being “overstimulated” and harmed in some way.

    The insist that every character in every show be “likable”. This is networkese for total absence of character flaws, or even quirks.

    This whole movement, by the way, began in about 1972. The children who were first “protected” in this manner from violence and emotion are now, say, twelve to twenty years old. The network child psychologists are, I think, directly responsible for giving us the punk-rock generation, with its violence, its ennui, its disdain of emotion, its illiteracy, and its complete absence of faith in the future. I think it’s quite an achievement, don’t you?”

    Pierre

  2. on 05 Jul 2009 at 2:27 pm 2.Michael said …

    Pierre, obviously and unfortunately, I stand on the opposite side of the fence from you. I make children’s films for a living, and I think the state of things is close to abominable.

    It all started with a speech from Peggy Charin at Action for Children’s Network in the 70′s. She sincerely cared about what children were getting on TV. Although some of the politicians went too stupidly in one direction, they were competing with the anything-for-an-audience programming at networks like The Cartoon Network, which porduces loud, screaming and annoying flat animation – for the most part.
    I prefer animation to talk not scream, and it’s rare to see. I think only a couple of words were spoken, not shouted, Ice Age 3D. Too hard to take.

    All those years of hard exaggerated cartoons has sped up the attention span of the audience to the point where a 2 sec scene is too long. Everything has to move and move all the time. This, alone, encourages screaming, violent action.

    But obviously the audiences like that, or at least pays for it.

  3. on 05 Jul 2009 at 5:43 pm 3.Pierre said …

    Hi Michael,

    I didn’t say that I agree with Steve Gerber. The text of my post is almost entirely his quote. When I read the article by Mr. Barbera I immediately thought of this article and quoted the appropriate parts.

    I am in total agreement with you that much of the fare on Cartoon Network is just lots of shouting characters and action sequences in lieu of character development and something more contemplative. The endless chases of Tom and Jerry frankly got boring after a bit. Having every Popeye cartoon end with a fight is difficult to accept in this more enlightened age. There was very little in children’s entertainment that taught anything of value.

    Therefore, there’s a place for children’s films like those produced by you, a company like Weston Woods, or other animation companies for instance. But I think the movement to pacify all cartoon entertainment went too far in the 1970′s and 1980′s. There’s no doubt that the movement also produced alot of good content. I’m particularly fond of the original Land Of The Lost program because it was exciting and still professed a belief that the family can overcome any problem, even dinosaurs looking for their next meal.

    I remember being a kid in the 1970′s and being keenly aware that all the rough edges had been taken off all children’s entertainment, leaving a kind of homogeneous result that I really didn’t find particularly entertaining or enlightening. It’s no wonder why I was immediately drawn to the Bugs Bunny and Road Runner cartoon hour. Even though these cartoons had been edited for content, there was still a bit of an edge to react to.

    I also remember being drawn to Star Blazers, a japanese import from the late 1970′s that showed the triumphs and perils of war. Characters lived and died, did heroic things as well as cowardly acts.

    I think that kind of approach towards children’s entertainment was entirely successful because it provided escapist entertainment while also mirroring the considerable complications of real life and the consequences of our actions. That program oddly enough really left a huge impression on me, more so than Superfriends or other TV cartoon entertainment.

    Trust me, I’m no fan of mindless violence. It’s only a crutch to hang some cheap laughs on.

  4. on 05 Jul 2009 at 9:04 pm 4.Don M. Yowp said …

    All Joe Barbera proved is that people don’t know what they want if you ask them.

    They say they don’t want cartoons with violence, like golf balls in the face .. in theory. But they say they do want the old cartoons which had that stuff in them .. through experience.

    Barbera puts it best: let the cartoon-makers make cartoons. If they’re crappy, people won’t watch them. The marketplace generally decides.

    As for Pierre’s comment about watching cartoons “mirroring the considerable complications of real life”, it proves we all have different tastes. I agree with him there’s a place for all types of well-constructed cartoons. But I’d rather watch Quick Draw shoot himself in the face through his own stupidity or Tex Avery surprise me with a gag out of nowhere. I don’t watch cartoons to be “taught,” thanks. If I wanted programming “mirroring the considerable complications of real life,” the folks at Lever Bros. make daytime shows they claim do exactly that.

  5. on 05 Jul 2009 at 10:28 pm 5.Pierre said …

    Hey Don,

    First of all, you’ve got a very cool blog. I’ll be checking it out in the future.

    Secondly, I think you put your finger on the problem. I too never wanted to watch any medium to be “taught” anything. However, it seemed that alot of 1970′s cartoons were all about “teaching” us kids right from wrong when all we really wanted was to be entertained. So as I said, I gravitated to Bugs Bunny rather than Superfriends or Pebbles and Bam-Bam.

    Pixar is very good at making films that “mirror the considerable complications of real life” (to quote my earlier post), and yet do it in a highly entertaining way.

    The difference between a soap opera and let’s say The Incredibles is that one is a melodrama while the other is a fable, designed to lead you to an “epiphany”. I think I’ve always felt that this could be one of animation’s greatest strengths and the opportunity is so often squandered on cheap laughs and thrills.

  6. on 05 Jul 2009 at 11:07 pm 6.Michael said …

    Well, Pierre, I hae to agree with what you’re saying there. I think most of the cartoon companies did a bit more unenlightened self-censorship and made the cartoons bland. They don’t have to be bland, but Tom getting hit in the teethalways came off as violent to me – as opposed to anything in any Bugs Bunny or Popeye cartoon – and that, in its own way was bland.

  7. on 06 Jul 2009 at 7:58 am 7.Stephen Macquignon said …

    So a show likes the “Ren & Stimpy Show”
    That aired sometime in the early nineties was what, a return to the golden age of cartoons?
    Was a show like theirs response to censorship?
    I remember it being popular but seen very few episodes do to the fact I did not have cable TV (still don’t).

    http://nickelodeon.wikia.com/wiki/Ren_and_Stimpy

  8. on 06 Jul 2009 at 9:43 am 8.Leo Loikkanen said …

    Dear Michael.

    I have to say that i find animation of today to be bland, flat, and not even that funny. I grew up watching old Tom And Jerry Cartoons, along with Looney Tunes shorts, mostly directed by Chuck Jones. Those cartoons were an inspiration that gave me my drive to draw and try to make animations of my own too.

    Later on i witnessed shows like Ren And STimpy and Invader Zim, that i thought managed to be hilarious, without looking flat. NOwadays when i turn on to Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network, i’m depressed to see all these totally PC cartoons, without any ammount of anarchy or slapstick humour. That makes me sad, as it was the slapstick humour and sense of anarchy that made me love cartoons and be entertained as a child. NOw, i agree that there are something in those cartoons (For example, i was uncomfortable watching Ren And Stimpy as 11 year old child) that a young child shouldn’t see, but personally i don’t see any damage done to them by seeing a Road Runner, or a Foghorn Leghorn short. Yes, those cartoons are a bit violent, but it’s not movie violence, where there are guts flying everywhere. It’s more slapstick violence like The 3 Stooges or Charlie Chaplin movies. Is cartoon violence honestly so damaging that even Pixar’s Presto should be banned?

    I enjoyed this article a lot, and plan to make a good ol fashioned slapstick cartoon as soon as i’m finished the one i’m working on now.

    Best regards.
    Leo.

  9. on 06 Jul 2009 at 11:25 am 9.Ted Nunes said …

    For me a low-water mark was Filmation’s Tarzan series (although it had a few things going for it). After looping his way…er…speeding across the jungle, Tarzan would talk the berserk gorilla into submission, then turn the camera and recap:
    “N’kima learned an important lesson today…”

    Oongawa!

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