On Saturday at 8 p.m., Nyback's aggressively titled program "F!#k Mickey Mouse" comprises 10 cartoons made between 1931 and 1943 in the shadow of Walt Disney's monstrously successful rodent: a couple of imitation Mickeys made in 1931 for Warner Bros. by Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising, one with a character called Foxy (One More Time) and the other with an undefinable whatsit called Bosco (Bosco's Party). Disney's penchant for animating fairy tales while stripping them of their darker elements is put into sexualized perspective by the Betty Boop Snow White of 1933, Tex Avery's Red Hot Riding Hood of 1943, and Bob Clampett's notorious Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs of that same year. It must be noted that the film was intended as much as a sign of the pleasure Clampett and his animators took in the hot jazz being played around L.A. at the time as it was a derisive raspberry at Disney's squeaky-clean heroine; but for all its vivacity Coal Black remains intractably racist at its core. Appropriately, a full program of offensive cartoons follows at 9:45 p.m., mostly from the 1940s: Titles like Scrub Me Momma With a Boogie Beat and You're a Sap Mr. Jap should give you the idea. Racial difference is the fault line of the quasi-Victorian hypocrisy of our own era, and while 1990s mores should not allow us to overlook the pleasures of such essentially good-natured films as Tex Avery's Uncle Tom's Cabana, others in this group (like Avery's All This and Rabbit Stew, featuring a Stepin Fetchit stereotype) will probably never be recuperable by even the most enlightened colorblind postmodernist.
-- Gregg Rickman
For a complete schedule, see the Minna Street Gallery entry in Reps Etc., Page 74.
