Mammy Two-Shoes

My co-worker/roomate/co-star/co-founder of Schneider's Skivvies, Ben, was in the other room earlier this evening (on the only tv we currently have) watching an episode of Tom & Jerry on Boomerang (a network that only cool kids with cool cable get). The episode he was watching caught his attention because it was one that he remembered from his childhood (I remember no Tom & Jerry from my childhood, only TMNT, Doug, Eureka's Castle, David the Gnome, et al).

This particular episode is titled "Dog Trouble" and features Spike the Dog, and Mammy Two-Shoes, a stout black woman in slippers and an apron whose body from the waist, up, is never seen. Now, the version that Ben remembers has said woman marching into the room at the end of the episode and dragging Spike out in classic Hattie McDaniel-to-Vivien Leigh fashion. In 1942, this was acceptable. Apparently, in the 1980s it was still acceptable even though the studio had begun censoring the cartoons in the 1960s. That's right. Censoring Tom & Jerry.

Apparently, in many instances, "these versions used rotoscoping techniques to replace Mammy on-screen with a thin white woman, and the voice on the soundtracks was replaced by an Irish-accented voice performed by white actress June Foray." Now, maybe it's me...but it seems like switching it to a white woman was a bit....MORE racist than just utilizing the Mammy archetype. In the mid 1990s, according the wikipedia, (so, after Ben was really a CHILD), the ownership of the cartoons changed, and the original imaging was retained...but Mammy's voice is replaced with a less... "offensive" voice and dialect.

I don't know, it all seems silly to me. It's a children's cartoon. Seriously? Seriously. I managed to find the two versions that have the original Mammy character, but with two separate voice tracks;


Tom & Jerry " Dog Trouble"
Uploaded by LibertedExpression. - Watch more music videos, in HD!


Version 2...which is so obviously dubbed and cleaned up and ridiculous that it makes me want to throw up.

I mean...it's not like the behavior and attitude and dialect portrayed in the original do not exist today. They do. They exist in the apartment upstairs from us, on our stoop, on the 2 train, down in Battery Park, on OBT in Orlando, etc. The character is meant to be over the top and a soul to be reckoned with. So....why the clean up? I just don't get it.