"Banned Looney Toons 4: "All This and Rabbit Stew"

This week I'm going to look at "All This and Rabbit Stew". It is a Merrie Melodies installment released on 13 September 1941 and the name is a parody of the 1940 film All This and Heaven Too. The reason for it having been pulled from circulation is obvious from the get-go: the racial stereotyping of black people.



The guy is slowly walking along with his gun trailing on the ground behind him. Ambling along, he sings to himself in a ragged voice, "I'm gonna catch me a ra-a-a-a-a-a-bit". Quick-witted this guy ain't. According to the Wikipedia article on the episode, this character was modeled after Stephen Fetchit, a black actor and comedian whose persona was that of a listless, unintelligent black man. Stumbling upon rabbit tracks, it isn't long before Bugs' hole is discovered.



At this point, the viewer knows what is to transpire a the short has the now-typical storyline of Bugs Bunny eluding his stalker. Here in 2006, lovers of Looney Toons know this routine by heart: hunter finds Bugs; Bugs eludes and toys with hunter; a few minutes of hijinks later, there's some goofy denouement as Bugs wins the day. Aside from the racial stereotyping, "All This and Rabbit Stew" is quite unremarkable.

Bugs comes up with a subterfuge that leads the hunter into a cave inhabited by a bear.



Then there's old hollow log trick.



And so on. Finally, the hunter corners Bugs and he screams. (This was, for me, one of the two funny moments in the film. The other being the shot above of the hunter with his gun pointed in Bugs' hole. The hole actually moved which caused me to chuckle.)



Unable to escape, Bugs pulls out a couple dice which really perks up his would-be killer.



They duck behind a bush and roll the bones. In the end, Bugs wins the hunter's clothing and then assumes his persona.



This storyline is very familiar to viewers today as all one has to do is replace the black character here with Elmer Fudd. Interestingly, replacing the black caricature with Fudd, who is arguably a white caricature, doesn't elicit charges of stereotyping or calls for the cartoon to be hidden away in a vault. When I think about how the black hunter here was modeled after Stephen Fetchit, I wonder how viewers in 1941 felt about this short. Most folks today have no idea who Fetchit was so someone watching "All This and Rabbit Stew" 65 years ago certainly got something different out of it than do viewers here in the 21st century. It occurs to me that the personas of black actors appear in cartoons today. What exactly is the difference between the parody of Fetchit here and that of Cliff Huxtable seen in Family Guy? Fetchit was the stage name of Lincoln Perry while Huxtable represents the persona of Bill Cosby. Once you get past your initial repugnance of the hunter, you can see that the cartoon is engaging in what shows like Family Guy and The Simpsons do all the time – use, manipulate, and parody shared cultural figures. It's just that Stephen Fetchit is a cultural figure that isn't widely shared any longer.

One question we might ask is this: who or what is being parodied in "All This and Rabbit Stew?" Is it Stephen Fetchit specifically? Or black people generally? Perhaps black people via Fetchit? Our 21st century sensibilities probably lead us in the here and now to think that it pokes fun at black people generally. But what did the cartoon's creators and the audiences of 1941 think? Will a viewer 100 years from now who doesn't know of Arnold Schwarzenegger think that McBain from The Simpsons denigrates German people in general? How would his or her reaction change when informed that McBain is a parody of the characters that made Schwarzenegger famous?

While I don't maintain the stereotype in "All This and Rabbit Stew" is not offensive, I would argue that there's more going on here than the overly-simplistic "Oh, everyone thought blacks were that way back in those days". Issues regarding race are complicated and so too are the ways in which the media and our culture work. To look at this cartoon and brush it off as an open & shut case of the thought above is to portray the cartoon's creators and the audiences of the early 1940s as merely being two-dimensional racist automatons.

Behind Stephen Fetchit was Lincoln Perry who, when not acting, was a writer for the Chicago Defender, a well-respected and influential black newspaper. Race and culture and two very complicated subjects that overlap a great deal and often lead to contradictions. Things perhaps aren't always as they seem.

Someone has posted this "All This and Rabbit Stew" on YouTube so you can watch it for yourself.



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