Watch: First trailer for Tom & Jerry, the live action film

Their friends are great, too. Well, until the end… :woman_shrugging:t4:

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WB was just as bad at times:

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Yikes.
This went way over my head as a kid.

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215a29c4fb78cc440ec80bf6f9abede7 tenor

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Opinions differ.

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(I’m having trouble linking my clever related GIF. Oh well)

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Who needs this? I mean, who really needs this?

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https://twitter.com/inouetable

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For whatever reason I never saw the most egregious examples of racism from old Warner Brothers cartoons on TV when I was a kid, but the station that was airing Tom & Jerry was still airing those blackface episodes well into the 1980s (even though I wasn’t aware of the history of minstrel at the time).

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Where I lived, the most offensive WB cartoons had dwindled down to near obscurity by the time I’d turned 10 or 12; but you are quite correct about Tom & Jerry.

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For sure! Even back in 1968 (hardly a time of great enlightenment when it comes to racist caricatures) United Artists recognized that eleven of the Warner Brothers films (including some that you showed images of) were so incredibly racist that they chose not to distribute them. Yet somehow they seemed to be ok with the Tom and Jerry blackface stuff that I remember seeing on TV at least as recently as the ‘80’s.

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A lot of those were already being taken out of circulation by the time I was a a kid, and I’m old.

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And then there’s the 1941 Walter Lantz short Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat by Universal Pictures, which is so toxically racist that they didn’t even bother renewing the copyright and allowed it to slip into public domain.

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I was disturbed to read that WB was “testing the waters” for some kind of DVD release of the censored eleven as recently as 2012 under the Warner Archives collection. I suppose there may be ethical ways they could make these available to the public as some sort of historical documents, and as part of an acknowledgment of their racist past, but it’s so incredibly disappointing that someone was apparently considering ways to monitize this garbage in this century.

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Hey Cat Concerto is a masterpiece!

Those weird ones made in Czechoslovakia in the 60’s are oddly endearing.

Plus thanks to Tom and Jerry, Louis Jordan’s “Is You is or Is You Ain’t My Baby” is burned into my subconscious

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Hard to believe the trailer does not include the phrase a deadly game of cat…and mouse.

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This is embarrassing. I feel sorry for Moretz.

I first saw “Coal Black” at an animation festival decades ago. It was an added surprise feature to the main programme and there were very clear and frank introductory remarks on what to expect. It wasn’t exactly presented in a scholarly manner, but more as a barbaric relic. The audience was completely scandalised, and any laughter was directed at the over-the-top racism on display.

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I still check to see if Tom and Jerry is on if I hear jazz.

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Everything about Tom & Jerry in that trailer looks great.

Everything else in that trailer can metaphorically “die” in a proverbial “fire.”