Cancelling the Pop Culture of Yesteryear

I recently wrote a piece for Skeptic titled “Ranking Presidents: Does It Make Any Sense?”, in which I outlined three reasons why ranking Presidents against one another is a fool’s errand: presentism, the evolving role of the presidency, and sui generis.¹ The current trend of the first of these criteria, presentism, becomes problematic when applied to entertainment made for previous generations. Viewing and evaluating the culture of the past through a contemporary lens has led to erasing history in at least three relatively recent incidents. This is, I believe, a slippery slope toward censorship and a missed opportunity for valuable lessons about our collective past.

In 1991, Disney released a video version of their 1940 masterpiece Fantasia, describing it as “a meticulously restored version of the original, full-length film.” It wasn’t, though. The version Disney released omitted an original scene in which a Black centaurette named Sunflower is shown shining shoes of a White centaur.² Seen today, Sunflower is a patently offensive stereotype.³ Ten years later Disney released the censored version for the film’s 60th anniversary DVD.⁴ Disney’s use of racist stereotypes is not limited to Fantasia. In varying degrees, such tropes are seen in Dumbo (1941),⁵ Peter Pan (1953),⁶ The Aristocats (1970),⁷ and Aladdin (1992).⁸

In 2020, the company (admirably, in my view) took steps toward addressing this controversy by adding disclaimers to their films on their streaming services, noting the “harmful impact” of racist stereotypes. Unlike the quiet actions the company took censoring the re-releases of Fantasia, the films are viewable in their original forms.

This begs the question: If the racism was so apparent, why weren’t these films decried upon initial release? The answer is they weren’t considered offensive by the public at the time, and applying today’s attitudes toward race crystallizes the fallacy of presentism.

In 2014, Ruth Wise, professor emerita of Yiddish and Comparative Literatures at Harvard, criticized Fiddler on the Roof (1971) for sacrificing Jewish identity to make the musical more universally appealing.⁹ The problem with Wise’s argument is (again) presentism. In the early 1970s, M*A*S*H writers employed rape jokes,¹⁰ and America’s most popular sitcom (All in the Family) featured a working-class bigot who employed racial slurs for laughs.¹¹ John Lennon released a song titled “Woman is The (N-word) of the World”¹² and Richard Pryor would use the same racial epithet in an album title three years later.¹³ Our attitudes towards cultural authenticity and appropriation have evolved since the early 1970s.

In 2020, a 1988 Golden Girls episode called “Mixed Feelings” was pulled from the streaming platform Hulu due to “a scene in which Betty White and Rue McClanahan are mistaken for wearing blackface.”¹⁴ In the episode, Dorothy’s (White) son introduces his fiancé, a much older Black woman. Blanche and Rose are mortified with embarrassment when they unexpectedly meet the couple wearing cosmetic mud masks.

Were Rose and Blanche revisiting a minstrel show to characterize Black Americans as lazy, hypersexual thieves, ala “Amos ‘n Andy,” as minstrel shows were in the past?¹⁵ Of course not. The joke lay in their mutual embarrassment of appearing as if they were in blackface.¹⁶ Each Golden Girls actress (Betty White, Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan, and Estelle Getty) came of age decades before the women’s movement, but their show was considerably progressive for their time. In its seven-year run, The Golden Girls featured episodes centered on then-controversial topics of racism, sexual harassment, same-sex marriage, age discrimination, homelessness, the death of children, and addiction.¹⁷ Perhaps most significantly, a 1990 episode titled “72 Hours,” has Rose worried that she may have come in contact with HIV.¹⁸ It was only five years prior that President Reagan first addressed the AIDS crisis, by which time 42,600 people had died from the disease. By 1990, that number had spiked to 310,000, a third of which were deaths occurring that same year.¹⁹ When one considers the climate of the times, airing the episode was courageous.

The same year “Mixed Feelings” was removed from Hulu, an actor named François Clemmons published Officer Clemmons: A Memoir. Clemmons played “Officer Clemmons” on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood in the late 1960s, the first African American actor to have a recurring role on a children’s television program.²⁰ In Clemmon’s mostly heartwarming book, he relates an incident in which Fred Rogers called him into his office. His boss said to him, “Someone has informed us that you were seen at the local gay bar downtown. Now, I want you to know, Franc, that if you’re gay, it doesn’t matter to me at all. Whatever you say and do is fine with me, but if you’re going to be on the show as an important member of the Neighborhood, you can’t be out as gay.”

Was Mr. Rogers homophobic? When Rogers had the conversation with Clemmons, homosexuality was still listed as a disorder in the DSM. It wasn’t until 1974 that it was replaced with “sexual orientation disturbance.”21 In reality, Fred Rogers, a Presbyterian minister, was an LGBTQ ally. He’d intentionally hired gay men and women since the 1960s and rebuffed efforts from his viewers to renounce homosexuality.²²

In John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club (1985)²³ and Jeff Kanus’ Revenge of the Nerds (1984),²⁴ there are scenes of sexual assault upon women played for laughs. Both Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert (renowned film critics) praised each film, neither noting their discomfort with the now-troubling scenes in either review.^{25, 26, 27} Why did they fail to do so? Were both Siskel and Ebert misogynists willing to overlook scenes of women being sexually assaulted? Of course not. The social mores in the early 1980s didn’t apply to those we share today. Are these scenes excusable? No, but both actresses (Molly Ringwald and Julie Montgomery) have publicly reckoned with the blatant sexism in their roles and neither has insisted the scenes be omitted.^{28, 29}

In 2022, the UK’s Channel 5 aired the 1961 classic Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but bowdlerized scenes of Mickey Rooney as “Mr. Yunioshi,” an over-the-top yellow-face Asian caricature.³⁰ Should Rooney’s role be excised? No. Just like the racist characters in Disney movies of the 1940s–1990s, and the sexual assaults depicted for laughs in 1980s raunchy comedies, the climate in 1961 was different.

Pop culture of the past is just that: of the past. Applying today’s standards to them is at best a fool’s errand and, at worst (as seen in the cases above) a slippery slope toward censorship. Entertainment from yesteryear should be taken in context while viewed in its entirety.