HBO Max’s Great Looney Tunes Purge

For those who are unaware, the Inki character in this short was a small tribal African child in a grass skirt who spent his days attempting to hunt various animals with a spear. And by African, I mean the blackface depiction with the white lips that is reminiscent of old Al Jolson films.

Now, I didn't remember ANYTHING about this part of the video. I had last watched it when I was a small child. But I enjoyed the part I did remember, namely the Minah bird, because the bird was methodical, walked in step with Mendelssohn's "The Hebrides," and could whup the crap out of anything. So when it came time to choose an avatar during a period of time when people were not using their faces as screen shots, I used this character.

It wasn't until years later that my girlfriend, who happened to be black, asked me why the cartoon bird was my avatar. So I looked it up and... let's just say I discontinued use of the avatar before the topic was broached again.

Those are good in a historical context to show just how racist cartoons can be, but certainly not for entertainment. Same goes for the early Tintin comics, especially those set in colonial Africa have serious racist undertones. Something even the author acknowledged. And those undertones are completely (?) absent from the later ones. Just shows how subversive racism can be when it is part of everyday culture, and that even non racist people fall prey to using those racist stereotypes in their work. The same goes for sexism and any other kind of systematic discrimination.

But it’s impossible to find. Even eBay has banned sale of the DVD.

Fortunately I have a copy my father ripped to DVD from some unknown source sometime in the 90s. It’s poor quality.

Since I watched Tom and Jerry cartoons many, many times, I just looked up who this is (although I kinda had inferred it, there aren't that many characters in Tom and Jerry :)) and why she's a problem.

Curiously, I always thought she was the owner of the house, so any racist undertones were totally lost on me (note that I'm not American). (I did get that they were quite sexist, no man doing housework ever).

I don't deny the racist intent, but it's funny how one needs the cultural context to get that. I hope in a few decades it will be lost on every kid.

I would love an in-depth review on why this move is smart or not.

Over what period of time do new works make most of their money? Over what period are production companies their payback over when deciding whether to invest in new works?

I would suggest 5 years more than covers the above.

To me the point of copyright, and the only way you can defend a state sponsored monopoly is to encourage creation of new works. If 5 years does that, any more just prevents derivative works, which are new creations in their own right.

I'll grant that perpetual copyright is at least logically sound, but once you move away from that I don't see how you can make an argument for anything more than a minimal (enough to encourage creation) copyright term.

http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.ht...

That said the internet is where I learned most things and it exists thanks to the DOD and ISPs have a lot of subsidies to thank for their existence (at least the ones in the rural area I grew up in)

I’ve heard this said before. Can you link to some science about this please?

But we are reacting to society. Hence, clone versions of you living 100 years ago, in current times, and 100 years in the future are going to react differently because there are different inputs and different accepted outputs to their behavior. They all are going to have different assumptions about the world around them because they live in worlds with different sets of knowledge. Schooling would be different (I'm assuming things continue to improve/change over time in the future). Nutrition, healthcare, transportation, communication... all has changed so much.

And this is the same when comparing current times. Three clones of you might act similarly in some respects, but vastly different in others. We've studied this exact thing by studying identical twins, actually, and even growing up in the same country doesn't even out the differences.

At the end of the day, it does mean that even though genes might affect the way we act, the comment you are replying to is absolutely correct.

I know this seems a little fantastical and engineering-brain-y but it also means we don't have to spend much time thinking about how much of Obi-Wan Kenobi the state of Oklahoma owns; we can just settle the whole obligation back to society in dollars. I don't know, seems simple to me.

It's particularly egregious when copyright to some of the most popular works of all time is inherited by people who had nothing to do with the author in his/her lifetime or had not even been born then:

> The composer died unmarried and childless in 1937. His heir was his brother Edouard, who died in 1960, leaving the rights to his former masseuse, Jeanne Taverne, who died four years later. A tangled legal battle in following years saw the rights divided between a number of claimants, including Ms Taverne’s husband’s second wife Georgette. -- https://archive.ph/NOLb7

This is the kindof remake/re-imagining that gets made ostensibly for a different audience...but in the process alienates the traditional audience...which makes it end up with no audience.

Mindy Kaling was a big part of the success of the American Office and has other successes in a relatively short career, so it's not hard to see why it was green-lit...but frankly it's rating is probably about what it should expected to be.

the second episode has Velma and Daphne making out.

I don't think it's a brigade, I think it's a serious reaction to a very different version of Scooby doo.