The Art of the Disclaimer

Tom and Jerry: The Spotlight Collection, Disc 1, which recently arrived in our mailbox, contains the following verbage right after it admonishes would-be video pirates:

"The cartoons you are about to see are products of their time. They may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices of that were commonplace in American society. These depictions were wrong then and they are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of today's society, these cartoons are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed."

In other words, leave us alone already! I've read that this collection originally came out with some clumsy editing, and that later, most of that was removed, leaving the cartoons closer to their original shape. Maybe. I don't have the time or energy to watch all of the cartoons that closely. Naturally, there are people who do pay really close attention to the various incidents of Tom and Jerry censorship.

The amazing thing to me is that I haven't seen all of these cartoons. Program directors of the early '70s shorted us kids when it came to Tom and Jerry, and seemingly not just because of embarrassing retrograde stereotypes. I don't think I'd ever seen "The Zoot Cat" (1944) before; certainly I would have remembered it. When Tom first appeared in his orange and green zoot suit, I laughed louder than the kids. But then, they've never heard of zoot suits. Arguably, that could be considered an element of ethnic stereotype, though I think the cartoon was taking aim at hep cats, rather than any ethnicity.