a review of

I think, if you try to isolate a lot of the Jim Crow era material from its context, a lot of it looks kinda cute and fun. I understand that the idea that you could attain happiness through lazing around and eating watermelons is meant to denigrate and implies a simplistic, primitive mind. But I can't help but feel like even back in the early 20th century some white folks looked at these caricatures and saw in them an escapist fantasy. A pleasurable existence, akin to what's promised by a lot of the modern-day New Age self-help books that break down and twist old Daoist, Hindu and Buddhist texts into the "everything is fine" paradigm. I think there's a similarity between those things and other Depression-era escapist entertainment, such as the Saturday/Matinee/Kindagay serials and comic books, i.e. Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Batman na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na, Superman, and so on and so forth. More importantly, I watched this on wikipedia. Not out of my own intention to find and watch a cartoon of that era. But still I didn't expect it to be this vile tbh, but at the very least I expected it to be entertaining on that escapist level, but it really wasn't. I think black people here look like a decadent, collapsed society of almost animalistic, inhuman creatures, but even aside from that, the song and all the visual gags make me wanna murder. And they (racists, I mean racists) say violent tendencies are genetic.