Tom and Jerry, the 70+ year old Hanna-Barbera cartoon, is now streaming for subscribers of Amazon Prime. The subscription has also paired the following disclaimer with the cartoon - "Tom and Jerry shorts may depict some ethnic and racial prejudices that were once commonplace in American society. Such depictions were wrong then and are wrong today."
This is not the first time that old cartoons have carried this type of warning. For example, a Looney Tunes DVD released back in 2005 included a disclaimer by Whoopi Goldberg regarding racism featured in some of the cartoons.
That hasn't stopped people from being upset about the matter. According to BBC News, "the warning was attacked as "empty-headed" by cultural commentator and professor of sociology, Frank Furedi, who said it was a form of a "false piousness" and a type of censorship which "seems to be sweeping cultural life"."
"We're reading history backwards, judging people in the past by our values," said Prof Furedi from the University of Kent.
This is far from the first time that Tom and Jerry has been called racist. The show has been edited many times, even going back as far as the 1960s, to either cut out or alter the appearance of "Mammy Two Shoes". In addition to being edited for racism, in the past scenes including smoking have also been removed.
BBC News continued, "Prof Furedi said calls for such trigger warnings were a form of "narcissism", with the concerns not really being about the content of a book or work of art but about individual students asserting their own importance.
"A tolerant society needs to discuss disturbing art," he said."
Source: BBC News
As far as I can tell they aren't playing edited versions of Tom and Jerry on Amazon (hence the disclaimer) so the arguments that people are trying to make don't even really make much sense. The warning isn't much different than what you would on your standard rating disclaimer.
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