Politically incorrect...

[Tryg Helseth]

DAVID:

>      Are you saying that in WDC 34 (the Cannibal story) that use of 
>'Jazzbo' was originally SAMBO??!  Ye gods, I thought the version I'd 
>seen was already so tasteless that it couldn't get worse.

I guess I don't find that so surprising that a story written in the '40s 
would use the word "sambo."  But then, as a child in the '50s one of the 
Little Golden Books I had was the story of "Little Black Sambo."  At the 
time, it didn't seem racist, but then I was too young to really know what 
racism was.

Attitudes have changed since then, and I remember being shocked in the  
'enlightened' '70s when I heard of a new resturant chain named "Sambo's."  
(Those resturants are still around, but now they go by the name of 
"Denny's.") 

One piece of Disney comic censorship that really surprised me was when (in 
the '70s again) they reprinted one of my favorites, "Lost Beneath the Sea."
What I thought was the funniest gag in the whole story was removed for fear 
of offending someone.  It was the scene where Donald and Scrooge are 
looking out the window of their bathysphere at the Martians disassembling 
wrecked ships each weilding four wrenches with their four arms.

Donald asks what they were as they are were certainly not men!  Scrooge 
replies,"They're not union workers either!" "What shop steward would let 
his men use four wrenches at once?"  This was replaced by the insipid line 
of "Imagine a worker who could use four wrenches at once!" Or something 
like that.  

Now admittedly, the original is an unfair slam to union workers (and my 
father was an ardent union man), but where do you draw the line?  If 
anything that might offend someone is censored, then all we're left with is 
the mindless pap of that permeates the rest of the Disney genre.  I think 
that one thing that made Barks stuff good was that it had teeth that would 
bite now and then.

Tryg

Tryg Helseth  <trygve at maroon.tc.umn.edu>   Minneapolis, MN, USA
          or  <tryg.helseth at tstation.mn.org>

"I wish they all could be Calisota Ducks!"  -the Beach Drakes