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OTR: cancelled
A Wisconsin public radio troupe performed old radio scripts, reviving old stories for new audiences. It was popular for years, and you can imagine what fun the actors had – tearing into the chunks of ham on the page, or recapturing the timbres and slang of a previous era.
No more; it’s been cancelled. In the old and new senses of the word.
Wisconsin Public Radio is canceling its long-running weekend program “Old Time Radio Drama,” with station officials citing the “racist and sexist material” present in many of the plays of the Golden Age of Radio.
“Many of these plays and productions were produced more than 60 years ago,” Wisconsin Public Radio director Mike Crane said in a statement on Friday. “Despite significant effort over the years, it has been nearly impossible to find historic programs without offensive and outdated content.”
This is . . . remarkable.
The statement relies on the audience’s ignorance of the material. It depends on people thinking “well, yes, those are old shows; surely they’re shot through with racism and sexism,” without knowing anything about the subject. It’s the past! Ergo it’s gotta be offensive.
I’ve no idea what percentage of old radio shows survive in transcribed form, but we have a lot, mostly from the 40s and 50s. Yes, Amos ’n’ Andy was, well, Amos ’n Andy, but it was a rare show built around African Americans. For the most part they were invisible, aside from a few domestic servants – and we’ll get to that in a moment. You could say that the exclusion of Black voices from radio was racist, but that’s different than saying the material was racist.
“Life with Luigi” was an Italian immigrant comedy, complete with stereotypical characters who-a speak-a the cliched mama-mia lingo. But it loved its characters, and Luigi, for all his comic faults, was proud to be in American. But okay, it’s racist against Italians, so take that one off the table.
The Goldbergs: same thing. Fine, don’t do those, eliminate the most prominent Jewish sitcom, for reasons.
And that’s about all I got, at the moment. If some of the Hispanic accents in the 50s were a bit too broad, it might be because they were usually played by the same guy – it was his speciality – but the Latin cops with whom Johnny Dollar dealt were always smart and on the level. As I noted in another old radio thread, the 50s Westerns at their best were explicitly anti-racist when it came to the American Indians. If Tales of the Texas Rangers did a story about a murder that looked like the immigrant guy did it, the plot was guar-an-fargin’-teed to find blame with the jealous white rancher. Joe Friday, week after week, was pulling in white guys – I can’t think of a single ep in which the bad guy was a minority, and yes, I’ve listened to them all.
About those “domestics” – two of the most long-running series had prominent African-American actors as “servants,” and in neither case were they subservient. Eddie “Rochester” Anderson had Jack Benny’s number cold. Birdie, the maid on The Great Gildersleeve (played by Lillian Randolph) started out as a cliche, but in the hands of good writers – including John Wheedon, grandfather of Marvel writer-director Joss Wheedon – she became the de facto mother and wife of the household, and the only person who could tell the truth to Mis’t Gildersleeve. I’m not defending the fact that she was a servant – I’m saying that in the context of the times, in the late 40s and early 50s, an African-American character was consciously elevated to the role of the household’s indispensable pragmatist and emotionally centered adult, because the writers invested her cliche with humor, dignity, and humanity.
As for “sexism,” well, here’s a news flash: women in the old radio shows were unapologetically feminine, and occasionally confessed to silly desires for romance and marriage. But the medium also abounded with smart, canny sidekicks – detective shows, from Let George Do It to Mr. District Attorney to Micheal Shayne to Casey, Crime Photographer, were expected to have a clever, resourceful female assistants who helped solve the crime, and they were invariably more resourceful than the bullheaded Oirish cop who couldn’t tumble to what was really going on. In the anthology mystery shows like The Whistler, you were more likely to find razor-sharp women who cut their way through a man’s world to make their way. In the comedies, women were often the voice of reason – sardonic, knowing – in a way that makes the menfolk blustering fools.
There are literally hundreds of hours of mysteries and adventures and romances and sci-fi shows that still work today. And even if there’s an element that abraids modern sensibilities, isn’t it instructive to experience the tropes and conventions of a prior age, so one might know what the culture was like?
Or are we expected to assume that everything Old was Bad, and take their word for it, and nod as the Old and Bad is put in the vault, because the actual evidence would be so horrifying we couldn’t even? Are people today so fragile they cannot survive contact with examples of the old culture – but we’re supposed to believe them when they say they know exactly what the old culture was like?
I love this art form, and have been studying it for years. The idea that one can’t find enough scripts that aren’t racist and sexist is not only absolute nonsense, it’s a casual dismissal of vast swaths of American pop-culture history. It’s a libel, and its ignorance is matched only by its cowardice. You want to cancel the show, cancel the damn show. You want to quit your job at the Library of Congress, quit your job. Just don’t throw a lit match over your shoulder as you head for the exit.
Published in General
“Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams called for the removal of the giant carving that depicts three Confederate war leaders on the face of state-owned Stone Mountain, saying it “remains a blight on our state and should be removed.””
2017
Oh, no doubt. They have no need for public funding.
What the heck is Shiseido? Can you tell I’m not upper middle class?
You better get a hard copy of “Blazing Saddles” if you ever want to see the original non “Ministry of Truth” version in the future.
They are going for it this weekend.
Sorry, but this Shakespeare guy. Too problematic.
A few years ago, a local TV station ran Blazing Saddles on a Sunday evening, totally uncut. I called them the next day to give them props, and they said they had only received positive calls.
How times change…
Although I wonder if they might actually still get positive comments, if they did it again now, except from a few agitators…
Me neither, but young women like to waste money on it.
Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben’s are now . . . toast. But I maintain that it is nearly impossible to tell parody from this crazy reality right now.
You have to remember, that when you say “well, they would never do X”, that is only encouraging them to do X. Waiting for the MLK statue in DC to come down – these folks hate what he stood for.
I now know how all those old Greek statues came to have no heads or arms: they had Democrats back then!
Frankly, I demand that the MLK statue come down, along with every single statue of a Democrat from coast to coast.
How about all those buildings etc named for KKK leader Robert Byrd?
Every statue, monument, plaque, you name it. They all go back to people who were Dems before 1970, when even they admit they were the explicitly racist party. Therefore, every Dem from that era was either explicitly a racist or a racist ‘ally’. Neither is acceptable.
Tear them all down.
Joe Biden was first elected to a county council as a Democrat in 1970.
And was perfectly happy to work with open racists once he got to Congress.
Cancelled!
Well, I mean if we’re canceling things with a racist history, then the Democratic Party itself must be canceled.
Until a few weeks ago, I was fond of pointing out that the folks seeking to remove civil war statues were just today’s Democrats taking down statues of older Democrats put up by other Democrats. So they were just covering their tracks.
But now they truly are the American Taliban party.
That’s what I’m talking about!
With a period soundtrack!
Since studying the rise and fall of Robespierre is likely beyond their abilities….
Precisely. If they’re going to act like Kindergartners, treat them thusly.
A year or so ago, I bought DVD versions of most of Mel Brooks, along with other brilliantly funny movies that I figured might get “cancelled,” like all of Monty Python and the incredibly silly, campy, and very funny “Zorro, the Gay Blade.” They were cheap and I thought there was a pretty good chance they’d disappear before too long. Gone With The Wind, I still have in some anniversary version in a pretty box on VHS. Probably should transfer it to DVD at some point while I still have a working tape player!
A two week unit on the French Revolution would do the job. That rascally Robespierre. Whose turn is it today for the guillotine? Let’s spin the wheel, Vanna!
Hardly. They’d be Madam Defarge, knitting calmly at the base of the guillotine.
If we did a satire for radio, I betcha we’ve got the connections to ask Pat Sajak to do his own voice! But to be fair to Pat, being connected to the likes of us would probably make King World Entertainment and Sony (producers of Wheel) a case of the vapors. We’ll give the guy a break.
If he did it, he wouldn’t be allowed to play Pat Sajak, or anyone who resembled Pat Sajak.
Oh sure, everyone starts as Madam Defarge, but the joie de France is, sooner or later, every group gets the blade. Diversity at its most gruesome. Pass out role cards, spin the wheel, Karen, you’re dead. Spin the wheel, …. At the end of class, the survivors get to write essays on the virtues that saw them through wave after wave of purges.
Next unit, Russia! Czar Nicky to Lenin and Stalin, with concentration camps in three corners and a morgue in the fourth, secretly designated secret police and informants, and an extra credit assignment for those volunteering to serve as Cossacks.
My generation was raised on the Addams’ family. The one with the great John Astin. They’ll all be dead by the midterm.
Oh, I know. But my point was that they’d fail to learn anything from a class on the French Revolution, believing themselves so virtuous that they’d certainly survive it.
Which is why they’re doing their best to emulate the French Revolution, while simultaneously striving to recreate the Russian.
Being cancelled is just the warm up practice version for being guillotined. They are in for such a good time.
“Two bits, four bits, six bits, a peso!
All for Zorro, stand up and say so!”
I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that the reason “two bits” is a quarter comes from the Spanish “pieces of eight”….
Dollar coins were routinely cut into wedges to make change. They made eight wedges, or bits, so two bits were a quarter dollar. This practice was still in use in the Colonies during the Revolution.
A practice taken from the Spanish dollar. Also known as a “piece of eight”.