Tax The Masses

‘Taxes The Masses!

Written By: Peter Zimmer
Mondo Film & Video Guide Contributor

Tax the masses,’ said the Queer King, and the monkeys shall rule the cities

I was recently reminded of some of my youthful television programs, spending hours tuned into Merry Melodies and Looney Tunes with the likes of Elmer, Foghorn, Bugs, and the rest of the gang by an unlikely source: Richard Wagner.  You remember, Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny in their rendition of Das Rheingold, the Viking and his lady on the fat horse?  I also enjoyed watching the adventures of the cartoon characters in Disney creations alongside the Merry Melodies shows.  The anthropomorphized characters really showcase an achievement in escapism, one of the major reasons I think people are attracted to the stories told through television and film.  Viewers are able to recognize the characters as human-like with human qualities and problems, and can thereby escape their own reality for a bit.  This article deals with how some cartoons utilize escapism and allegory to influence the theme of their shows/films.

As my interest was piqued and renewed in the old cartoons I began to look back on the stories and how they were told.  The films and shows that continue to resonate with me, for whatever reason, are the Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig skits as well as Disney’s Jungle Book and Robin Hood.  I found something that I knew had been there all along but wasn’t sure what exactly, and, also what it likely meant for the producers.  Simple, relatively subtle messages conditioning an unassuming viewer towards a certain agenda is what I found. These kinds of productions are obviously geared towards children and the tone or influence of the story isn’t all that inconspicuous.  During my time as a child, of course, I wasn’t aware of the underlying messages and depictions within the works.  Going back and re-watching some of the old Merry Melodies, Looney Tunes, and Disney flicks you can really trace a line of social orders and hostility arranged by the protagonist and thereby the producers of the program.  Beyond the pervasive comedic violence in the cartoons there is plenty of subtle, and not so subtle, coding of American society and the threat, or at least existence, of outsiders. Specifically we can look at The Jungle Book and Robin Hood from Disney’s repertoire.  The most glaring example in The Jungle Book is King Louie’s quest for ‘Man’s Red Fire.’

The episode of Mowgli in the Ape Kingdom strikes me now as a kind of minstrel show with the monkey’s struttin’ jive with traditional, southern black music.  The scene sets up the inferiority of the apes to men.  They aren’t intelligent and they reside in an abandoned human city, their entire quest for fire is to become equals of men.  Lines such as “I wanna be a man, man cub, and stroll right into town,” “I wanna be like you” pretty clearly assert this desire.  The question is if the ape kingdom is coded as African American society.  In my opinion the scat, the voices, drum line and the musical score supports such a claim.  The time frame of The Jungle Book brings to light a more serious and substantial argument; the film was released in 1967 shortly after the Civil Rights act and during escalated tensions between black and white America.  The abandoned temple that King Louie occupies encourages the suggestion of white abandonment of northern cities for suburbia.

If we look at Robin Hood, another Disney film created in a similar style and time frame, 1973, we find an obvious and pervasive theme throughout the film; the role of the government and taxation of citizens.  The threat of big government is coupled with a feebleminded leader suffering a serious Freudian complex and arguable homosexuality in conjunction with an autocratic police state, the Sheriff of Nottingham.  All of these confrontational and antagonistic characters also work towards subverting religion and oppressing the people.

For one, the Sheriff of Nottingham taxes all the poor folks including children on their birthday.  Furthermore, the Sheriff takes money from the church and arrests Friar Tuck.  Friar Tuck is then sentenced to death for protecting his parish; this staging is clearly a rebuke on the religious.  As for Prince John’s ‘otherness’ and his sickly depiction the audience recognizes him as a poorly conditioned man, unsuitable to be king as revealed by his oversized crown from which he took from his brother, King Richard.  Meanwhile, King Richard is nobly fighting in the crusades dispatching battalions of infidels.

The subtle themes consist of over taxation enforced by autocrats and fascists while the righteous are protecting Christianity and the dominant order.  There is also the harassment of the churches and the pious by the government, which is headed by Prince John, a clumsy, extravagantly dressed man with a lisp who overtly flirts with a costumed Little John.  The association of the homosexual is not far off for the Prince in power.  Some may think that this kind of reductionist story telling with an agenda is from days past.  However, Paige Schilt points out similar conservative and dated agendas persist.  Her article is based upon Ice Age 3 and Manny’s inability to hold onto his masculinity while tending to his child.  Ultimately he must become feminized to fill the role of caregiver due to the fact that traditionally the parental figure is the mother.  Schilt’s scathing review also includes compelling and interesting insight into the squirrel, his obsession with his nut and the femme fatale trying to take it away.

It clearly isn’t just dated productions that use tepid and stale models to dictate thematic characteristics onto the view and it also, interestingly enough, isn’t always that they’re deploying traditional and conservative models.  Like I said earlier I was and am a huge fan of Merry Melodies. Granted, some of the characters are in the conservative vein like Elmer, Foghorn, and Yosemite, all of these characters are represented pretty satirically.  Yosemite and Elmer specifically are essentially bumbling idiots.  Meanwhile, Bugs is able to overcome typical gender roles and is constantly appearing in drag and playing transgendered or transsexual roles often with heavy overtones of sexuality in dress, score and story.  Here is where we have an instance of progressive models of gender and society found in child geared animated entertainment.

The process of boiling down huge stories like Jungle Book and Robin Hood into politicized and polarized accounts, I think, is a transgression against all those looking for openly supportive and honest stories rather than obvious agendas.  Taking the allegorical lessons of the larger works of the stories like the Disney recreations can be influential in how younger viewers recognize characteristics in the human forms of the cartoons representations.  However, production studios have in the past, and in the present, used dated models of human and social qualities to depict gender roles, noble power, the role of government and minorities in our society.

It’s a slippery slope to play on and something that is important when considering what to show your children.  Just something to think about next time you’re enjoying an animation, what really is going on in that story?

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