One of the greatest caricaturists of all time, Al Hirschfeld, spent his career doing black and white portraits of celebrities in which he exaggerated their most salient facial features. Many of these appeared in the pages of the New York Times.
Hirschfeld died in 2003, though I suspect if he were living today he would be unemployed, if not regarded as an outcast. So sensitive has the Left become to noticing, much less calling out, individual and cultural differences that even the most innocent reference has become taboo.
The latest company to fall in line with these draconian strictures is entertainment conglomerate Disney, which has began adding warning labels to its cartoon classics. As Mashable first noted, the animated films “Dumbo” (1941), “Lady and the Tramp” (1955), “The Jungle Book” (1967), and “The Aristocats” (1970) will henceforth carry along with their plot descriptions the warning, “This program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions.” Fortunately, that’s as far as the silliness goes, leaving it up to the individual parent to decide whether he wants to “enlighten” his young child.
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Of course Mashable, being the reliably left-leaning site that it is, doesn’t just stop at noting the addition of the language. It takes Disney to task for not going far enough:
While it’s decent of Disney to note the poor aging of these portrayals with time, this seems like a prime opportunity to point out that these depictions are not just outdated — like say, the low-rise jeans of the early 2000s — but inaccurate and offensive.
One film in the Disney collection that won’t carry the warning is “Song of the South” (1946), which is based upon characters created by Joel Chandler Harris. The reason the film — which introduced the song classic “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” — won’t carry the label is because it is no longer exists for all intents and purposes. Disney has kept the movie out of circulation for decades because it depicts southern blacks, dialect and all. I’m surprised the Left hasn’t found a way to make living and breathing southern blacks disappear.
