British activists have won a battle with Turner Broadcasting about some of its vintage cartoons and the evils of (gasp) smoking.
Tom and Jerry can flatten each other with anvils and batter themselves senseless with mallets, but censors have drawn a line when it comes to watching the cartoon cat and mouse enjoy a cigarette.
Following a single complaint to the media watchdog Ofcom, scenes showing characters smoking in the classic cartoons are being cut. Similar scenes in other cartoons including The Flintstones and Scooby Doo are also destined for the cutting room floor.
I’m certainly not in favor of smoking. On the other hand, there’s a lot more potentially objectionable material in cartoons, both old and new, that I’d lop out first — if I were of a mood to bowdlerize cartoons.
And, what the heck does this mean for a true classic like Jonny Quest, where dad is constantly puffing on his cigar, and Race swaps cigarette-lighting duty with his girlfriend Jade? (To be sure, the classic JQ is so politically incorrect, I suspect it will never make it back to the airwaves again.)
I can see it now.
“Aw, mom, why can’t I smoke? Tom and Jerry did! Besides, you let me hit my baby brother over the head with a mallet, push him off a cliff, drop an anvil on his head, and hand him a stick of dynamite with a short fuse!”
Pfui.
As someone observed — the two cartoons Ofcom objected to had Tom doing the smoking. And no kid is looking to emulate Tom — Jerry is the cool one, after all.