Sun Aug 27, 2006 12:35 pm
Smoke''s no joke for Tom and Jerry..
does anyone know who the two nanny-state nutters were who complained to the British television regulator, Ofcom, about "scenes of gratuitous smoking" in the Tom & Jerry cartoons, "Texas Tom" and "Tennis Chumps?"
I suspect they'll be easy to spot, with rolled-up copies of the Grauniad under their arms, a mad, deranged, paranoid stare as they look out for anything that might be even remotely considered "offensive," and the fact that their children, on the rare occasion that they are ever let out into the big bad dangerous world, are wearing crash-helmets, knee-pads, and cricket boxes just to pop down to the shops.
All H-B's classic Tom & Jerry cartoons are now to be edited, duly excising any cigar, cigarette, or pipe-related material, in case it encourages watching children to nip out and get a packet of 20 Woodbines or Hamlets. So presumably Winston Churchill's portrait is next, or Van Gogh's self-portrait, or Magritte's "This Is Not A Pipe" (erm which features a pipe, and pretty much nothing else)
Now of course we shouldn't encourage children to smoke. But neither should we encourage them to lure coyotes off cliffs, buy do-it-youself atom bomb kits from Acme, hit each other with frying pans (leaving their little brother or sister with a flat, three foot wide face) nor to drop anvils on passing strangers, or fooling a vicious guard dog into swallowing a stick of dynamite. Strangely enough, the newspapers are generally free of reports of such incidents, which if one were to follow the logic of the politically-correct police, should be happening on a worryingly regular basis. I wonder why?
Incidentally, said "policy" is now to be extended to all episodes of Scooby-Doo and the Flintstones. No doubt it will be further enhanced to include all other cartoons and film containing scenes of smoking, in no matter what form (like when the Coyote uses a lit ciggie to light the fuse to his latest Roadrunner trap) - the few that may escape the pc-censors on the basis of "editorial justification" will almost certainly carry a warning for concerned parents stating "Caution - May contain scenes of inhaled fumification!" (and here was me thinking nothing could be crasser than "caution - may contain scenes of extended peril."
Kind of makes you think what would become of Brief Encounter, or Way Out West, or any one of thousands of film made before smoking became the worst thing since Attila the Hun?
<wistful sigh> ah, Tom & Jerry; for any child born after the 1940s they were an intrinsic part of growing up. Back when I was a little Taw, and we only had a black and white telly and just three channels (BBC1, BBC2 and ITV) and our dad used to have World of Sport on all Saturday afternoon thus denying us any chance to watch cartoons (or anything else for that matter) my brother and I would trot down to the local picture house for the Saturday afternoon matinee with a whole half-a-crown (that's two shillings and sixpence, and you felt rich if you had a half a crown) and watch Tom & jerry cartoons in glorious Technicolor on the silver screen, a Childrens Film Foundation feature about Tommy's Time Bike or some such, and some foreign series about Abdul the Peasant Boy and the Thirty Thieves of Marrakech, which always seemed to start at Episode 23 for some reason. Aftre the magical few hours were up, and we'd spent all the money on Lyons Maid vanilla ice cream tubs and Kia-Ora, we'd catch the bus home and trudge in for whatever muck mum was making with stinky boiled cabbage and pray we might get to watch Dr Who after dad had finished watching the wrestling and done his football pools coupon,* before the Generation Game and Saturday Night at the London Palladium came on.
in my own case, it certainly wasn't watching Tom & Jerry cartoons that started me smoking; it was the bigger lads who hung around at the back of the cricket pavilion at school who said they'd beat me up for being a ponce if I didn't have a drag. Can't remember any cartoon animals being involved.
an additional moot point, linking in with other subjects we've been discussing recently; if smoking is so evil, why do all airport duty-free shops still sell cheap cigs? and if you're not allowed hand-luggage any more because you might be a mad jihadist terrorist planning to blow up airliners with Ladybird colouring books and Crayola crayons, how do you get your duty-free shopping onto the plane at all? And why, if planes are all non-smoking, do the no smoking signs go still out once the plane levels out after take-off?
what a wonderful world we live in! I'm just off outside for a cig, anyone fancy joining me? it may be the last chance you ever get....
(* football pools were how poor people tried to get rich and wasted their money back in the days before National Lottery nonsense.)
Edited by - Tawakalna Qubt-ut Allah on 8/27/2006 2:07:48 PM
Edited by - Tawakalna Qubt-ut Allah on 8/27/2006 2:08:33 PM
I suspect they'll be easy to spot, with rolled-up copies of the Grauniad under their arms, a mad, deranged, paranoid stare as they look out for anything that might be even remotely considered "offensive," and the fact that their children, on the rare occasion that they are ever let out into the big bad dangerous world, are wearing crash-helmets, knee-pads, and cricket boxes just to pop down to the shops.
All H-B's classic Tom & Jerry cartoons are now to be edited, duly excising any cigar, cigarette, or pipe-related material, in case it encourages watching children to nip out and get a packet of 20 Woodbines or Hamlets. So presumably Winston Churchill's portrait is next, or Van Gogh's self-portrait, or Magritte's "This Is Not A Pipe" (erm which features a pipe, and pretty much nothing else)
Now of course we shouldn't encourage children to smoke. But neither should we encourage them to lure coyotes off cliffs, buy do-it-youself atom bomb kits from Acme, hit each other with frying pans (leaving their little brother or sister with a flat, three foot wide face) nor to drop anvils on passing strangers, or fooling a vicious guard dog into swallowing a stick of dynamite. Strangely enough, the newspapers are generally free of reports of such incidents, which if one were to follow the logic of the politically-correct police, should be happening on a worryingly regular basis. I wonder why?
Incidentally, said "policy" is now to be extended to all episodes of Scooby-Doo and the Flintstones. No doubt it will be further enhanced to include all other cartoons and film containing scenes of smoking, in no matter what form (like when the Coyote uses a lit ciggie to light the fuse to his latest Roadrunner trap) - the few that may escape the pc-censors on the basis of "editorial justification" will almost certainly carry a warning for concerned parents stating "Caution - May contain scenes of inhaled fumification!" (and here was me thinking nothing could be crasser than "caution - may contain scenes of extended peril."
Kind of makes you think what would become of Brief Encounter, or Way Out West, or any one of thousands of film made before smoking became the worst thing since Attila the Hun?
<wistful sigh> ah, Tom & Jerry; for any child born after the 1940s they were an intrinsic part of growing up. Back when I was a little Taw, and we only had a black and white telly and just three channels (BBC1, BBC2 and ITV) and our dad used to have World of Sport on all Saturday afternoon thus denying us any chance to watch cartoons (or anything else for that matter) my brother and I would trot down to the local picture house for the Saturday afternoon matinee with a whole half-a-crown (that's two shillings and sixpence, and you felt rich if you had a half a crown) and watch Tom & jerry cartoons in glorious Technicolor on the silver screen, a Childrens Film Foundation feature about Tommy's Time Bike or some such, and some foreign series about Abdul the Peasant Boy and the Thirty Thieves of Marrakech, which always seemed to start at Episode 23 for some reason. Aftre the magical few hours were up, and we'd spent all the money on Lyons Maid vanilla ice cream tubs and Kia-Ora, we'd catch the bus home and trudge in for whatever muck mum was making with stinky boiled cabbage and pray we might get to watch Dr Who after dad had finished watching the wrestling and done his football pools coupon,* before the Generation Game and Saturday Night at the London Palladium came on.
in my own case, it certainly wasn't watching Tom & Jerry cartoons that started me smoking; it was the bigger lads who hung around at the back of the cricket pavilion at school who said they'd beat me up for being a ponce if I didn't have a drag. Can't remember any cartoon animals being involved.
an additional moot point, linking in with other subjects we've been discussing recently; if smoking is so evil, why do all airport duty-free shops still sell cheap cigs? and if you're not allowed hand-luggage any more because you might be a mad jihadist terrorist planning to blow up airliners with Ladybird colouring books and Crayola crayons, how do you get your duty-free shopping onto the plane at all? And why, if planes are all non-smoking, do the no smoking signs go still out once the plane levels out after take-off?
what a wonderful world we live in! I'm just off outside for a cig, anyone fancy joining me? it may be the last chance you ever get....
(* football pools were how poor people tried to get rich and wasted their money back in the days before National Lottery nonsense.)
Edited by - Tawakalna Qubt-ut Allah on 8/27/2006 2:07:48 PM
Edited by - Tawakalna Qubt-ut Allah on 8/27/2006 2:08:33 PM
.