So many features in the cartoons you love-down to the white-gloved hands-have a troubling history. Written by Shon Arieh-Lerer. Edited by Scott McGhee. Based on the research of Professor Nicholas Sammond at the University of Toronto.
It’s because if the hands were also coloured black you wouldn’t be able to see them if they past over the characters body (since they’re the same colour they’d merge together) - that’s what I’ve always been known anyways
That’s true. It’s just A coincidence that they wear white gloves. They probably wore gloves to cover their white hands while cartoons covered their hands for having black hands lol
Looks like it originated from what they just showed I would think even if cartoons were in black and white black hands would be more visible these days you don't see the white gloves not like they gonna say we did it because the slave look alike tradition
@@iK0FFEE bro you’ve clearly never played a match of smash bro’s before. Watch the intro to the n64 game. The white glove represents the creators childhood imagination and how he would play with plushies and action figures of those characters as a kid.
The reason that old cartoon characters wear gloves is because that back than drawing cartoons was a lot of work, drawing each picture individually, so in order to draw them faster the artists would draw the cartoon characters with not a lot of detailing. And a shortcut they did is to draw their hands with gloves on them because that drawing a hand took a lot of detailing and a glove didn’t.
dvdvante well they actually gave old cartoon characters gloves to define them against the dark bodies because if they’re hands moved over their bodies you wouldn’t be able to see them - if you made them all white the same problem would happen
I mean for fuck sake they are just gloves it is not like they are the definitive way of telling if a cartoon is racist or not like Jesus fucking christ people need to just calm the hell down
It would be impossible to deny that there's a lot of racism in old cartoons, but saying that white gloves and slapstick are inherently racist seems like a stretch.
add to that the fact that the white gloves weren't really meant to convey racism. It's just a tool from black and white cartoons to differentiate the hands from the body.
I am not sure he is saying that it is racist, just that it has its origins in a racist medium. Once a thing becomes devoid of racial connotations, it cannot really be racist in any sense.
A lot of this video is true, but the part about violence in cartoons being a direct result of slave conditions is an oversimplification. Clearly whoever made this video is unfamiliar with Vaudeville acts where white people, mainly Jews, used slapstick humor and comical violence. This can also be seen in The Three Stooges. They were never referencing slavery.
"Repetitive, brutal violence" as children's humor doesn't have "it's roots in minstrelsy." Punch and Judy shows date back to at least 16th century Europe, and they were essentially live action cartoons. I would venture to say it's probably been around much longer than that.
Jonathan Wiggins U are right Punch and Judy shows date back to the 1600’s. This guy puts together a professional looking video and it looks like he did his research but fact checking should’ve of been the first thing he did instead of running with racism. I mean the whole cartoons getting burned or blown up and that being an example of blackface in cartoons was a ridiculous reach. Remind me again what something looks like when it gets burned or fried it’s usually black.
2:08 "God of the cartoon universe" You got that waaaaaaaaay off there, guy "Master hand" is called that because every character in the smash bros series are actually just toys in a child's imagination. Master hand is the hand of the child who owns these toys, hence why the name "master" And i feel like the white glove being racist is a bit of a stretch, because 1. a lot of jobs have people wearing white gloves 2. It was easier to animate and differentiate the hands from the body 3. It just looks nice
Alot of what is mentioned in the video, mostly the modern stuff, is not 'inherently racist.' But the roots of these trends in animation undoubtedly are.
Lol for real, the characters freezing into figurines should make this really obvious. Also it's easier to draw a white glove than it is a paw, and human hands instead of paws means they can use items instead of just walk around
This video has some good points but come on. Today nobody thinks of racism when you see those white gloves. The intention has been lost over the decades. So saying that Mario is racist, it’s a bit of an stretch. Mario is only an Italian stereotype, I’m half Italian and I don’t give a damn. Also is Buster Keaton and Chaplin racist too? There is slapstick there too. And I’ve never seen them doing blackface.
the example just said "minstrel performers had white gloves, and so does this... so racism" weak ass logic. by that criteria every magician is a racist
Great video. Enlightening for certain. I would like to address one thing I believe to be incorrect - white gloves. White gloves were the symbol of a gentleman or a "True Lady". They and still are worn as such. Historically speaking, white gloves came along as a necessary response to assorted plagues and viruses. In fact, in the early 19th century a general rule for the ideal gentleman was to change his gloves 6 times a day. Freemasons wear white gloves with their tuxes when they hold lodge. So, although white gloves were warn in racist fashions, they are not a symbol of racism.
ehhhhh I get what you are trying to say but some of your examples aren't on point. the master hand from smash bros ? GTFOHWTB you reaching too far on that
It's a vestige...No one did it on purpose...but culturally it has roots in minstrel shows..Things we all grew up loving in cartoons has origins.. You a college student? you seem to lack critical thinking.
college ? lol maybe 20 years ago. no I'm aware of minstrels influence on cartoons, but I just don't buy a japanese game having that influence. if anything it probably speaks to their own cultural history as opposed to something yankee side. its not like whites invented gloves, it seems a little americentric to assume the connection
The japanese copy our culture...and no one mentioned "whites" once. Stop defending something that doesnt need defending race is a social construct only...it doesnt need your defending. No one called you a racist... walk away. Stop acting guilty. And before you reply "guilty? me"... just walk away... you sound like a racist to be honest but i dont know you so i will reframe judgment.
they copy elements of your culture, they aren't a mirror for every aspect of it. wearing white gloves does not mean the same thing in every culture. you may think I'm guilty, I do not care. I'm the product of slaves and slave masters, I don't need you or anyone to educate me on my own history. the issue with cartoons is correct, it just doesn't translate to other cultures equivalently and bringing up Japanese video games is a stretch. if the creator of the vid stayed in their lane I wouldn't have said anything.
Once I saw the blackface plays I started crying, why did we ever allow this to happen? Why did we sit back and watch people of power dehumanize their fellow humans? Thank god I don’t live in the past because I wouldn’t have been able to keep my mouth shut against such ignorant ass monsters
I love the people soyraging down here going "NOOOOO ITS JUST BECAUSE OF ANIMATION REASONS YOU ARE SEEING RACISM WHERE THERE ISN'T ANY YOU MUST BE A LIBERAAAAAAL"
If slapstick comedy for entertainment originated in slavery, what exactly where the jesters and court entertainers doing long before America yet alone slavery even existed.
Jared Jams but not biased/discriminatory slavery. I do not believe any slave trade other than west African was based solely on race. Maybe the Jews or some shit but idk
@@thewerewolfcrossedwithveno8370 Except it does. He's trying to make the point that "slapstick comedy originates from Minstrels" which is false to the core.
@@sprintingoni8828 i feel like saying that takes away from how fucked up the enslavement of black people was, especially considering human chattel slavery is like, probably the worst that it ever got
What are you? The general news? The white gloves are easier to animate, like with 4 figures, and easier to spot. Some did used it for racist connections, but not everyone, like Mario don't use it for such reasons. In Japan, it's a professional look. Master Hand from 64 to Melee represents the hand of the player. Don't know about Brawl to Ultimate, just that Sakurai mentioned that Smash world is the imagination of a kid playing with his toys. Turning darker or black from an explosion is form the direct of such explosion. There is a lot of racist animation works back then especially from Disney, but you decided to mix non racist with racist works
@@heisenkittie If you never picked up a pencil and paper and done multiple animations of hands in different styles or study the art of animations or done grayscale studies with limited shades and tints then don't come here crying wolf. Why are you repeating what I say about Disney? Oh yeah cause you're trying to distort what I say.
@@heisenkittie You don't dumb down things to make your point stronger. If you can't acknowledge the other side then you fail to advance. Life doesn't work by feelings bud
I understand these origins but I feel that by now, cartoon characters are divorced enough from their racist roots that we can still enjoy them without them contributing to systemic racism anymore!
fun fact: the circus was actually originally formed for entertainment among groups of white people such as the middle and high class that contained clowns. you might think clown aren’t racist, right? wrong. clowns were originally meant to stereotype black people such as an afro, big teeth, big lips, and of course, there skin color. they have changed overtime and now the makeup is different containing no blackface, but clowns today look exactly like clowns did, only they got rid of the blackface. it’s very interesting to think that something very innocent like a circus has a very racist and dehumanizing backstory.
As a black person I think the racist cartoons are hilarious because it’s ludicrous . It did do immense damage and I will never deny that my family that. Hell the stereotypes ain’t end. Look at rap . So disturbing
This video had some valid points but most are a bit of a stretch And i also really hate the replies in this comment section, full of hive minded and stubborn misinformed people
@Vince Belfort if that was a typo and you mean "why are you against rights or with racism" i don't. It's just that the comments is filled with people wanting to play the victim, wanting every detail to be so negative and just straight up believing anything that was said in the video
@@ericfording3556 gloves are easier because they are bulkier, so you don’t have to worry about the wrists connecting to the hand right or anything being exactly the correct size such as the fingers and such.
Your ancestors are dead and you are alive just live your life and forget the past you never knew them you never experienced half the things they went through live your life while you still can and stop worrying about the past you never truly experienced
@@MistyKathrine You're welcome I was curious so i looked into it. I'm also gonna reiterate, I wasn't a shock but normally a mix of surprised and indifference
It's strange you didn't mention Warner Brothers' answer the Mickey Mouse in the early 30s, Bosco,the Talk Ink Kid... He's so stylized it doesn't really occur to you at first, but .... He was a little black boy!
Maybe it was at the start like that but cartoons have evolved over time and followed each other. When warner brothers saw how popular Mickey Mouse was that made them want to reference Disney by making bugs
Alternatively...slapstick comedy depicting over the top but none consequential violence is funny and has nothing to do with racist shows from the 20s-40s.
My dad showed this to me back then and I didn't see nothing wrong with it. Or him, and we are black. But now after I saw this on my recommend I feel different about the song
You guys are calling everything racist. Please do your research before making these videos. The master hand is supposed to be the kid who controls the toys and it is not a racist thing. Just because you have to fight it that doesnt mean it is the villian. Also the gloves were there because they are easier to animate with and you called mario's gloves racist. First of all he is a plumber so it makes sense for him to wear gloves.
@@swanthechosenone3975 You can't believe it's racist that somebody get soot in the face from fire or an explosion, if you're not a racist yourself... It's called obsession...
At a few points in the video, a claim is made that's _so_ outrageous it beggars belief, even for someone as progressive as myself-but then, not a moment later, the proof is shown and the claim is validated. If someone like me experiences cognitive dissonance watching this, just imagine what it does to those less progressive
Literally all of the comments trying to poke holes in this is just sad. They can't even imagine that there might be two equally true reasons for white gloves in animation (not that them supposedly being "easier to animate" makes any sense to me, but whatever).
Ever think that the explosions turned someone's skin darker because it was soot? You know, the product when inorganic materials are burned? Didn't think so
I personally love "The Story of OJ", it is a great song with a great message behind the music video and I love this video (except the white gloves part, because it's just not true) thank you for telling the current generation about the history of one of my favorite things, cartoons
- I never cared if you were “gay” until you started shoving it in my face, and the faces of my children. -I never cared what color you were, until you started blaming my race for your problems. -I never cared about your political affiliation until you started to condemn me for mine. -I never cared where you were born until you wanted to erase my history and blame my ancestors for your current problems. -I never cared if you were well-off or poor, until you said you were discriminated against, when I was promoted because I worked harder. -I never cared if your beliefs were different from mine, until you said my beliefs were wrong.
The piece is true. White gloves on cartoons started long before nintendo. It doesn't matter that Nintendo doesn't intend it to be racists. The point is that you can trace the use of white gloves on characters all the way back to it's roots as part of the minstrel show costume. It's not a claim that Super Mario's white gloves are fundamentally racists. People need to pay closer attention. It's about the origins and how they came to exist on current characters. Not an assignment of meaning to a current character.
It is possible to change an illustration or text-line that is racist offensive without dumping the whole book. That said: There is a whole well known Theodore Geisel backstory that the press seems incredulously oblivious to, and that is that the author was a national propagandist illustrator for the War Department in WW2, his job was to draw incendiary visceral anti-japanese racist propaganda pictures and imagery en par with anything the Nazi's were portraying Blacks as (something the author Theodore Geisel was already good at and partly why he got the job in the first place). This was fully approved by President Roosevelt, however Eleanor Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace were aghast horrified by the whole major racism push against the Japanese. The project was partly coordinated out of the actually titled small 'Office of Racism' in the War Department (the sole purpose of the office was to instill hatred of JAPANESE military personnel into US military recruits and draftees).. The reason such a racist program was enacted in the first place was that the US public had been fed a steady diet of ever more sensationalist (newspaper/advertising sales) media articles from 1937 to Pearl Harbor depicting the Japanese, as they juggernaut-steamrolled through Asia heading for Australia and Burma, as highly-resourceful unstoppable semi-insane mass-raping ape-like take-no-prisoners baby-bayoneting decapitating suicide-killers (the same way people today look at ISIS or Al Qaeda but on a much bigger and threatening scale) and potential American soldiers were terrified of facing Japanese troops in the field (War Department studies on military preparedness and propaganda are declassified and archived) but interestingly the American public at that time viewed the Germans as just like your average 'white American' (that only began to change in 1944 when US troops engaged the Germans in Europe and liberated Nazi concentration and POW camps and the level of Nazi atrocities started to become more widely understood). So the top US military brass, all of whom were around during WW1 when US anti-German racist propaganda was a real thing nationwide in the US, used, as later mainly against the Japanese in WW2, all in order to counter the genuine fear about Japanese 'suicide killers'. And it works psychologically, nothing gets rid of ordinary people's fear of killing someone or facing killers more than hate (take the Capitol insurrectionists for example, mostly ordinary people who's lack of fear of insurrection and potential to cheer on or participate in lynching, was real and actual). There is so much stuff about WW2 that people don't know, some of it a lot worse and larger-scale-war-outcome-implicative than I'm mentioning here (my dad was an OSS agent in France before D-Day and in China when the Japanese surrendered during WW2 and was told by his OSS supervisor that he would be killed if he went over the OSS and State Department heads to report war crimes (torture and executions) committed against Japanese Officer POW's by the KMT (Nationalist Chinese) Intelligence AFTER Japan had surrendered and my dad was forced to participate in the cover-up or "accidents happen all the time". I have many examples of WW2 horrifying and mind-blowing stuff involving US or US-allied troops and national leaders, most of which has been uncovered or even known at the time locally, but is merely ignored (no one wants to have 'the good war' completely dismantled in their brainscape and to have some of their national heroes brought down to sociopathic criminality revision) and left out of the vast majority of history books or biographies.recounts and even from most more-specific-related college courses. One tidbit of still classified info: Stalin and Churchill conspired to assassinate the Polish leader in exile at Gibraltar (lest PM Sikorsky publish international red cross and German documents proving that US/UK vital ally USSR mass-murdered all of the [surrendered] Polish military officer class at Katyn - a scandal that likely would have led to a severe breakdown of the US-USSR war alliance at a crucial juncture and assuredly cause splits within the US allied coalition and led to public pressure to cut ties with the USSR, all to the existential detriment to the UK). It is established (cf. 1969 UK parliamentary and other independent inquires) but completely ignored fact - due to too many witnesses, forensic evidence, and cover-ups. However one thing no one I know of has never connected the dots in this affair: Kim Philby (yes THAT Kim Philby - the most notorious British turncoat spy ever working for Soviet Intelligence) was MI6 station chief at Gibraltar and present during the assassination whole affair and matched the description of the 'unknown guy' who entered the sabotaged aircraft before it went down due to 'unknown reasons' (i.e. it was proven that there was no reason the aircraft should have or DID malfunction, contrary to the pilot's and contemporaneous government--inquiry claim of ' jammed' parts, yet pilot error or culpability was also automatically ruled out as the pilot, another MI6 agent, miraculously was the only one to survive, besides an 'unknown' person who was seen swimming to shore and disappearing running into the fog right after the crash and before emergency vehicles had reached the area. The pilot was caught telling several blatant lies contradicting a half dozen witnesses, all of which which was completely ignored by the contemporaneous British government inquiry. The Polish crash investigators (from London) who were unprecedentedly not allowed any input into the final report, were deliberately kept unaware at the time of most of the information uncovered after the war.
That was a depressing video. I didn't realise just how much racism was in the cartoons I loved and how it still persists. It's also the most I've ever seen of minstrel shows and it was deeply disturbing and strangely surreal.
Hey yeah I am totally with you on most of all of this but there’s actually a lot out there from primary sources explaining the gloves are used because of ease of animation as well as other factors and lots of explanation as to why the gloves were always used (super interesting) and also same goes for the whole violence with no repercussions is sourced way back thousands of years in clowns and there pre cursors.
you see...you look at the world now and think its horrible just look at how it was back then terrible good thing were making an impact on our lives and rights its just disturbing how they treated and looked at us
White gloves, large eyes and mouths don't necessarily mean they were representing minstrel shows. White gloves were easier to animate, the explosions were probably made to make the characters look like minstrel actors. However, slapstick comedy was just easier to animate.
Or is that what they're telling you think about it why could it just be a hand with no detail added on just the fingers would have been the same like Olive from the cartoon popeye the sailor man
@@blu3bugjunkie420 because Popeye was white and you could clearly see his hands but Mickey is a black mouse and you wouldn’t be able to see his hands if he was holding a dark object.
Of course 'blackface' is disturbing and offensive. But yet again people are diminishing the real thing by finding 'blackface' everywhere, even where it is not. Wile E Coyote having his face covered in soot from an explosion is not racism, nor is the slapstick 'violence' of Bugs Bunny or Tom and Jerry.
