| Disney Gets Dissed
At Cinema Village, irreverent & racist spoofs slip a Mickey to Walt's wonderful world of animation by Lewis Beale |
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| Daily News Staff Writer
RACIST, SEXIST, POLITICALLY IN- correct and totally out of control. Not to mention screamingly funny. That's the best way to describe a cartoon series opening tonight at Cinema Village. Titled "Screw the Mouse: Rip-Offs, Parodies and Deviant Versions of Disney Cartoons and Characters," the series features a number of cartoon shorts that satirize hallowed Disney characters, themes and plotlines. "These hark back to an era when the rival cartoon production studios were a lot more fun," says Ed Arentz, programer for Cinema Village. "Studios like Warner Bros. felt they had a license to mock, mimic and parody Disney, something you don't see in today's corporate climate. It harks back to a period when animated shorts were being done for an adult audience as well as children." Like in "Corny Concerto" (1943), where a bumbling Elmer Fudd stands in for Leopold Stokowski in a sendup of "Fantasia " Or "Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs" (1943), a tasteless, racist and absolutely fascinating parody of Disney's "Snow White." "[In the era of cartoon shorts], you had a more auteur-driven environment," says Arentz. "These guys were allowed to do |
what they wanted. That's not the
case now — the animator's not given the free hand, and some of the anarchic
spirit is gone."
Tonight's program, which runs through Jan. 9, comes from the collection of Dennis Nyback, a local collector who once ran the Lighthouse Cinema on the lower East Side. Other esoteric gems from Nyback's collection form the basis of a seven-week series featuring American jazz stars in short films that are no longer shown due to their racist content, clips and shorts with cross-dressing stars, wacko educational films from the 1950s and other weird stuff. The material is interesting as much for its strangeness as its now-forbidden na- ture. But despite the repugnant content of some of the films, Arentz says they have educational value. "Racist sentiments and characters are interesting as a period piece," he says, "and as a way of making it very obvious that these attitudes were very prevalent. I don't think anyone today will be offended by them. They'll just see them as part of a pop culture that has largely vanished." "Screw the Mouse" shows tonight
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