Black Hoosiers in Animation

Ours is a cancel culture in which art is permitted to serve a political purpose or none at all. In other words, any art that is not propaganda is to be censored, bowdlerized, suppressed, cancelled, eliminated, or destroyed. Right now it is statuary that is bearing the brunt of the anti-art, anti-history, and anti-culture movement in the West. Once the destroyers are done with sculpture, they are certain to move on to other forms. Museums and libraries are likely targets. The nation's cultural and educational institutions should probably start thinking about how they're going to protect their collections. After all, it's a lot easier for a single destroyer to slip into the stacks and burn everything there is about Andrew Jackson or Christopher Columbus than it is to topple a statue. The act might not be as public or ostentatious, but it would be effective nonetheless. If the goal is to destroy the past and all knowledge of the past, then words and images must go into the memory hole in the same way that statues are decapitated, burned, dumped into lakes, or dragged through city streets like an American serviceman in Mogadishu.

Movies, too, are being cancelled. Gone with the Wind (1939) has joined Song of the South (1946) on the list of forbidden works. Never mind that it includes a performance by Hattie McDaniel, the first by a black actor or actress to win an Academy Award. We cannot be permitted to see it. Other movies and television shows can't be far behind.

Animated film hasn't escaped the wrath of the cancelers and destroyers. Hank Azaria, an American of Sephardic Jewish extraction, can now no longer provide the voice for the South-Asian character Apu on The Simpsons. Instead, Apu and other characters in animated series will have "race"-appropriate actors speak in their voices. It is one of the absurdities of our age that actors, who are in the business of pretending to be something they are not, will not be permitted to pretend to be something they are not.

One of the cancelled film performances is by James Baskett, a chemist, chiropodist, mortician, and newspaper columnist who was of course best known as an actor. He won a special Oscar for his performance in Song of the South, making him only the second black actor and the first black man to win the the award. In Song of the South, he played opposite the first black woman to win an Oscar. By my estimate, Song of the South was the first movie to feature two black Oscar winners. (Mr. Baskett's winning the award was of course still in the future when the movie was being filmed.) Nevertheless, we cannot see his or her performance.

In addition to appearing in the live-action sequences of Song of the South, Mr. Baskett provided the voice of Brer Fox in the animated parts. He had previously been the voice of Fats Crow in Dumbo, released in 1941. As far as I know, he was the first black Hoosier to appear in animation or to provide the voice for an animated character. I don't know of any black Hoosier artist to have worked behind the scenes as a storyboard artist or animator. 

James Franklin Baskett was born on February 16, 1904, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of John S. Baskett (1869-1921) and Elizabeth Baskett (1879-1961). The death of his older sister in her infancy (before he was born) left him an only child. His parents, both native Kentuckians, lived close to downtown Indianapolis, including on Douglass Street, the same street on which members of my dad's family once lived. Douglass Street is no longer in existence. It was cleared to make way for the Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis campus, possibly also for the Lockefield Gardens Apartments. Mr. Baskett grew up in Indianapolis, but he left his native city in the 1920s to work on the Broadway stage, then in Hollywood. He appeared in fewer than a dozen movies, with Song of the South being his last. James Baskett, also known as Jimmie Baskett, died on today's date in 1948 and was buried at Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis with his father. His mother was also buried at Crown Hill. May he and they rest in peace. The image above is from Uncle Remus Brer Rabbit Stories, published by Golden Press of New York in 1977.

In 1968, the Hong Kong flu ravaged the world. A couple of years later, a kung fu craze swept across America like a contagion. Combine the two and you might have the beginnings of Hong Kong Phooey, an animated TV series produced by Hanna-Barbera and broadcast from 1974 to 1976. The title character, as any culturally literate person knows, is a dog who knows kung fu and sings scat for his title song. That's convenient because the voice of Hong Kong Phooey was done by none other than Scatman Crothers.

Born on May 23, 1910, in Terre Haute, Indiana, Benjamin Sherman Crothers was a singer and actor who appeared in movies and TV shows from 1950 until his death in 1986. His parents were Benjamin Crothers (1873-1938) and Fredonia (Lewis) Crothers (1871-1937), both of whose families had come from the South. Scatman Crother's paternal grandfather at least, named Abe Carothers or Caruthers (ca. 1844-1907), was born a slave.

Scatman Crothers performed on the radio in Ohio during the 1930s. In 1937, he married and moved to California. He continued to sing and play guitar in front of live audiences, on radio, and on records. As a member of the group The Ramparts, he recorded "The Death of Emmett Till" in 1955. By then he had made his movie debut. Two years later, in 1957, he made his first appearance in a television series, in an episode of The Adventures of Jim Bowie entitled, strangely enough, "Quarantine." The Adventures of Jim Bowie, by the way, was based on a  book by a fellow Hoosier, Monte Barrett (1897-1949) of Mitchell, Indiana. Barrett also created and wrote the script for the long-running newspaper comic strip Jane Arden.

Although there were only sixteen episodes of Hong Kong Phooey, the character proved very popular. There were Hong Kong Phooey children's books, comic books (above), lunch boxes, and other merchandise. A few years back there was talk of a Hong Kong Phooey movie. I'm not sure how good it--or anything else--could be without the participation of Scatman Crothers. He died on November 22, 1986, in Van Nuys, California.

Scatman Crothers also did the voice of Meadowlark Lemon on The Harlem Globetrotters cartoon series produced by Hanna-Barbera and shown on Saturday morning television from 1970 to 1973. Like Hong Kong Phooey, The Harlem Globetrotters was a very popular  show and spawned its own line of merchandise, including the stickers shown above, which, if you were lucky, you would have found in boxes of General Mills cereal in 1970.

The Jackson 5 were also from Indiana. They were Jackie (b. 1951), Tito (b. 1953), Jermaine (b. 1954),  Marlon (b. 1957), and Michael (1958-2009). All are natives of the city of Gary, the largest American city founded in the twentieth century. Like The Beatles before them, they were immensely popular. Like The Beatles, too, they had their own Saturday morning cartoon series, The Jackson 5ive, produced by Rankin-Bass and Motown Productions and broadcast in 1971-1972. The brothers didn't do their own voices except in the songs on the soundtrack. Voice actors took their place, including Edmund Sylvers, later of the group The Sylvers.

If you don't have to be born in, work in, or live in Indiana to be considered a Hoosier, then maybe we can still call people imprisoned within the state Hoosiers. Cartoonist Clyde Lamb (1913-1966), for example, a native Montanan, served time in Michigan City. Upon his release, he became a magazine gag cartoonist, then had his work syndicated in American newspapers. It seems pretty likely to me that Mike Tyson would rather just forget about his Indiana years. My including him here might be in pretty bad taste. But I would like to consider him a Hoosier, too. Since being released from an Indiana prison in 1995, Mr. Tyson has had his ups and downs. I would like to think that he considers the animated television series Mike Tyson Mysteries, in which he plays himself, one of the ups. Produced by Warner Bros. Animation, it has been on the Cartoon Network Adult Swim since 2014. Because of it, Mr. Tyson's form and image have been turned into an action figure (above), which is really just a miniature statue. I dare anyone to knock this one down.

Vivica Fox (b. 1964) of South Bend has done voice acting in Unstable Fables: Tortoise vs. Hare (2008), Scooby-Doo! Stage Fright (2013), and The Sky Princess (2018). The still above is from Sofia the First: Carol of the Arrow, from 2015.

Born in Evansville, Indiana, Ron Glass (1945-2016) did voice work on Superman: The Animated Series and All Grown Up! His most prominent voice-acting role was as Randy Carmichael on the Nickelodeon series Rugrats.

Finally, Kenneth Brian Edmonds (b. 1959), a native of Indianapolis and better known as Babyface, was a producer on the music soundtrack of The Prince of Egypt, released in 1998. Ironically, The Prince of Egypt was banned in several countries, including of all places Egypt. As always, the non-artists of the world, the intolerant and the iconoclastic, the haters and destroyers, the oppressors and censors, seek to deny us a look at any art they deem inappropriate. When will it ever end? How will it end? Not as the destroyers expect, I think, because the true artist possesses an irrepressible and indomitable spirit.

Text copyright 2020, 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Gray Morrow (1934-2001)

The police are in the news. Or they were. Now it's people against the police who are getting all of the attention. A couple of years ago, I found an old comic book drawn by one of my favorite comic book artists, Gray Morrow. I had planned at the time to feature it in this space, but that little project slipped away from me. Now the time seems right . . . or wrong, depending on how you look at things. From one angle, you can see Gray Morrow's comic book The Super Cops as a piece of 1970s pop culture: a little cheesy, a little exploitative, but nothing at all serious. Some people will no doubt see it differently. That won't stop me from showing it, as I think Gray Morrow's cover for The Super Cops, published forty-six years ago this month, is a beautifully done piece of comic book art.

The Super Cops, published by Red Circle Comics in July 1974, was based on a movie of the same name released in March of that year. The Super Cops was directed by Gordon Parks (1912-2006), a man of extraordinary accomplishment who had previously directed Shaft (1971), now considered one of the first movies in the genre known as blaxploitation. By the way, Gordon Parks' second wife was the daughter of a cartoonist, E. Simms Campbell (1906-1971).

In 1975, American International Pictures released Friday Foster with Pam Grier in the title role playing an intrepid magazine photographer. She was supported by Yaphet Kotto, Eartha Kitt, Scatman Crothers, and Carl Weathers. (During his long and varied career, Gordon Parks was also a magazine photographer.) Friday Foster is considered a blaxploitation film. It was based on a comic strip, the first of the postwar era and the first widely syndicated comic strip with a black woman as its title character. (It was preceded by Torchy Brown in "Dixie to Harlem", which was drawn by Jackie Ormes [1911-1985] and syndicated in 1937-1938.) Friday Foster began on January 18, 1970, with Jim Lawrence as writer and Jorge Longarón (1933-2019) as artist. Longarón was with the strip for most of its run. Gray Morrow took over on December 24, 1973, and carried it through to its end on February 17, 1974. Below is an image of the daily from January 29, 1974. Note the artist's inscription under the last panel.

Dwight Graydon Morrow was born on March 7, 1934, in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He attended North Side High School in his hometown and the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, where he received the sum total of his formal art training in just three months under Jerry Warshaw (1929-2007). Recognizing Morrow's talent, Warshaw told his young student, "Pack your bags and get started," and that's what Morrow did.* In 1954, he moved to New York City and found enough work to keep himself from starving. Not long after arriving in the city, he decided to look up political cartoonist Eugene Craig (1916-1984), formerly of the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel but by then with the Brooklyn Eagle. Craig took Morrow to a meeting of the National Cartoonists Society (NCS) and introduced him to giants, including Hal Foster (Prince Valiant), and future giants, including Wally Wood (1927-1981). Morrow went on to work with Wood, as well as with Al Williamson (1931-2010) and Angelo Torres (b. 1932). That made his start as one of the great American cartoonists, comic book artists, and science fiction illustrators of the 1950s and after.

In 1956, Morrow got caught in the draft and spent two years in the U.S. Army, including service in South Korea. He returned to civilian life and his career as an artist in 1958. In the 1960s, he drew comic book stories for Classics Illustrated. In The Illustrated Story of Whaling, a title in the World Around Us series (#W28, Dec. 1960), Morrow depicted in his original artwork a number of black whalers in an attempt at historical accuracy. He later told of how his publisher, Roberta Strauss Feuerlight, made him change their features so as to avoid controversy. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of this comic book or any images of Morrow's artwork to show you.

In the mid-1960s, Morrow illustrated children's biographies of famous black Americans, Crispus Attucks: Black Leader of Colonial Patriots by Dharathula H. Millender (1965) and Frederick Douglass: Freedom Fighter by Lillie Patterson (1965). I have two images from these books:

An illustration by Morrow from Crispus Attucks: Black Leader of Colonial Patriots by Dharathula H. Millender (1965). Born in Terre Haute, Indiana, Dharathula H. "Dolly" Millender (1920-2015) was an author, educator, librarian, and local historian known as "Gary's Historian" for the northern Indiana city where she made her home. I should point out that Crispus Attacks was also at one time a whaler: in this case, Morrow was right in his research and in his art, and there should have been no controversy at all when he drew his comic book story for Whaling. Instead his art was bowdlerized. Today, with all of the smashing of statues, we see the same thing happening, though in a far worse way. What are artists and lovers of art to do in this age of violent, ruthless, aggressive iconoclasm, destructiveness, and culture of cancellation?

An illustration by Morrow from Frederick Douglass: Freedom Fighter by Lillie Patterson, a Discovery Book published by Garrard Publishing Company of Champaign, Illinois, in 1965. Lillie Griselda Patterson (1917-1999) was an author of children's books and a librarian in the Baltimore Public Schools. She also wrote about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Booker T. Washington, and Francis Scott Key, whose statue was knocked down recently in San Francisco. I wonder what Ms. Patterson, who was black and a creator and an educator, would have thought of that.

Update (July 6, 2020): Now comes word that a statue of Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York, has also been toppled. The date was July 5, 2020, the 168th anniversary of his famous speech, "What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?" At this point, the question must be: what statue in America will stand?

You can read more about Gray Morrow on the Internet and in magazines and books, including Gray Morrow: Visionary, published in 2001 by Insight Studios Group. His work is characterized by flawless draftsmanship, an extraordinary ability to handle the human face and form, great skill at composition, and an excellent sense of color. His sense of aesthetics placed him above most comic book artists of his time and ours. Mr. Morrow died on November 6, 2001, in Kunkletown, Pennsylvania. May he rest in peace.

Dharathula H. Millender's biography of Crispus Attacks is part of the Childhood of Famous Americans series, originally published by Bobbs-Merrill of Indianapolis. The image above is from the Aladdin edition of 1986. The cover artwork was not by Gray Morrow, but his interior illustrations remained.

On this Independence Day, we should all remember Crispus Attucks and the men and women who sacrificed so much so that we might have and enjoy our freedoms. We should also hold in contempt the people who want to take all of that away from us. And we should remember people like Gray Morrow, who sought the universal in the particular and looked past surfaces to see the truth in things, as good and great artists do.

Happy Independence Day, America!

*After leaving art school, Morrow worked for a Chicago art studio. He also met a fellow Hoosier, Allen Saunders (1899-1986), famed author of Mary Worth, Big Chief Wahoo, and Steve Roper, who encouraged him to get into the field of syndicated comic strips. Morrow gave it a try, but only later did he find success as a not-always-credited artist on such strips as Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Rip Kirby, and Tarzan.

Text copyright 2020, 2024 Terence E. Hanley