Borgarkeri A bit overrated, but still an amazing film

Lollivan It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Catherina If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Tad Pole . . . scribbled out OTHELLO with his quill pens. If Ted Turner and his then-spouse "Hanoi Jane" Fonda had decided to get smashed on six pitchers of Mint Juleps and while away an evening Red-Lining the works of "The Bard," no doubt OTHELLO would have appeared on their Shakespearian "Censored Eleven" Blacklist. Nowadays the rest of Hollywood is just catching up to the Warner Bros. savants of the 1930s, with such recent releases as LOVING. However, all is NOT "sweetness and light" in such affairs, as Nicole Brown Simpson learned to her dismay. Sometimes even innocent bystanders such as busboy Ron Goldman get caught up in such incidents of BIRTH OF A NATION-like rage. Warner Bros. suggests that the products or legacies of such pairings constitute the proverbial "Fate Worse Than Death" to many if not most Americans in their right minds. (If you're not with Warner's program, watch GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER and you'll see that it's the Black Mailman Dad who is the most cognizant of this fact.) No matter how much the Bleeding Heart Liberals want to condemn the Nicoles and Rons of Modern America to tragic demises in order to satisfy their delusion that we all live in a world of Unicorns and friendly Dragons, Warner Bros. was, is, and always will be in the forefront of sharing a frank, unblinking view of Reality with America, no matter how many pitchers of booze Ted and Jane chug down.

Electrified_Voltage "Jungle Jitters" is one of the eleven cartoons, all from the 30's and 40's, that were put on a list in 1968 called the "Censored 11", and banned from television, as they were considered too racist. Nonetheless, I was born eighteen years later, and I remember watching this one a lot on video as a kid, and enjoying it. However, I was entertained by just about everything I saw on TV or video at the time, and I no longer find this animated short very amusing.The cartoon begins with an African tribe doing various things, including dancing, drumming, and riding on a merry-go-round. However, their fun is interrupted when someone comes to their doors. It turns out to be a silly door-to-door salesman (one with a dog's face) on the other side of the wall. As this salesman waits for someone to answer, members of the tribe look down at him from above, and he doesn't realize that this is a tribe of cannibals who want to eat him for dinner! When I watched this cartoon as a kid, I obviously never thought of it as racist, as that word wasn't even in my vocabulary at the time. Right now, I can understand the controversy, but that's definitely not my main problem with the short. Yes, it does portray Africans as cannibals, but it has been nearly seventy years since it was made, and I don't think there's any point in getting worked up about it now. What is my main problem with "Jungle Jitters"? Well, if you ask me, it's simply not very funny. The only part that makes me laugh is when the salesman knocks on the doors, and tribe members keep opening and closing them. I probably don't get a lot of the gags simply because they are out-of-date, and I would probably have a better understanding of the cartoon if I knew more about the era in which it was made.Nowadays, this 1938 animated short can cause different reactions from viewers. Some could find it appallingly racist, while others may think those people are overreacting, and defend the cartoon by saying it's not THAT offensive, and/or that the stereotyping is not all that one-sided. So, there's obviously a lot of controversy among those who are familiar with "Jungle Jitters" over whether banning it was a wise decision or not. However, if the cartoon were 100% politically correct, I don't think too many people would be talking about it anymore, as I don't think it has anything else that could give it much recognition these days. While some could still find it amusing, I would say it's probably too dated to have wide appeal today.

F Gwynplaine MacIntyre I'd heard no end of horror stories about how 'Jungle Jitters' is allegedly so mind-bogglingly racist that it has been banned from polite society for all eternity. It turns out that this cartoon's major crime is that it isn't very funny. The single most racist gag involves a black man who looks like Stepin Fetchit but with enormous lips. He eats a persimmon, and his lips pucker until they're normal size. Elsewhere there are moronic gags involving African natives (all male) with nose rings and metal bands elongating their necks. (Apparently the gang at Termite Terrace have got African men confused with Burmese women.) I was surprised that there weren't any plate-lip gags ... but, really, most of this toon is just so stupid and unfunny that it's not worth the credibility of being called racist. Some other Hollywood toons from this same period are far more racist, maliciously so. Step forward, Chuck Jones's Inki.After the initial gags, we get two interesting examples of Dorgan's Syndrome, a term I invented. Dorgan's Syndrome (named for comic-strip artist Tad Dorgan) is when a comic-strip character or cartoon character (almost invariably male) is drawn to look like an exaggerated human (fully clothed), but very minor details -- such as floppy spaniel ears or a black button nose -- indicate that he's actually a humanised animal, nearly always a dog. (Tad Dorgan drew comic-strip dogs who were so completely anthropomorphised, you have to look carefully to see they aren't comic-strip humans.) Into this cartoon jungle comes a commercial traveller who appears to be a white man, except that he has a dog's nose. The African natives (who are clearly human beings, at least by cartoon standards) want to put him in a big cauldron and eat him. Before anybody cries 'cannibalism', how can they be cannibals if they're humans eating a dog? The talking dog's flesh tones resemble a caucasian human's, so I guess he's 'white'.Now we veer into H. Rider Haggard territory, as it turns out that all these black men are ruled by a white queen ... a very old queen, in fact, wearing Mammy Yokum high-button shoes. She too appears to suffer from Dorgan's Syndrome, as she looks nominally human but her mouth and nose are drawn to resemble a chicken's beak. (An old biddy?) She takes one look at the dog and starts screeching 'A man!'. She's surrounded by black men, but apparently she's been waiting for a talking dog with caucasian flesh tones. While the dog is talking, the hen imagines him morphing into Clark Gable (very unpleasantly drawn) and Robert Taylor. It shows how defeatist the makers of this Warner Brothers cartoon were, that they had to invoke two MGM contract actors as examples of male sex appeal. Couldn't they have used Warners actors Cagney, Raft ... even Dick Powell?This whole toon is too dumb to bear much scrutiny. When the African men look at the dog, he morphs into a fried chicken. But their queen IS a chicken, so why don't they eat HER?A previous IMDb reviewer, Randy H Farb, observes that the travelling salesman in this cartoon is a parody of a radio character named Elmer Blurt. He's correct, but Mr Farb has misspelt the name of the radio actor who invented the character: that would be Al Pearce, not Pierce. Al Pearce's radio character Elmer Blurt was nicknamed 'the Low Pressure Salesman'. As Farb notes, quite a few Warners toons featured parodies of radio or movie actors. Which brings me to the one good thing about this cartoon: the dog character (an imitation of Blurt) is actually fairly interesting in his own right, and could have been quite effective in a funnier cartoon. It's a shame that Warners never used him again. Maybe he'll show up in a Tiny Toon. I'll rate 'Jungle Jitters' just 2 out of 10. That's all, folks.

Robert Reynolds I suspect that even if there weren't stereotypes and caricatures that would be viewed as unacceptable today, this one probably wouldn't air today because it simply isn't all that funny. It starts off okay, but then we meet the "hero", who's about as stupid as they come (I've seen better heads on a glass of root beer) and it goes downhill from his entrance on. This one just doesn't work for some reason. Of interest only to die-hard Warner Brothers fans and rare cartoon enthusiasts. Otherwise, skip this altogether.