Cinema: Censor in the Barnyard

The wolf gazed hungrily at the shapely maiden. Then he drooled and howled. But no moviegoer ever saw that scene from MGM’s cartoon, Red Hot Riding Hood. Hollywood’s censor, the Breen office, which hardly blinks at a human wolf on the screen, turned a prompt thumbs-down on the cartoon version. Last week Producer Walter Lantz sounded off on some other rules of cartoon censorship.

Producer Lantz, whose stable of Universal International cartoon characters includes Woody Woodpecker, Buzz Buzzard and Wally Walrus, keeps his feathered and furry folk as innocent and clean-living as a troop of Cub Scouts. Unlike Hollywood’s human stars, the animals may not 1) drink hard liquor, 2) smoke, 3) be ghosts, 4) do bumps & grinds, 5) cavort in diaphanous costumes like the kind Betty Grable wears. Chamber pots, privies, cow milking—relics of earlier movie days—are gone forever. Although cartoon villains may belabor all and sundry, no blood may ever flow.

Remembering a few classics of the good old uninhibited days (like the Walt Disney cow whose udder swayed like a cootch dancer when she ran), Lantz complains: “We can’t even draw all of a cow any more.” But he admits that cartoonists are likely to be too Rabelaisian to be trusted: “If you give some animators an inch, they might take ten feet.”