Sorry, Walt, You Can't Air That

Miss X’s cartoon career was very short through no fault of her own.

Walter Lantz basically took Tex Avery’s singing/dancing Red character, added some exotic settings, and put her on the screen. (The far-too-unsung Pat Matthews was responsible for much of her animation). But theatrical censors came down on Lantz because her movements were apparently too suggestive for youngsters. Miss X disappeared for good after only two cartoons in 1944.

If Lantz thought the Production Code Administration was tough, he wasn’t prepared for people who were more skittish and paranoid—television executives and sponsors.

People in charge of radio networks and ad agencies went to ridiculous lengths to avoid offending anyone listening, and when television came along, so did the same attitude. When Lantz signed a deal with Kellogg’s and ad agency Leo Burnett in 1957 to put the half-hour Woody Woodpecker Show on ABC, he was told to start clipping things out of cartoons that had, years earlier, passed muster with bluenose theatrical censors. Here’s what he told United Press International in a column published September 24, 1958; to be honest, he had made some of the same complaints (ie. banning cow udders) about theatrical censors.

Lots of Vice on TV, But Comic Characters Are Real Puritans
By VERNON SCOTT
UPI Hollywood Correspondent
HOLLYWOOD (UPI)— Real actors can swear, get drunk, beat women and commit murder before the TV cameras, but cartoon characters— innocent little rabbits, birds and dogs— are the most strictly censored performers in history.
Walter Lantz, creator of Woody Woodpecker and a dozen other cartoons, has daily battles with the blue pencil boys to prevent Woody from corrupting the morals of youthful televiewers.
“It’s getting worse every year,” says the mild-mannered cartoonist. “Violence is the basis of cartoon humor, now they're cutting it out.
“The same audience that watches our Woody show 10 tunes in on ‘Wyatt Earp’ and other westerns and horror shows. The heroes can drink redeye whiskey, but Woody isn't allowed to drink cider.
“And that’s not all. We can’t show a cow’s udders. All dialects are censored and that old standby, the navel, is taboo.
“Most of the films on our show were seen in theaters years ago. But they are strictly censored for TV.

“For instance, one of our six-minute cartoons depicted a grasshopper chewing tobacco and spitting. Network censors said it was bad for kids, so we were forced to hack out six scenes showing the spitting grasshopper.
“In other shows characters spit in one another’s faces.”
Lantz was chastized by the state department for showing Mexican cartoon characters without shoes.
“I painted their feet black and called ‘em shoes and we managed to get by,” he grinned.
“There is no written code for cartoon censorship, so you can never tell what will upset the censors. It’s all right for Woody to kiss another woodpecker, but he’s not allowed to kiss a girl. Sexy scenes are absolutely out, naturally.

“When we played an old rerun of ‘Three Blind Mice’ we had to leave out dialogue about the mice being blind. Another time we had to delete a scene showing hospital attendants in white coats.”
Lantz argues that children watch “adult” shows on TV regularly, including programs in which glamour girls appear wearing next to nothing.
“We aren’t allowed to show a cartoon character in a bare midriff costume,” he laughed, “navel or no navel.
“Maybe we’ve brought this censorship on ourselves. In the ‘30s we went hog wild while feature pictures were tightly restricted. Now the pendulum has swung the other way.
“Our program reaches 187 stations. It’s the top-rated daytime show.
“We know we have a tremendous number of kid viewers, and I’m sure we would exercise good judgment and good taste without such stringent censorship. So far, nobody’s willing to give us a chance to prove it.”

Lantz groused about the same thing to The Hollywood Reporter in 1957, explaining he had to cut scenes from the Oscar-nominated Musical Moments From Chopin (1947) because it showed a horse with a keg of cider.

The folks at Leo Burnett also told him the Swing Symphony cartoons with black characters were verboten. “We never offended or degraded the colored race and they were all top musical cartoons, too,” Lantz said at the time though, even in 1957, thick-lipped, watermelon-eating stereotypes could hardly be deemed acceptable. “The agency reasoning,” Lantz went on, “was that if there was a question at all on a scene, why leave it in?”

The shorts may have been cut for television but we’re fortunate much of what Lantz produced from 1940 to when Woody first appeared on TV are on home video and uncut. Kids in 1957 may not have been able to see Miss X or a tobacco-spitting grasshopper, but we can today.