What’s a cartoon without a villain, pulverized by the forces of good? All the better if his name is Abdul, and he’s riding a camel, complete with hooked nose, accent and harem.
“There have always been racist images in cartoons: the Stepin Fetchit black; the bespectacled, bucktoothed Japanese; the lazy Mexican,” says Jack Shaheen, professor of mass communications at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, who has spent 20 years examining images of minorities in the media. He discusses the problem at the Illinois Humanities Festival, 2 p.m. Saturday at the Chicago Historical Society, 1601 N. Clark St.
“The animation industry has evolved and eliminated most of these harmful portrayals of ethnic groups over time, with one exception-Arabs,” Shaheen says. Shaheen helped persuade Walt Disney Pictures to change the opening song in “Aladdin” from “I come from a land/From a faraway place/Where the caravan camels roam/Where they cut off your ear/If they don’t like your face/It’s barbaric, but, hey, it’s home,” to a minutely less insulting, “. . . Where the land is immense/And the heat is intense/It’s barbaric, but, hey, it’s home.”
“It’s better,” Shaheen acknowledges, “but they wouldn’t change the word `barbaric.’ They said it refers to the weather, not the people. But does a 5-year-old make that distinction?”
Disney’s response? Says spokesman Steve Feldstein: “I don’t know. I’m not a 5-year-old.”
Shaheen, author of “The TV Arab” (The Popular Press, 1984) and upcoming books on “The Comic Book Arab” and “The Hollywood Arab,” believes that negative images of Arabs have outlived other stereotypes because of ignorance, laziness on the part of imagemakers, and politics: “If we (animators) portray Arabs positively, then we apparently look like we’re pro-Arab and thus anti-Israel.” He also points to the lack of Arab-American involvement in the animation process. “When you work with someone, it’s harder to ridicule that person’s heritage.”
Case in point, officials at Hanna-Barbera Productions Inc. recently consulted their resident Arab-American, Casey Kasem (the voice of Shaggy in “Scooby Doo”), to help them avoid typecasting in an upcoming “Arabian Nights” special. “We’re making an effort to avoid stereotypes,” executive producer Buzz Potamkin explains. “We’re dealing here with a society that we don’t have intimate knowledge of. But remember, the entire cast is Arab. There will be some good ones, and there will be some bad ones.”
That’s fine, Shaheen says. His plea to imagemakers is “only to portray Arabs no better or no worse than other groups.”
But Shaheen’s research shows that at least two cartoons a week ridicule Arabs. As he recalls, it began in 1926 when Felix the Cat beat up a sheik. Later the animated Laverne and Shirley rejected Abdulo the Uncool-o; Ali Baba Mad Dog of the Desert barked on all fours for Porky Pig.
Shaheen likens current portraits of Arabs to those of Jews during World War II: “The bulbous nose and lips, greedy, always trying to seduce women or hurt people. If you remove the headdress and add a yarmulke, the image is exactly that of our fellow Semite, the Jew. I find that very frightening.”
“You can’t take popular entertainment out of the context in which it was made,” responds Steve Hulett, business representative for the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists, an animators union. “American popular culture has always tended to vilify enemies of the government. . . . When `Aladdin’ was made, we were at war with Saddam Hussein. I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s just part of human nature.
“Arabs may have gotten the fuzzy end of the Popsicle stick right now, but Disney, for example, has bent over backward to be at least partially politically correct. I consider it admirable that they responded to these complaints at all.”
Shaheen believes that, though adults may be able to separate fact from stereotype, “to a child the world is simple. There is only good and evil. Once images of evil Arabs are imbedded in their minds, they are almost impossible to eradicate. What’s interesting is that tomorrow’s filmmakers and animators will learn about Arabs primarily from these cartoons.”
