Here is our view of which 10 arenas might just be able to boast the best goal experiences. However, we must say that, while all are times to long for, some bring even more to the goal experience than others. Sunday Go to Meetin’ Time, not so much.When attending a game of your favorite hockey team, you just wait for those moments: the crushing hits that cause uproars around you, the spectacular saves that get everyone chanting your goalie's name, the missed penalty call that turns the arena into a chorus of boos.īut, most of all, you wait for the moment that the puck crosses the goal line, the moment when fans explode out of their seats, celebratory songs blast out of the speakers, and that treasured, overwhelming goal horn officially announces that something fantastic has happened and everyone is going to know about it.Įach team and each arena have their own goal experiences, whether that is the song, the horn, or the raucous crowd that makes it truly special. Offensive stereotyping abounds, but Clean Pastures has at least provided significant critical fodder. The music is a huge success, and droves of folks come to Heaven, including the Devil himself. He is unsuccessful until four angels - caricatures of jazz musicians - suggest using “rhythm” to get people to paradise. A parody of the film Green Pastures, this short follows the angel Gabriel - a caricature of contemporary performer Stepin Fetchit - as he tries to get Harlemites to come to Heaven (or “Pair-o-Dice” as it’s called here). When he’s hit on the head and has a dream about the Hell that awaits him, he awakens repentant.Ĭlean Pastures is, on the whole, a more entertaining and more complex offering. Sunday Go to Meetin’ Time is a standard morality tale, about an errant man (Nicodemus) who sneaks out of church to go steal some chickens. I present them below, not to glamorize them but to shed some light on an occasionally fascinating - and often appalling - corner of an American institution.ġ936’s Sunday Go to Meetin’ Time and 1937’s Clean Pastures share religious themes as well as large opening set pieces that provide an opportunity to introduce a cavalcade of racial caricatures - country folk in the former and city dwellers in the latter. These cartoons have not been broadcast since 1968, though they are available online. Such elements are abundantly clear in the “Censored Eleven,” shorts from the Warner Bros catalogue that were withheld from syndication due to racially offensive content. While this certainly makes these shorts more interesting, it also means that some of the uglier elements of the time are on full display. These cartoons were far from the squeaky-clean version of today: They were vibrant, innovative, and often subversive. Yet Looney Tunes was a definite forerunner to the adult animation of today, poking fun at contemporary politics and pop culture. As a kid watching cartoons on Saturday mornings, I didn’t catch many of the forty-year-old references. I was also surprised to discover how topical these cartoons were. Coyote’s design was inspired by Mark Twain’s description of the coyote as “a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton … with a despairing expression of forsakenness and misery, a furtive and evil eye, and a long, sharp face … The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want.” I learned that Bugs Bunny’s smart-alecky attitude and cigar-like carrot were based on Groucho Marx, and Wile E. Titled “What’s Up Doc? The Animation Art of Chuck Jones,” this retrospective illuminates the originality and charm of Jones in particular and the Looney Tunes in general. Yet this was not always the case, as demonstrated by the excellent Chuck Jones exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Today is no better, with the Roadrunner and Foghorn Leghorn perhaps most recognizable as shills for companies like Time Warner and Geico. To be fair, my exposure to Looney Tunes at the time bore that out pretty well: I grew up in the age of Space Jam and the slew of jerseys, sneakers, McDonald’s toys, pogs, and cookie jars that film spawned. For all the pandemonium that Bugs Bunny and his ilk ostensibly represent, their chaos is bland, their destruction is predictable, and their lineage is corporate. Despite the cultural pervasiveness of these characters, and a lifelong love of animation on my part, they’ve always struck me as annoying, repetitive, and boring. I have an uncomfortable confession to make: I have never liked the Looney Tunes. From blatant plagiarism to offensive and stereotypical subject matter, the 1930s Looney Tunes cartoons have a dark history.
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