ReFrederator Blog

Some questions have popped up about ReFrederator and censorship. Specifically, will our upcoming daily podcast of classic animation feature the original, uncensored versions of classic cartoons? Short answer… yes. ReFrederator plans to present all cartoons uncut and we will show many cartoons previously censored by the TV networks. If you catch us with an edited print, let us know and we will work to restore it to it’s full length.

Let’s be honest. Classic American theatrical cartoons reflect the
social attitudes of their time periods. In the 1970’s and 80’s,
virtually the only venue for these great shorts was kid oriented
television, early afternoon and Saturday morning shows. There was no opportunity for historical or social context, not even a mechanism to explain how old some of these films were (heck, at least Boomers had their cartoons presented by human beings, albeit ones dressed up like sea captains and circus clowns.) Racial humor, stereotypes, and graphic cartoon violence may have been legitimate areas of concern when programming for the very young. Unfortunately many cartoons were artlessly sliced, diced and sometimes just plain buried. That was then.

Welcome to now. We probably have the same feelings about censorship that you do… we don’t like it! In putting our play lists together, we will be working with the prints that are available to us, but ideally we would like to present our cartoons in their original
versions.

Dave Kirwan