In 1973 Scatman Crothers experienced a transition in his career as a vocal artist in animation, leaving behind an old character and voicing a new one. But both the old and new roles had one thing in common: Harlem, New York. Since 1970, Crothers had voiced the caricature of basketball player Meadowlark Lemon for Hanna-Barbera’s series The Harlem Globetrotters, and he played the character one last time for a September 1973 episode of The New Scooby-Doo Movies. Before the end of the year, he signed up for Ralph Bakshi’s movie Coonskin. In the hybrid live-action and animated film, he played the convict Pappy for live-action scenes and voiced characters Old Man Bone and Simple Savior. In the movie Pappy in live-action tells another convict some stories about his acquaintances in Harlem, and the animated sequences bring those stories to life.
Ralph Bakshi directed Coonskin. At age 35 in 1973, he was already an animation veteran, having started at Terrytoons in the late 1950s. He produced and directed Paramount Cartoon Studio’s last films in 1967 and worked on the Spider-Man television series the following year. In 1973 he was at a peak in his career as a director with the successes of his pioneering X-rated animated feature films Fritz the Cat (1972) and Heavy Traffic (1973). Paramount Pictures reunited with him for Coonskin, agreeing to distribute the film — at first.
Like much of Bakshi’s work, Coonskin is never visually dull. Photographs of actual urban locations serve as backgrounds for the animated scenes, and the cartoon characters cavort over the photos. There are inventive allusions to earlier cartoons. The film’s transition from live-action to animation begins with a cartoon backdrop of concentric rings, not unlike those that opened Warner Brothers’ theatrical cartoons. The animation of the characters effectively blends smooth movements with stylized poses familiar to devotees of Bakshi’s work.
Coonskin treads on some familiar thematic turf in its plot. The film begins with southern convicts Pappy and Randy escaping from their cells and waiting in the prison yard for Randy’s two friends to arrive to drive them off the grounds. While they wait, Pappy spins his yarns about his friends Brother Bear, Brother Rabbit, and Preacher Fox and their exploits after leaving the South for better opportunities in Harlem. The film isn’t the first cartoon to depict African Americans as southern characters, but it is the first since Bugs Bunny’s 1953 episode Southern Fried Rabbit. Coonskin is novel in being a cartoon addressing the Great Migration of the early twentieth century, in which millions of African Americans left the South for the North and the West Coast from the 1910s to the early 1970s. However, the radio comedy Amos ‘n’ Andy was also about African American southerners making a living in the North, and Coonskin came forty years after Amadee Van Beuren’s brief animated adaptation of that series.
Coonskin’s characters and hybrid film style draw comparisons to Walt Disney’s 1946 hybrid feature Song of the South. To be sure, both movies use anthropomorphic animated animals to act out the tales told be Uncle Remus and Pappy. Both films have a vignette style, and they use central live-action characters as the anchors for the multiple animated stories. Even Pappy’s scat-singing of “Zha-bee-do-bee-do” in the opening sequence’s song seems to reference Uncle Remus’s song “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.”
In a sense Coonskin is a product of its time. Blaxploitation films were money-makers for Hollywood distributors in the early 1970s. This genre consisted of African American protagonists fighting European American villains in movies of cheap budgets, violent scenes, sexual scenes, and urban settings—especially in Harlem. The films Cotton Comes to Harlem and Hell Up in Harlem preceded Coonskin. Much of the sexual content in Coonskin concerns a woman representing the United States of America. In one scene she cries “Rape!” in the presence of an African American figure, who is then immediately lynched. Another animated woman is a southern prostitute who happens to be the daughter of the sheriff, who looks like a Bakshi version of DePatie-Freleng’s cartoon sheriff Hoot Kloot from this same period.
Coonskin was also timely in its approach to social commentary. Its release barely predated the premiere of Saturday Night Live, which often resorted to broad ethnic caricature to parody the tropes informing the caricature in the show’s early seasons. It was a new, radical school of comedy. Previous cartoons addressed ethnic inequality by avoiding the gross blackface-inspired bug eyes and big lips for African American characters, as in the groundbreaking message-cartoon Brotherhood of Man from United Productions of America in 1947. Then in 1970 Hanna-Barbera found ways to use African American characters without the minstrel designs to entertain kids in The Harlem Globetrotters and Josie and the Pussycats. Rankin-Bass followed suit with The Jackson Five in 1971, as did Filmation with Fat Albert in 1972. Coonskin dared to resurrect the minstrel-style caricature but only to subvert it, as when one big-lipped character leaving the South for Harlem muses that in that city there would be “no more soft-shoeing, happy-acting, back-busting.” The movie also brought back the minstrel-type dialect for African Americans after other animation studios had avoided it ever since Paramount’s own Buzzy the Crow in the 1950s.
Original newspaper ad (Click to enlarge)
Especially tragic is that the film seems to exist without a purpose, except to shock with ethnic caricature for its own sake. For example, Uncle Remus told his stories in Song of the South with the goal of his juvenile listeners learning moral lessons. Pappy, in contrast, tells his stories either to entertain Randy while they wait or to amuse himself, but neither character develops or evolves as a result of the stories. Rather, when the film transitions from animation back to live-action, Randy complains to a chuckling Pappy, “What you laughing at? We’re dead!” The complaint suggests that the animated stories wasted his time. Also, one vignette features a mammy-type figure shooting guns at a pancake rolling on its edge. The scene is a reference to the Aunt Jemima pancake brand, but what is the point of firing at a pancake? The drudgery of domestic service and the threat of sexual violence against African American maids by their employers would seem more powerful targets to address than a mere product of the labor itself.
Coonskin’s legacy today is as a cautionary tale. Back in the mid-1970s, a European American could announce an attempt to write and direct a tale that fetishizes African American life in Harlem as a violent and sexual cartoon fantasy, and no one would bat an eyelash. And if a viewer today accepts that Coonskin is a European American’s fantasy about Harlem and nothing more, then the viewer does not expect much—if any—accuracy about the Harlem they see on screen. One may be dismayed by the crudeness of the ethnic imagery without worrying that the filmmaker is presenting it as an earnest slice-of-life look at Harlem. But too much time may have passed in half a century for audiences to look beyond the caricatures and dialect and to overlook Bakshi’s European American ethnicity in his development of the film. He has every right to portray African American characters however he wants, but he was very audacious in proudly crediting himself as not only the writer-director of the film but also the lyricist for that opening number, which he titled “Ah’m a Nigger Man”—a title that both involves an ethnic slur and the minstrel dialect.
Even in the 1970s, others treaded more lightly. Hanna-Barbera actually hired an African American consultant for The Harlem Globetrotters in order to avoid the very visual and verbal tropes that Bakshi deliberately used. As Ken Spears later told me, “We didn’t want the Amos ‘n’ Andy thing.” After production of Coonskin wrapped, Scatman Crothers returned to Hanna-Barbera—this time, to voice Hong Kong Phooey. The protagonist was an anthropomorphic dog, and Crothers’s voice is unmistakably familiar. But the dog lacks the big lips and bugged eyes of the figures he had just voiced for Coonskin.
Christopher P. Lehman is a professor of ethnic studies at St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud, Minnesota. His books include American Animated Cartoons of the Vietnam Era and The Colored Cartoon, and he has been a visiting fellow at Harvard University.
Thank you for this overview of this rather interesting film. I guess most of this explains why this film has not been given the same kind of upgrade that “Fritz the cat“ and “heavy traffic“ have for Blu-ray. I always took it as a kind of mock up of“song of the south“ and the “Blaxploitation“ genre in general. However, it is interesting to hear exactly what happened with this film upon release.
I feel like Bakshi often had that underground comics sensibility of trying to break every taboo for its own sake. I do think that was perhaps a necessary step for people who wanted animation to be not just a distraction for kids. Until they started importing some of the stuff from Japan, his films were just about the only animated films that would stray into adults only territory. There aren’t many of his films I would want to re-watch these days, but I did make an effort to see every one of his films and I am glad he had his career.
That being said, Br’er Rabbit is a great character and it’s too bad the two major films about him are both things you would probably never want to show to kids. The versions I read as a kid were those by Julius Lester, which I believe were adapted into the HBO fairy tale series. It was narrated by Danny Glover. I found my kids didn’t respond too well to that one. Maybe it was due to the limited animation. They did a little better to the more recent one that used D. L. Hughley and, I believe, Wanda Sykes as voices. It had some pretty big names as voices, but I think it was direct to DVD and still had kind of budgeted animation.
If I recall, the Danny Glover version is from Rabbit Ears Entertainment. Along with having A-list actors as narrators, they also hired top illustrators for the visuals, which almost made up for the lack of animation.
I don’t know. I think the stuff coonskin was trying to say back then Is still going on today. If you look at the news.
The sherrif in Coonskin that appears to be modeled along the lines of Hoot Kloot in the DFE cartoon series was in turn based on Logansport, Indiana born character actor Joe Higgins (who starred as a sherrif in commercial for Dodge cars in the late 60s to mid-70s):
https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/depatie-frelengs-hoot-kloot/
Interesting article. I agree that it’s hard to know what kind of idea Bakshi is trying to convey (even more so with the Godfather, Pope and Italian Mafia inclusions), but that applies to his entire output: it’s hard to know what’s in the guy’s head – in general. That’s part of his charm, given that he comes from an industry where the “messages” are crystal clear from the first five minutes or even from the promotional poster.
One wonders whether Mr. Bakshi’s ethnic background is an important factor in the film’s appreciation (born in Haifa, I suppose he’s technically Asian) when you think of the many Disney films, for example, that attempt to fit into other cultures, completely alien to that of his creators. The problem is that Bakshi takes the explosive tactics of subversion, typical of underground auteurs like R. Crumb, and applies them to the highway of a massive product like a Paramount film.
It would be interesting to know what Crothers thought of the finished film.
Ralph studied my 16mm print of the animated portions of “Song of the South” several times during the production of “Coonskin”, now called “Street Fight”. He wanted to parody the Disney production as much as he could. He caught none of the empathy or warmth of the characters in “Song”, just a little of the framework of the movie. I did the “Malcolm de Cockroach” sequence in “Coonskin”, which we based on George Herriman’s drawings. I delivered cels, which I inked with some Ver20 Cartoon Colour paint. John Walker animated the woman and her baby in the sequence. That was my last effort for Ralph.
Thank you for your personal anecdote about the film. It certainly helps me to better understand how the film developed.
“Empathy” and “Warmth” are definitely two words I don’t associate with Ralph Bakshi! Having viewed Coonskin, Heavy Traffic, and Fritz The Cat, I have arrived at the conclusion that RB had a nihilistic point of view. All the characters in his films are bereft of just about any sympathetic traits. He viewed humanity as innate corrupt and evil. I think the man does scream for justice but in his world, humanity will never overcome it’s savage, primitive, tendencies.
Curious how Ken Spears said “We didn’t want the ‘Amos n’ Andy’ thing,” concerning H-B’s “Harlem Globetrotters” series, yet less than a decade later he co-produced the currently hard to defend “Rickety Rocket” cartoons at Ruby-Spears. I asked Ken during the 1980s how on earth the studio was able to make “Rickety Rocket,” a series featuring an African American protagonists, who ride around in a vehicle which sports exaggerated lips, when it was neither written, drawn nor produced by people of color. “It was easy!” replied Spears. “We used all black voice actors.”
Oh, that’s disappointing.
I think the point of firing at a pancake is a matter of excoriating the whole notion of the soft, innocent black mammy type only existing to cook and clean. I am Black and yeah, the racial caricatures are not meant to be flattering but really, why can’t we look weird? In Bakshi’s films, no race or ethnicity was spared, EVERYONE looked weird. I am tired of seeing soft peddled “caricatures” in today’s animation that exist because of the fear of offending someone. Coonskin is certainty of it’s time and there’s ignorance in the film but I think the biting satire is still on point. Ralph said that Spike Lee enjoyed the film but I can not find a quote from Spike confirming this.
If anybody is curious, someone just unearthed the original Paramount cut of “Coonskin”. It’s an Italian dub, but it contains alot of the original extended sequences that were later trimmed in the Bryanstone version. It’s a wildly different experience watching the original cut of the film:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NlSMUOyMSdQ
Anyways, excellent article as usual, Mr. Lehman!
Interesting. I remember an extended German cut of the film (or, at least, clips of it) popped up online about 20 years ago. Maybe this is based on the same cut of the film.
I’ve always loved Bakshi’s work, but I can totally understand those who don’t.
There was a Blu-ray of Coonskin released in Germany. It’s not a mind-blowing restoration, but it is decent and better than the DVD released in the U.S. I seriously doubt we’ll ever get another release of Coonskin in the U.S.
You know speaking of Scatman Crothers this reminds me of of a story I’ve read about:
When Disney was making ‘The Jungle Book’, Walt assigned The Sherman Brothers to find all the dark spots in Bill Peet’s original version of the film, and write upbeat songs. In Peet’s version of The Jungle Book, there was a scene where the Apes try to enslave Mowgli and teach him the secrets of Man’s fire. The Sherman Brothers decided to place a song here, “our discussion at the time…” the late-Richard Sherman said: ‘… [was] ‘He’s an ape, what does an ape do? Swings in a tree.'” and therefore decided to write a swing/jazz number.
Initially they considered Louis Armstrong for the role of King Louie, since the Sherman Brothers were great admirers of his music, and Walt was friends with Armstrong (Armstrong had appeared in the Wonderful World of Color episode ‘Disneyland After Dark’ and had recorded an album for Disney entitled ‘Disney Songs the Satchmo Way’). However according to Richard M. Sherman: “…one of the writers said ‘you know the NAACP is going to jump all over it having a black man playing an ape — it would be politically terrible.’ That was the last thing on our minds, nothing we’d ever thought of, so we said ‘okay, we’ll think of someone else.'” Instead they went the white well known jazz player named Louie… Louie Primia.
Apparently Armstrong had always wanted to be in a Disney animated film, and was disappointed by having his character dropped. But Walt promised to make it up to him and give him a role in their next animated film. After Walt’s death the studio kept it’s word and Armstrong was slated to voice Scat Cat in The AristoCats… but sadly due to Armstrong’s declining health he had to drop out at the last minute, and was replaced by Scatman Crothers.
words cannot express how profound of an influence this film has had on me and my work. There is no doubt in my mind that had I not discovered Ralph Bakshi and this film; I doubt I would be making “Plaything” today. Happy Birthday “Coonskins” and a big thanks to Ralph and Victoria for your support.