Studio: Leon Schlesinger Productions (Merrie Melodies)
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures, The Vitaphone Corporation
Produced by: Leon Schlesinger
Short Synopsis
In a cartoon African jungle, a tribe drawn in the crudest blackface caricature of the day goes about its business, with modern gags laid over the primitive setting: a dance around a hut becomes a merry-go-round, the village has a telephone and a radio. A gangling, long-necked travelling salesman arrives with his suitcase of gadgets and is promptly put in the cooking pot, saved only when the tribe's queen, a white woman who looks like a parody of a spinster, decides she wants to marry him. Faced with the choice between the pot and the bride, the salesman climbs back into the pot himself. The film is one of the Censored Eleven, the Warner cartoons withheld from American television since 1968 because of their racial stereotyping, and it survives as a document of that history rather than as entertainment.
Why It Matters
- As a cartoon it is minor Freleng, a routine jungle farce with a few good gags, the merry-go-round and the salesman's gadgets among them; its interest is in what it shows about the industry's assumptions in 1938, when a major studio could build a whole cartoon on this material without anyone objecting.
- Jungle Jitters is also a case study in copyright: United Artists let its copyright lapse in 1966, two years before the same company withheld it from syndication, so the film has stayed in circulation through public-domain video collections while the other Censored Eleven cartoons remained locked away. It is, in effect, a banned film that anyone can watch, which is why it is so often the one people know.
Notes and Trivia
- The Censored Eleven also includes Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs, All This and Rabbit Stew and Tin Pan Alley Cats.
- Tedd Pierce, who voices the salesman, was one of the studio's leading story men.
- See also: Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (1943), All This and Rabbit Stew (1941), Tokio Jokio (1943).
