Studio: Leon Schlesinger Productions (Looney Tunes)
Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures, The Vitaphone Corporation
Produced by: Leon Schlesinger
Short Synopsis
A fake Japanese newsreel, supposedly captured by American forces, with each segment pretending to praise Japanese life and the war effort while showing the Japanese as fools: a rooster parodying the Pathé logo, an air-raid siren that is two men shouting, a cooking lesson in which a chef makes a club sandwich from ration cards, a fashion show, a "Japanese Navy" item in which a submarine is a sardine can, and portraits of the Axis leaders, including a Hitler who cannot find Japan on the map and a Tojo drawn with the full set of racial caricatures of the period. There is no plot; the film is a string of propaganda jokes in the form of a newsreel spoof, and its racism is relentless. It survives as a document of wartime Hollywood, not as entertainment.
Why It Matters
- Of all the American anti-Japanese cartoons of 1942-45, this is the most concentrated, and it shows how completely the studios adopted the racial caricature the government's propaganda encouraged; seen beside Der Fuehrer's Face, which attacks Nazism as an idea, Tokio Jokio attacks the Japanese as a people. That distinction is the reason the film is still studied.
- It is one of the 122 Warner cartoons whose copyright was not renewed in 1971, so it has remained freely available even though Warner withdrew it from broadcast after the war; it is also Norman McCabe's last cartoon before he was drafted, and his unit was taken over by Frank Tashlin. The public-domain status is what keeps it in view.
Notes and Trivia
- The title puns on Tokyo and "joke"; "Tokio" was the older English spelling.
- McCabe had directed most of the Schlesinger unit's wartime propaganda shorts, including The Ducktators (1942).
- See also: Der Fuehrer's Face (1943), Scrap Happy Daffy (1943), Daffy the Commando (1943).
