Coal Black, the WB banned cartoon from the ‘40 (Patreon)

Look, a surprise post! I’ve told you something would appear here from time to time… and this is one of those times.

Besides the pinup itself there’s a story behind the drawing. This cute girl belongs to one of the banned cartoons from Warner Bros. the title was “Coal Black and de sebben dwarfs” and it’s a Snow White parody. A very politically uncorrected one, using our standards. It was a mixture of war propaganda and racial stereotypes: it was released in 1943, after Pearl Harbor, So White (the name of the girl just to be fair!) escapes from the Wicked Queen (a looter big black woman selling robberies to the black market), that wants to kill her because Prince Charming loves So White and not the her. So White manages to spare her own life by giving some unseen “favors” to the murderer gang who kidnapped her and find an army camp with the seven black dwarfs that now are into the Army. The story follows the plot you all know, with the Evil Queen poisoning So White, but it’s not the Prince Charming to awaken her… but Dopey!

It’s definitely not a cartoon for kids, like the other made during the war years by Warner Bros, and it’s full of racist stereotypes but in the meantime it’s technically a very good cartoon with a lot good hot jazz and swing, and all the dialogues are in rhyme.

As I told you, this cartoon was literally banned and the reason are understandable. It’s a shame you can’t find it anywhere except a decent quality version on the internet archive. This cartoon it’s not ok to be aired today and nobody would disagree with that, but giving a bit of context to it would help to enjoy it anyway, as an historical document. It would help us also to understand how far we went in less than a century in creating entertainment less offensive towards a certain community, without being boring because of respect we need to pay to everyone.

Anyway, So White is a very hot character and I will draw her again for sure!

Here is the time lapse video of the drawing process: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/hjl5yvj9zeb9c14er63n4/sowhite.mp4?rlkey=t2zouw62xpgvl8z2hc0l9a5mk&st=zmlqm6vn&dl=0