From the E-Mailbag

In response to this post, Roger Green wrote…

You noted: Standards and Practices at ABC had made up a list of racial and ethnic minorities and it was kind of like "Pick one." and "one of the other Standards/Practices rules at that moment…was that every show had to have a female character who was assertive and/or in a position of authority instead of just tagging along as the male characters drove the story forward."

I was wondering if you thought that was a good thing, a bad thing?

Surely having someone other than white people might attract non-white viewers, and help white ones to note, "Oh yeah, there are other people. And having a strong woman (not Nell, or '50s Lois Lane always imperiled) is a good thing for women (and especially men) to see.

In this world — or in my world, at least — one often finds situations that fall under the category of "Doing the right thing for the wrong reason" or maybe "Achieving the proper goal in an improper way." I don't think it's a good thing for, in this case, network functionaries to be dictating creative content because they're afraid of advertisers who are, in turn, afraid of pressure groups.

But I also don't think it's a good thing for police officers to pull you over for speeding. That should not be necessary. You shouldn't be speeding in the first place.

I'm fine with female characters who are strong and assertive. I'm fine with characters not all being white guys. I'm fine with both those things because in real life — or in my real life, at least — a lot of women are strong and assertive and a lot of people are not white guys. Those who felt animation was deficient in representing those kinds of human beings were right.

But the Standards and Practices people we dealt with in the late seventies/early eighties were sometimes very clumsy and tyrannical and creatively insensitive. I wrote one particular ABC Weekend Special where at the last minute, they demanded major (and, I thought, injurious) changes to the script because of some crazed concern of the week. And I was arguing with someone who really didn't care if the changes disfigured the story and betrayed the book being adapted for the special.

It was like if you were adapting Moby Dick (the classic novel, not the Hanna-Barbera cartoon show of that name) and they came to you and said, "We're under fire for not having enough black women in our shows!" You might say in response, "Okay, they're right. After I finish this, we'll come up with some stories featuring black women" and they said, "No, no! This can't wait! You have to make Captain Ahab a black woman! And make sure she's a good role model!"

And then they added, "And although we haven't had any complaints about this, we need to lose the stuff about Ahab only having one leg. Just in case!" Maybe the right long-term goal but the wrong time, place and method to achieve it.

They were also, I thought, often dead wrong about their goals. As I've written elsewhere, some of the "pro-social" messaging they demanded pushed the premise that "the group" is always right; that if all your friends want to do one thing and you think that's a bad idea, you should yield to the majority. I thought that was a dangerous message — that's kind of how The Crips and The Bloods got started — and when I worked on the Garfield and Friends show, I wrote several cartoons refuting that message.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that in (roughly) the years 1977-1986 when I wrote cartoon shows, most of which were on ABC, I battled constantly with the Standards and Practices people — and one lady in particular. Sometimes, I lost. Sometimes, I won. Often, I won but the producers of the show made the requested changes anyway because they were afraid that even if ABC would let a certain joke or action in now, they might not a few years down the line and would not then buy the show for reruns.

When I started doing Garfield and Friends in 1987 (it began airing in '88), all that changed for me. No one ever suggested pro-social concepts to me. No one at the network (CBS) really suggested anything. In 121 half-hours, the Standards and Practices guy had about five requests, all of them minor and reasonable and easy to accommodate. And as noted, I even got to do episodes ridiculing what Standards and Practices had demanded at all three networks in the previous ten years.

These days, very few cartoon shows face anything like what we faced way back when. My friends working on current programs do sometimes complain about notes from someone upstairs about story elements that might lessen a character's merchandising potential. But that's another matter.