Thursday, April 10, 2008

U.S. film in foreign hands

Is there anyway that Axis powers such as Germany or Japan would have ever had access to U.S. media such as the Donald Duck cartoon? I just wonder because although he has never commented on it I'm sure Kim Jong Il has seen 'Team America', or at least knows about it as he had it banned. Do you think Disney would have been so blatantly disrespectful of all the axis leaders if he thought they would ever see his cartoon? Do you think making fun of an enemy, even in cartoon form, could result in a much more aggressive attack against the U.S. (during WWII or modern day)?
There's obviously no right or wrong answer... these are just questions that popped into my head while thinking about the cartoon.

2 comments:

Justin Sadowski said...

That's an interesting way of looking at it. Usually enemy propaganda is seen as dangerous and is kept from the population, or used to show how wrong the "other guy" is. But would it be used to reflect on the nation of origin? Now that is indeed an interesting question. For some reason, I think that the cartoons would have been more subdued if the people thought that the enemy would be seeing them as well, like in today's world politics. I suppose you could argue that the inherent racism in the various cartoons, especially the ones concerning the Japanese, only fed the fire that the Japanese militants had started by "proving" that the colonial powers/America doesn't take them seriously and considers them inferior to itself.

Andrew Hoxey said...

I dont know that the Nazis would have become enraged by the viewing of American propaganda. Although I havent done the research, I assume that they had plenty of anti-American propaganda of their own. Whether or not that would have really effected how they planned/fought battles is hard to say.

Speaking of inherent racism, I found it particularly interesting that the cartoons still had character speaking German. It creates an attitude about the language that it is harsh and with an angry tone. If you have ever studied German you would know that this isnt really true. It seems like this is still around today, people have the impression that Germans yell and cough up lungs when they speak.