Not for the first time in its life, Tom and Jerry is the subject of censorship. In the mid-twentieth-century, the target was violence, and the campaign in America led to those rather strange cartoons in which Tom and Jerry were fond friends. I’m grateful to PD for pointing me in the direction of the latest attack on this dangerous genre. It seems that Tom and Jerry is little more than an advertising campaign for smoking. Of course, the historian in me is outraged that the cartoons are to be mutilated. On the basis, according the the Scotsman, of a single complaint. I wonder if AIDS and world hunger can also be solved by editing old cartoons.
The Telegraph also comments on the interesting priorities and moral choices that the move reveals.
And - since is the first post made via wifi in a cafe - PD would like to add the thought that between the jobs for OFCOM investigators, film editors and so on, deciding to edit smoking out of old cartoons keeps quite a few people in work. At tax-payer and consumer expense, of course. But at least somebody is thinking of the children.