ThunderCats More Racist Than Dukes of Hazzard

Note: This story originally appeared on my blog on July 6, 2015.

Given the recent furor over the Confederate flag, TV Land pulled reruns of the eighties’ series Dukes of Hazzard from its line-up a few short days ago.

I have to admit, I wasn’t too sure what to think of this. You see, once upon a time, two of my younger brothers and I, were huge fans of The Dukes of Hazzard. And here’s where things get really interesting: more than thirty years later, despite my deep seated abhorrence for the Confederate flag and everything it stands for, despite the fact that the Dukes rode around in a car called the General Lee, I don’t think Dukes was a racist television show.

Yes, you heard me. The Dukes of Hazzard wasn’t a racist show.

It was just too silly for that. The plot lines (if you want to call them that) of the show revolved around car chases, moon-shining, flaming arrows, and Daisy Duke’s frequent romantic mishaps. The Dukes, “never meaning no harm”, had (to my fuzzy recollection) no onscreen interactions with people of color and (to my fuzzy recollection) never said or did anything that even the most paranoid black militant would have taken offense to. Even my highly racially-conscious mother, who thought the show was “stupid”, never forbade my brothers and I to watch it. (She even bought my brother, Gregory, a Luke Duke action figure, which he promptly broke.)

Quite frankly, The Dukes of Hazzard was a television show that depicted rural white people from the South. And, given that Southern-born rural whites often display the Confederate flag on or in their cars, the General Lee granted the show one of its (very) few touches of realism. Yes, this depiction was distorted to the point of being demeaning to white Southerners but I can’t honestly say that the show was racially offensive.

Hearing TV Land’s announcement got me to thinking about all the other shows I watched as a kid. At the ripe old age of thirty-eight, I am beginning to realize that another show I watched during my childhood was steeped in racist/sexist/homophobic overtones.

For example, why was Panthro, a character on the cartoon ThunderCats, depicted with African facial features and voiced by the African-American actor, Earle Hyman? Having a “black guy” on that show, in of itself, wasn’t problematic. However, Panthro’s relationship vis-a-vis the other characters was. While Lion-O and Tygra, both depicted with Caucasoid facial features and voiced by white actors, were the unquestioned leaders of the group with highly advanced technical knowledge, Panthro was the glorified chauffeur of the group, being the only person who ever drove — or serviced — the ThunderTank. And while Panthro was a fierce warrior who could take anybody in a fight, I don’t think I ever saw him think his way out of a tricky situation.

Cheetara, the only adult female character on the show, was fast and blessed with a psychic abililty…a psychic ability that so drained her physical strength that she invariably ended up falling into a swoon and being carried a la Vivien Leigh into the lair. Cheetara, despite her femme fatale looks, never got the kind of screen time that the male characters got. And too many of her story lines had “damsel in distress” overtones.

Now that I’m approaching middle-age, I have to say that the character that now rankles the most is Snarf. Snarf was a male character with highly effeminate speech and mannerisms, speech and mannerisms that entirely too many lazy (read: incompetent ) writers use as short-hand for “gay.” Snarf was the unofficial housekeeper/den mother of the clan, performing household chores, fussing over Lion-O, and keeping the mischievous WilyKit and WilyKat in line. However, Snarf’s lack of social stature within the group guaranteed that no one in the group ever took Snarf too seriously; in fact, each episode almost always ended with the characters laughing uproariously at some comment that Snarf had made in all earnestness.

If the “black guy”, “hot girl”, and “fruity” gay guy are all subordinate to (presumably) heterosexual white males in a children’s cartoon, what were Rankin/Bass Productions really telling millions of little children about the power structures and social stratification of the “real world?” That white men ran — and always would — run it? That people of color, white women, and members of the LGBTQ community could only join “the club” if they never aspired to lead it in any meaningful way?

The very subtlety of the message is what bothers me the most. While it is easy to raise umbrage to a Confederate flag emblazoned on the hood of a racing car, it is not so easy to notice the nearly subliminal ways that television and other forms of mass media affirm white male superiority and privilege on a regular basis. How many times did I see, hear, and subconsciously absorb these messages as a child? A few hundred? A few thousand? A million? More?

Sorry, guys, but I think cartoons such as ThunderCats did way more damage.