He did other racist cartoons.
I don’t want to link to them.
One is called Just Spooks.
There is absolutely no way, if you watch that cartoon, that you would not think black people would be offended by it. Again, I don’t want to link to it, but it’s available to watch on the Internet if you’re curious. His claim of innocence was just a lie.
Edit: To whomever downvoted me- Scrub Me Mama With a Boogie Beat takes place in an all-black town called Lazytown where everyone is big-lipped, lazy and stupid but addicted to jazz. They also love eating watermelon. Do you really think Walter Lantz wasn’t a racist piece of shit?
My dude, I looked it up, that was made in 1925, putting it long before Scrub Me Mama. Additionally, as much as I hate to agree with a shithead who tried to tell the NAACP that Scrub Me Mama wasn’t racist, McEvoy wasn’t wrong when he said that racial stereotypes were very common in cartoons at the time. Hell, Walt Disney made Song of the South, and he didn’t even get to claim ignorance because there’s plenty of documentation that he knew what he was doing, but did it anyway (and from what it sounds like, there are still references to the movie in Disney World, like Splash Mountain, despite Disney trying to erase it from history). Dr. Seuss also made a number of very racist books early in his career, however he grew as a person and changed, eventually disowning his offensive books.
Lantz grew up during the Jim-Crow era, which didn’t end until the 1960s. That’s going to have some effect on you. I like to think people can change, which is why I was wanting a source showing that he continued to make blatantly racist cartoons or hold racist beliefs uncommon for the time, even after the controversy. It sounds like, from the Wikipedia article, that it hadn’t occurred to Lantz that his sense of humor was offensive, and that the controversy was the slap in the face he needed to stop and rethink was he was doing.
