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Wwii Cartoon Cap'n Cub Ted Eshbaugh 78534 (1943)

1943 · Animation · 9 min

  • Animation
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Synopsis

Made by Ted Eshbaugh, who made six or more cartoons for various studios in the 30s and 40s, CAP'N CUB is a WWII propaganda cartoon that ballyhoos the U.S. Army Air Corps. The cartoon starts out cute, but soon turns very politically incorrect by post-war standards. Cute little Cap'n Cub reviews a weapons parade, but wants more "planes, planes, planes!". A full production sequence follows, and the completed planes go off to fight the Japanese, and goes from cute to dark very quickly with defamatory anti-Japanese caricatures that dominate this period in US history. Yes there are some outrageous stereotypes -- the Japanese are portrayed as monkeys -- highly insulting to them -- and their dreaded Mitsubishi Zeros are bloated, haywire contraptions that fall to pieces. This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD and 2k.

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Details

Running time
9 minutes
Collection
Ephemeral Films

Subjects on the Internet Archive

Reviews on the Internet Archive

★ · Modern 'description' of racist cartoon as racist as the cartoon itself. · IWPCHI6394 · 2020-11-25

What's worse than a racist WWII cartoon? A modern apologia for that cartoon that expresses modern racist dismissal of the seriousness of the deliberate indoctrination of US children via "good old days" racist war propaganda. The claim that this cartoon is merely "politically incorrect by *modern* standards" is a lie: for socialist workers of the 1940s - and of course all non-"white" workers the world over - the blatant racism of this cartoon was NOT "politically correct" in the 1940s. The claim that being compared to monkeys by white Americans was somehow only offensive to the Japanese is…

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