This just shows how powerful the whingers lobby are these days!
Its not even just Ofcom being killjoys – as TV companies have less money to take risks; if the regulators ignore the whinge on a commercial channel, the complainers often video the material and adverts and then start product boycotts on the advertisers!
Incidentally I’ve never seen much positive imagery of smoking in kids’ cartoons.
Usually it was the bad characters who lit up; and often they would end up with an exploding cigar or find themselves smoking in a room full of explosives, red cans marked “GAS” etc; with predictable results.
Hardly the sort of thing to encourage brats to spark up a quick cig…
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More cartoon classics smoked out
[/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Mark Sweney
[/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Monday August 21, 2006
[/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]MediaGuardian.co.uk
[/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Turner Broadcasting is extending its mission to edit smoking scenes out of classic Hanna Barbera cartoons to more than 1,700 episodes of shows including Scooby Doo, The Jetsons and The Flintstones.[/FONT][FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]The editing process is being voluntarily extended by Turner to all Hanna Barbera cartoons, following an initial complaint to Ofcom that two episodes of Tom and Jerry which featured smoking scenes were inappropriate for a show aimed at children.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Turner, which airs the shows in the UK on children’s channel Boomerang, said it had decided to work its way through all 162 episodes of Tom and Jerry and has removed smoking scenes from three shows.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]The painstaking process requires the frame-by-frame “painting out” of any images of cigarettes or smoking – and there are 25 frames a second in a cartoon.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]In a statement, the company said: “Turner recognises that it is not suitable for cartoons aimed at children to portray smoking in a cool context and has additionally pledged to review the entire Hanna Barbera catalogue to remove scenes that appear to glamorise or encourage smoking.”[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]The original complaint to Ofcom, the broadcasting regulator, was about two separate Tom and Jerry cartoons – Texas Tom and Tennis Chumps.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]In Texas Tom, Tom tries to impress a female cat by making a roll-up cigarette, lighting and smoking it with just one hand, while Tennis Chumps sees Tom’s opponent in a match smoking a large cigar.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Ofcom’s broadcast code states that smoking must not feature in programmes made primarily for children unless there is strong editorial justification; and it must not be condoned, encouraged or glamorised before the watershed.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]The regulator said it recognised the cartoons were made from the 40s through to the 60s, when smoking was considered more acceptable.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Ofcom also noted that in Tom and Jerry, smoking usually appears “in a stylised manner and is frequently not condoned”.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]The regulator welcomed Turner’s “precautionary approach” and review of the archive material.[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]However, the regulator said in future it would look at all such cases individually and that “the level of editorial justification required for the inclusion of smoking in such cartoons is necessarily high”.[/FONT]
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