Clean Pastures - Production and Distribution

Production and Distribution

Many Hollywood cartoons from the 1930s are based on feature films. Therefore, it was only natural for Leon Schlesinger's cartoon studio to parody the 1936 Warner Bros. musical film The Green Pastures, itself an adaptation of a play by Marc Connelly which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1930. The Green Pastures features an all-black cast and proved a success for Warner Bros., despite generating controversy. Animator Friz Freleng had directed the short Sunday Go to Meetin' Time in 1936. The cartoon lampoons African American religious beliefs to the backdrop of jazz music and tells the story of a rural black man who shirks church on Sunday in favor of worldly pastimes and finds himself in Hell as a result. Clean Pastures was thus keeping with his past work. Freleng even reuses animation of a jitterbugging couple from the Sunday Go to Meetin' Time in Clean Pastures. The short's use of caricatures of famous performers was in the same vein as such Freleng films as At Your Service, Madam and Coo-Coo Nut Grove.

Warner Bros. had trouble distributing the film. In an interview for Look magazine, producer Leon Schlesinger complained that Clean Pastures gave him more trouble with Hollywood censors than any live-action film. Censor Joseph I. Breen alleged that the cartoon violated the Hays Production Code, a set of rules for the content of American films, because it burlesqued religion. In a letter to Schlesinger, Breen complained about the scenes set in a parodic Heaven known as "Pair-O-Dice" and said, "I am certain that such scenes would give serious offense to many people in all parts of the world." Authorities also requested that Schlesinger remove the halo from one of the black characters. The letter does not specify to what exactly Breen objected, but musicologist Daniel Goldmark speculates that it was the idea of Heaven being run by blacks and the cartoon's implication that Heaven holds a place for "gamblers, dancers, drinkers, and, above all else, jazz fans", making it "even more threatening to white viewers." Schlesinger managed to quell the censors by making alterations, such as cutting the phrase "De Lawd". The short debuted in theatres on May 22, 1937. Tin Pan Alley Cats, a 1943 cartoon directed by Bob Clampett, was inspired in part by Clean Pastures and has a similar theme of redemption.

In 1958, United Artists (UA) bought the Associated Artists Productions (a.a.p.) library of cartoons and, 10 years later, removed Clean Pastures and ten other Warner Bros. cartoons from circulation on television or in theaters due to their racist portrayal of black characters. UA and later Ted Turner and Warner Bros. (after re-acquiring the rights) have upheld this ban and kept Clean Pastures from being distributed on home video, laser disc, or DVD. Both Sunday Go to Meetin' Time and Tin Pan Alley Cats are also on this list. The Green Pastures, on the other hand, is still in distribution.