'Redskin Blues' is full of toe-tapping music and weirdness

Redskin Blues (1932)
Starring: Anonymous Voice Actors
Director: John Foster and George Stallings
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

Tom and Jerry are chased and captured by a hostile Native American warriors. Is this the end of our heroes?

Some of the cartoons starring the original "Tom & Jerry" duo are just plain awful,others have not aged well, but a few are full of funky weirdness that lasts throughout the ages and which should be as amusing to viewers now as they were 85+ years ago. "Plane Dumb", for example, is so full of racist stereotypes that it even made this indifferent-to-all-your-FeeFees GenXer cringe (although given the inexplicable and casual nature of the extreme transformation of the characters into a pair Step-n-Fetchit/Sleep-N-Eat clones, I wonder if there might not be a pop cultural reference/context/connection that's been muted by the passing decades).

When I first started watching "Redskin Blues",  which was released immediately after "Plane Dumb" in 1932, I feared I was in for another festival of racism. Our heroes are under attack by Indians, all of whom are wearing war bonnets... but this one veers off into unexpected territory, beginning with the war bonnets becoming the starting point of some surreal action and continuing straight through to an ending I am sure no viewer will see coming.

Now, I'm certain there are things in this cartoon that those out there who are looking for something to take offense at will need a fainting ouwill be clutching their pearls over, especially in the light of the cartoon's title and the fact the Native Americans are the villains of the story. (Well... as much as anyone can be a villain in this bit of nonsense.)

In the final analysis, I think there may be a couple of interesting points floating around in the madness that is "Redskin Blues"--music bridges cultural gaps, to name one--although I could also be assigning meaning to this cartoon the way I might see a wild boar riding a butterfly in one of those ink blot tests. At the very least, it's a crazy and entertaining cartoon that you can watch it right here, right now, via embedding from YouTube.

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