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Sacha Baron Cohen is so. hot. And he just talked about testicles and farts. What else do you want?

Jasmine Guy being bitchy! The Gute on a motorcycle! Malcolm-Jamal Warner! Debbie Gibson! Danny Glover! John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John! Aykroyd! Ferrigno! Bialik! Feldman! Helmsley! Abdul! I can't even count all the fantastic washed-up celebrities! Oh, the awesomeness!

Any video with Lou Diamond Phillips and Billy Dee Williams having a conversation wins at life.

I've recently become interested in the history of American animation, so I've been downloading clips off of YouTube of some of the more famously racist or otherwise inflammatory cartoons made by Disney, Warners, and MGM. I've only just started watching the Tex Avery shorts from MGM, and the first one I pulled up was called "Half-Pint Pygmy". Not only does the pygmy speak with a caricatured voice and have that lovely blackface visage so common to all these cartoons, it has a nice bit where the protagonists try to lure the pygmy out of a hole by dangling a WATERMELON in front of him. Jesus. I feel a little dirtier for having watched that.

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A lot of the earlier Warner Brothers cartoons, and some of the Walter Lantz ones (he did Woody Woodpecker -- as well as a lovely short called, I shit you not, "Little Black Sambo"), are in the public domain now, so they can be released on DVD or distributed in general by pretty much anyone who feels like it. John Kricfalusi, the animator of Ren and Stimpy, was posting YouTube clips of Tex Avery and Bob Clampett cartoons, some of which were in the public domain, on his blog as an ongoing educational feature for his readers. Then, Warners put the smack down on YouTube, and YouTube went through and pulled all the WB clips it could find -- even ones in the public domain. So Kricfalusi raised a stink about fair use and copyright protections, all of which is pretty interesting. Then he went back to posting stupid promotional material for his new Ren and Stimpy DVDs, featuring the hypersexualized shorts he made for SpikeTV. So, not as interesting. Kricfalusi was infamously tossed off of Ren and Stimpy while it was still on Nickelodeon for basically wanting to push the envelope too far in terms of sex and general grossness. But he's made a comeback as an animation commentator, even doing commentary for the Warner Brothers Golden Collection DVDs that he's so critical of for their general whitewashing of the studio's history.

I always watched a lot more Disney than Warner Brothers, and my exposure to MGM and Lantz cartoons were limited to a couple of videos we rented when I was a kid and then copied onto Beta cassettes (talk about copyright infringement -- ah, Betamax). The extent of Disney's controversial content includes the WWII propaganda films that included some lovely Japanese stereotypes and a number of racist undertones in characters like the crows in Dumbo (I just watched that the other day, and it was the reason I went looking for the Tex Avery cartoons in the first place), the edited-out-of-future-relases black servant centaur in Fantasia, a bunch of nasty Native American stereotypes in some of the shorts and Peter Pan (though I love the song "What Makes the Red Man Red" in spite of myself), and, of course, the never-released-to-video Song of the South. Kim's had a bootleg videocassette of Song of the South, so I rented it. I think I had a record with Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah and a couple of the Brer Rabbit/Fox/Bear sections on it as a kid, and I definitely remember them showing a clip from the movie at the Disney Store when I was in there once in the early '90s, so I didn't have any recollection of the more-offensive frame story. The complaint is less that the movie is full of stereotypes, which is true (although not as ridiculously hit-you-over-the-head offensive as in these other shorts that I've been watching) than that the movie portrays this antibellum plantation as this totally happy place where the slaves have all stayed on because they love the family so much and they sit around and sing happy songs all night long and everything is just WONDERFUL. My complaint, on the other hand, is that the live-action parts of the story, apart from the historical whitewashing and the racial stereotyping, are just plain boring. Of course, I don't know if it picks up towards the end, because the Kim's videotape was a piece of crap and the picture totally cuts out about halfway through, right after the little rich white boy and his little black not-a-slave-anymore-my-life-is-so-much-fun-YAY friend meet up with a little poor white girl whose brothers want to kill her dog. It's a downer in so many ways. But see the races and classes all coming together in youthful innocence! Sure. I won't really get into the racism or non-racism of Walt Disney himself, because, well, the man was probably an anti-semite, which was also tied up in him being strongly anti-labor, and it's all been pretty well hashed-out, and that's all I have to say about that.

I'm rambling. This post has no real point. Suffice it to say, I find the history of all these animation studios to be really interesting from the point of view of someone who's obsessed with DVD releases. The amount of stuff that's being covered up is pretty crazy, and it ties in to my interest in copyright protections, given that Disney's the impetus for all the changes in the law, anyway.

Now that Amazon is selling groceries, the reviews page for a gallon of milk has apparently become the target for, at this point, 332 jokers who feel it's their destiny to write the funniest thing about milk ever published on the internet.

There was one that tickled the funny bone of this Sesame Street-obsessed reader:

I drank the last of the milk 3 days ago, and so my mother decided it was time I replenish it. I was walking down to the local store to purchase a loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter... when I came across a man with arms that went the wrong direction and everything was in psycadelic colours and sounds. I went by an insane machine and then by a crazy fountain, and got to the store, and purchased my goods, only to realize that I forgot where I was. I asked advice of a strange technicolor man, who sent me on my way ... having reminded me of all the bizarre landmarks I passed. So I got home and exclaimed to my mother look, I remembered! A loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter!

I hope they do realize that those are two separate sketches. And if we're going to mention Sesame Street sketches having to do with milk, I must, of course, post my personal favorite.

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we can now embed video in our LJ. apparently there is quite the hue and cry about how this marks the myspacification of livejournal, but i actually like the idea. they don't autoplay, after all. so i'm not sure what the big uproar is -- whether it's on principle or maybe because some people on dial-up think it'll make their page load slower...

also in the news today is word that the state is FINALLY coming to DVD. no, this time, they're serious. they just had to re-score the whole series to get around the music rights issues. unfortuantely, that means you won't be able to hear the breeders' "cannonball" playing while michael ian black buys pants.

in honor of both of these things, here's the original-scored version of the sketch, embedded, much to everyone's chagrin, in my journal.

back when funny people made music videos for good indie songs. a golden age. pavan gave me the yo la tengo one on the videotape of second season mr. show he made me, but i'd never seen the superchunk one until just now.