by Charlie Brooks posted in Parenting

I've been reading Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland to my kids at bedtime. We've also watched the 1951 Disney adaptation. When reading the books, the wordplay caught my kids by surprise. My son, who is really coming into his own as a reader, got a kick out of all the puns and double meanings couched in Carroll?s original works. In the cartoon, another type of humor caught my kids by surprise: the slapstick routines.
Kids? programming today doesn?t use a lot of physical comedy or sound effects the way older cartoons did. My kids found it both surprising and hilarious when Tweedledum and Tweedledee kept bonking themselves on the noggins.

It?s easy to dismiss slapstick as mindless cartoon violence, but the humor is a bit more complex than that. It requires a mix of strong animation, appropriate sound effects, and excellent timing. I?d love to show my kids more slapstick animation, but then I run into the Looney Tunes problem.
You Can't Go Home Again
The Looney Tunes problem is that there?s a lot of racism and other unsavory material in old cartoons. The most blatant examples of this are the Censored Eleven, which haven?t been shown on TV since 1968. But even among the stuff that I loved as a kid, there are plenty of unfortunate elements.
A surprising number of old cartoons used the Sambo image, which?yeah, let?s save that stuff for history class and not Saturday morning entertainment. Suicide becomes a punchline in multiple Looney Tu...