Funky Turns 50: Black Character Revolution National Tour Press Coverage - Part 1

National Exhibition Tour Media Coverage December 2013 - February 2014 Part 1 

December 2013 7:57 AM

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Birds Eye View Animator Leo Sullivan helped develop some of the characters and storylines on Fat Albert.

"Doing the cartoons and developing those shows and working on them in those early days was exciting," he says. "It was more personal, it took more people to do them, it was more expensive, and in my day we had to individually develop characters."

Sullivan started working as an animator in 1961, and over the years worked on lots of what I watched while sitting cross-legged in front of the TV on Saturday mornings, including The Flintstones, Scooby Doo, Captain Caveman, Richie Rich and the Laff-A-Lympics, just to name a few. Today, at 71, he teaches kids about the technology and animation for the games they play.

"We felt what better way to introduce kids to the science fields, because they play these games, but they don't know how that stuff works," Sullivan says. "We teach them in these classes how the technology works and how they can be a part of it, giving them the skills in case they want to continue doing it in high school, college, or at a trade or technical school."

-------As a kid growing up during the 1970s and '80s, I would often spend the night at my cousin Chris' house.

On Friday nights after my aunt sent us to bed and turned off the light, we would lay in our respective bunk beds whispering to each other — not about school, or friends or toys (well, OK, sometimes about toys), no, we were locking down our cartoon watching plan for the next morning. Top of the list?

Hey, hey, heyyyyy, it's Faaaaat Albert!

Yep, that catchy phrase kicked off each episode of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. Actor and comedian Bill Cosby created and produced the show, which aired from 1972 to 1985, and based it loosely on his childhood. Fat Albert and the gang (which included a character named Mushmouth and another named Dumb Donald — I'm guessing that wouldn't fly today) hung out in North Philadelphia and faced many moral crises. Chris and I (and a bunch of you, too, you know it!) loved the kids' various shenanigans and the life lessons.

Most episodes ended with a similar catchy tune from the cobbled together instruments of the Junkyard Band. In fact, music was a common theme among many of the new entries to that era's Saturday morning cartoon lineup.

UnCut Funk!

Pamela Thomas was particularly captivated by the animated images of African-Americans on Fat Albert and other shows from that era, including The Jackson 5ive, Josie and The Pussycats and Harlem Globetrotters.

"I was born in the '60s, so I was growing up in the '70s and I remember all of these cartoons — not all of them — but this is the first time that all of these positive animated images were on TV," says Thomas, a preschool teacher who grew up in the Bronx.

"Their stories were like your stories, their experiences were like your experience," says Thomas, who has a black history degree from The City College of New York. "Bill Cosby's cartoon was so groundbreaking, it just dealt with so many issues — smoking, cheating in school, playing hooky, divorce, what happens when you steal from others. You don't realize it when you're watching it that you're getting all of these messages in a form that children can understand."

Twelve years ago, Thomas started collecting black animation art, and a few years later she started the online Museum of UnCut Funk! Now, she has acquired enough pieces for a traveling show, Funky Turns 40: Black Character Revolution Exhibition, which makes its first stop in January at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Thomas explains, "the whole overview of this collection is not so much that it's cartoons and black — these are groundbreaking because they were all the first, and they took place from 1969 to 1979."

From Civil Rights To Black Power But it wasn't easy to build the collection.

"It was really hard to find black animation; there was really no market for it," says Thomas. "Everything was about Disney and Warner Bros. and the Looney Tunes characters, Bugs Bunny and Tweety Bird."

Thomas and friends put the word out to various art galleries, and when curators heard about a piece that might interest her, they would let her know.

"This aspect of black popular culture, I think there is such a significant story to tell there, coming out of the 1960s civil rights movement and shifting to the 1970s black power movement," she says, "to come into our own and to have all of these images that were not derogatory to come on the television and in the news, and children not seeing their grandmothers' cartoons with the derogatory images, like [Little Black] Sambo that came out of the 1940s." http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/12/24/256555149/hey-hey-hey-historian-draws-attention-to-70s-black-animation-art

http:// npr.tumblr.com/post/71235267181/an-original-production-cel-fromfat-albert-and-the

http://wrkf.org/category/culture http://kuow.org/post/hey-hey-hey-historian-draws-attention-70sblack-animation-art http://www.ideastream.org/news/npr/256555149 http://capeandislands.org/post/hey-hey-hey-historian-drawsattention-70s-black-animation-art http://www.opb.org/artsandlife/article/npr-hey-hey-hey-historiandraws-attention-to-70s-black-animation-art/ http://krwg-tv.org/post/hey-hey-hey-historian-drawsattention-70s-black-animation-art http://mcqsjazz.com/1/2013/12/24/hey-hey-hey-historian-drawsattention-to-70s-black-animation-art/ http://wwno.org/post/hey-hey-hey-historian-draws-attention-70sblack-animation-art http://wuis.org/post/hey-hey-hey-historian-draws-attention-70sblack-animation-art

http://muckrack.com/link/MM83/hey-hey-hey-historian-drawsattention-to-70s-black-animation-art

http://www.veooz.com/photos/Gc6Djb.html?tag=hey

http://timstock.tumblr.com

http://3chicspolitico.com/2013/12/25/merry-christmas-2/

http://www.feelartistic.org/blog/tag/art-calsses-in-seattle#.UsZKmRa265Q

http://article.wn.com/view/2013/12/24/Hey_Hey_Hey_Historian_Draws_Attention_To_70s_Black_Animation/#/related_news

http://fuckyeahcracker.tumblr.com/post/71116041774/hey-hey-hey-historian-draws-attention-to-70s-black http://knowledgeequalsblackpower.tumblr.com/post/71111560220/hey-hey-hey-historian-draws-attention-to-70s-black

http://www.superbgiftbaskets.com/blog/hey-hey-hey-historian-draws-attention-to-70s-black-animation-art/ 

http://jshannise.com/the-coolest-freakin-thing-ever-turning-a-passion-into-a-museum/

http://themajornelson.tumblr.com/#/71235731523

https://twitter.com/afropunk/status/ 415928698093572097

http:// animatedviews.com/2013/historian-draws-attention-to-black-animation-art/

http://animationews.com/tag/museum-of-uncut-funk/

http://dontbesillyo.tumblr.com

http://doinggoodseries.tumblr.com

http:// www.walkerart.org

http:// nnekbone.tumblr.com/page/2

http://gartenarbeit.tumblr.com

https://twitter.com/WomenInTheArts/status/ 416247257496059904

http://u-metro.com/wp/?paged=2

http://www.dogstarnyc.com

http://discoverblackheritage.com/ hampton-university-museum/

http://tonybarraza.me/2013/12/24/hey-hey-hey-historiandraws-attention-to-70s-black-animation-art/

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forum/who/ dawson/ T4N68CC4TQ31SVFL6

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umd.tumblr.com/post/ 71027664104/hey-hey-hey-historian-draws-attention-to-70s-black

http://www.viralnewschart.com/ShowLink.aspx? linkId=24011241

! http://inagist.com/all/415840409051340800/

http://soulbrotherv2.tumblr.com

"The broader 1970’s Black animation collection also includes additional pieces of original artwork from adult animated feature films such as Coonskin and Hey Good Lookin’, as well as opening sequence to the dance television show Soul Train.

Other pieces in the collection include racially stereotypical art from 1930’s and 1940’s cartoon shorts. At one time, thousands of hand-painted cels were created and used under the camera to animate every TV and theatrical cartoon. Today’s animation is all computer generated, so hand painted cels represent a lost art form.

As relatively little Black animation was produced in the 1970’s and beyond, original production artwork is scarce and rare. Although limited edition reprints of selected scenes from many cartoons and films have been produced, there are very few that have been created from Black animation.” - Sista ToFunky ——————————————————————— AWESOME.

*SIDEBAR* Animation today is not “ALL computer generated” (not sure what she means). It is still designed and hand-drawn animated on paper in the larger, international animation industry.*

Although, as a black man myself, I am not fond of the term “Black Animation.” My reason being is simply because we’re Americans and animation is a medium, not something “owned” by a particular group, ethnic or not. you can tell what ethnic group the animation is catering to by the stories, culture and ethnicities of the characters within the medium of animation. The average viewer knows something is for a “black audience” by simply watching it. I think labeling anything “black” first, limits the wider exposure especially in a cultural melting pot like America.

However, props for this video!

Source: http://museumofuncutfunk.com/2011/10/04/black-animation-colection/ http://leseanthomas.tumblr.com/post/71668080746/the-broader-1970s-black-animation-collection

REACTOR Online Museum Celebrates Pioneering Black Animation

by Jillian Steinhauer on December 26, 2013 An ad for “Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids” (via Museum of UnCut Funk) Think of trailblazing black TV shows, and The Cosby Show immediately comes to mind. But before the Cliff Huxtable, there was Fat Albert, Bill Cosby’s beloved animated creation that became famous for his catchphrase, “Hey, hey, hey!” Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids began airing in 1972, around the same time that other cartoons and animated shows finally began featuring black characters that weren’t all embodiments of negative stereotypes. “It wasn’t until the early 1970’s that Saturday Morning television cartoons started to feature image affirming Black characters with a modern look and positive story lines that delivered culturally relevant messages,” writes Pamela Thomas, aka Sista ToFunky, on the website of her online Museum of UnCut Funk.

The museum, which I discovered thanks to a recent NPR story, is a treasure trove of African-American pop cultural artifacts and ephemera, from Blaxploitation movie posters to black comic books. Perhaps the most extensive is the black animation collection, which includes extensive explanatory texts, YouTube links, and original production cels and drawings. Thomas, who has a degree in black history from City College and is a former art dealer, focuses not just on shows with all-black casts, like Fat Albert and The Jackson 5ive cartoon, but on black characters that popped up in other shows, like Josie and the Pusscats’ Valerie Brown, whom she dubs the “first positive Black female character in a Saturday morning cartoon series”; and the “first Black male superhero character in a Saturday morning cartoon,” Schoolhouse Rock’s Verb (“I can question like: What is it? / Verb, you’re so demanding,” the song goes)

Production cel for “Schoolhouse Rock! Verb! That’s What’s Happening” episode (via Museum of UnCut Funk) The Museum of UnCut Funk is an internet rabbit hole that you can (and should) easily get lost in for hours. It has no physical home yet, but I can only hope it will one day. In the meantime, Thomas has organized a physical exhibition, Funky Turns 40: Black Character Revolution, focused on black characters in Saturday morning cartoons. It opens at New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in February, and will travel to Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American History and Seattle’s Northwest African American Museum afterwards.

Tagged as: black animation, Fat Albert, Museum of UnCut Funk, Pamela Thomas http://hyperallergic.com/100308/online-museum-celebrates-pioneering-black-animation/

http://hyperallergic.tumblr.com/post/71220398644/onlinemuseum-celebrates-pioneering-black

Think of trailblazing black TV shows, and The Cosby Show immediately comes to mind. But before the Cliff Huxtable, there was Fat Albert, Bill Cosby’s beloved animated creation that became famous for his catchphrase, “Hey, hey, hey!” Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids began airing in 1972, around the same time that other cartoons and animated shows finally began featuring black characters that weren’t all embodiments of negative stereotypes. “It wasn’t until the early 1970’s that Saturday Morning television cartoons started to feature image affirming Black characters with a modern look and positive story lines that delivered culturally relevant messages,” writes Pamela Thomas, aka SistaToFunky, on the website of her online Museum of UnCut Funk.

The museum, which I discovered thanks to a recent NPR story, is a treasure trove of African-American pop cultural artifacts and ephemera, from Blaxploitation movie posters to black comic books. Perhaps the most extensive is the black animation collection, which includes extensive explanatory texts, YouTube links, and original production cels and drawings. Thomas, who has a degree in black history from City College and is a former art dealer, focuses not just on shows with all-black casts, like Fat Albert and The Jackson 5ive cartoon, but on black characters that popped up in other shows, like Josie and the Pusscats’ Valerie Brown, whom she dubs the “first positive Black female character in a Saturday morning cartoon series”; and the “first Black male superhero character in a Saturday morning cartoon,” Schoolhouse Rock’s Verb (“I can question like: What is it? / Verb, you’re so demanding,” the song goes).

Production cel for “Schoolhouse Rock! Verb! That’s What’s Happening” episode The Museum of UnCut Funk is an internet rabbit hole that you can (and should) easily get lost in for hours. It has no physical home yet, but I can only hope it will one day. In the meantime, Thomas has organized a physical exhibition, Funky Turns 40: Black Character Revolution, focused on black characters in Saturday morning cartoons.

It opens at New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in February, and will travel to Chicago’s DuSable Museum of African American History and Seattle’s Northwest African American Museum afterwards. article by Jillian Steinhauer via hyperallergic.com Share this: http://goodblacknews.org/tag/museum-of-uncut-funk/

http://goodblacknews.tumblr.com/page/2

http://reagan-was-a-horrible-president.tumblr.com/post/ 71681090490/goodblacknews-online-museum-celebrates

http://theobamacrat.com/2013/12/28/online-museum-celebratespioneering-black-animation/ Via: Hyperallergic

http://www.radiofree.org/us/online-museum-celebrates-pioneeringblack-animation/

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The Museum of UnCut Funk Preserves the History of Black Animation and Culture

BY ANDREW LASANE | DEC 27, 2013 | 3:19 PM | PERMALINK

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The mission of the Museum of UnCut Funk is to "preserve funky Black Cultural artifacts and history for future generations." The online museum boasts a collection of over 5000 pieces including film posters, album covers, coins, Broadway musical window cards, comic books, sports memorabilia, and various other artifacts.

Their Black Animation Collection and it's Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids pieces were recently profiled on NPR in an interview with museum curator Sista ToFunky (Pamela Thomas). As a resource, the collection is incredible. There are animation cells, YouTube links, and pages devoted to specific shows, specials, and important milestone episodes in Black pop culture history. As if that wasn't cool enough, the museum also presents real world exhibitions. "Funky Turns 40: Black Character Revolution," an

exhibition about Black characters from Saturday morning cartoons, will be coming to New York City on February 1 at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.Â

Check out Sista ToFunky's interview with Collector's Quest about the collection and mark your calendars: http://www.complex.com/art-design/2013/12/museum-of-uncut-funk-preserves-the-history-of-black-animation

http://radishreviews.com/2014/01/03/linkspam-010314/

Harlem // ’70s Black Animated Character Exhibit @ The Schomburg | Feb. 5 – Jun. 14 Dec 27, 2013 Posted by theComplex In Art, Events, Featured, On TV, Upcoming & Current Events From the early 1900s to the late 1960s, Hollywood produced over 600 racist cartoon depictions of Black people as “cannibals, coons, mammies and Stepin Fetchit characters with exaggerated features and ignorant dialect.”

The 1970s ushered in an era that boasted “25 Saturday morning cartoon series, one primetime cartoon series, one weekday cartoon series, two after school cartoons and 16 cartoon specials starring positive Black characters, 17 of which had a predominately Black cast.”

Replacing several banned Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons were shows like Bill Cosby‘s Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, The Jackson 5ive featuring Michael Jackson and his brothers, The Harlem Globetrotters, and I Am The Greatest featuring Muhammad Ali. Realistic and affirming storylines changed the way Black children saw themselves. Strong Black female characters and multicultural casts were also introduced in Josie and The Pussycats, Star Trek and Kid Power.

To celebrate the legacy of this revolutionary time period in animation and television, the Museum Of UnCut Funk is bringing its traveling retrospective exhibit, Funky Turns 40: Black Character Revolution to Harlem’s Schomburg Center starting February 5th.

Originally launched at the Lou Schiemer Gallery at ToonSeum in Pittsburgh, PA last year, the show included 40 pieces of art commemorating the 40th anniversaries of these Black characters and cartoons. Curator Sista ToFunky reflects on the importance of the showcase: “As a kid growing up in the 1960’s, I saw images of Blacks being beaten and tortured. I saw the aftermath of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and I couldn’t understand why people who looked like me had been treated in this manner.

Then the 1970’s arrived and brought an explosion of color to Saturday Morning cartoons. As a pre-teen, I could see positive Black characters that looked like me and real people that I admired, like the Jackson Five and The Harlem Globetrotters. I was glued to the television.

I couldn’t wait to see these animated characters fill the small screen. These cartoons changed my life…filling me with pride and self esteem.

They brought adventure, mayhem and fun to a generation of Black children.

Forty years later, my perspective on these cartoons is a little different. Besides being an integral part of Black children’s lives, these cartoons also benefited white children and the broader society as a whole.

A number of these cartoons addressed issues like cultural differences, racism and multiculturalism. It is my belief

that these cartoons are national treasures. They are an important part of American culture, and in particular the Black experience.

I fondly remember the decade when these revolutionary Black cartoon characters made their mark on animation history.”

The exhibit features original production cels, drawings and limited edition cels of Fat Albert And The Cosby Kids, The Jackson 5ive, The Harlem Globetrotters, Valerie (Josie and The Pussy Cats), Lt. Uhura (Star Trek Animated Series), Muhammad Ali (I Am The Greatest), Billy Jo Jive (Sesame Street), Verb: That’s What’s Happening (School House Rock) and Franklin (Peanuts).

Following its Harlem run, the Funky Turns 40 will hit the DuSable Museum For African American History in Chicago (July 13 – October 20, 2014) and the Northwest African American Museum in Seattle, WA (November 22 – March 1, 2015).

See NYC exhibition details below and check out a full character introduction timeline at museumofuncutfunk.com.

When Exhibit: Wednesday, February 5, 2014 – Saturday, June 14, 2014 Hours: Monday through Saturday | 10:00 am – 6:00 pm Where Schomburg Center For Research In Black Culture Latimer/Edison Gallery 515 Malcolm X Blvd New York, NY 10037 Cost Free

http://www.sinuousmag.com/2013/12/harlem-1970sblack-animated-character-exhibit-schomburg/




[spotted via AfroPunk/npr.org]

http:// sisterhoodagenda.com/ 2014/01/10/70s-blackanimated-character-exhibitthe-schomburg-feb-5-jun-14/

http://www.asifaeast.com/thefunky-turns-40-black-characterrevolution-exhibition/

http://www.nationalbook.org/bookupnyc_test.html


The Museum of Uncut Funk Presents: The Golden Age of Black Animation Racial diversity is once again on the rise in TV animation, with Black, Asian and Latino characters playing a major part of such recently launched series as Cartoon Network’s Steven Universe, Nickelodeon’s Sanjay and Craig and Disney’s Sofia the First. Is this merely a fleeting trend, or the it’s-about-time actualization of The King of Cartoons‘ ‘I Have A Dream’ speech?

Your guess is as good as mine.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, after all. Way, way back in the 1970s, it appeared that minority cartoon characters were finally catching up to their Caucasian counterparts. Shows like Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, Josie and the Pussycats and Star Trek: The Animated Series featured multicultural cartoon characters who doubled as role models, teaching positive messages and presenting inspiring images of smart, strong men AND women of color. Less than ten years later though, things were back to their previously pathetic state, with Black, Latino and Asian characters being tacked onto cartoon casts as almost an afterthought. (See: Strawberry Shortcake, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Beverly Hills Teens, etc.)

The Museum of Uncut Funk is an online resource dedicated to the preservation of Black Animation and its place in cartoon history. For the past thirteen years, the virtual museum’s creator and curator, Sista ToFunky, has been collecting drawings, storyboards and cels from TV’s ‘golden age’ of Black Animation, the 1970s. This year, Sista ToFunky is taking her 200+ piece collection on the road, doing a crosscountry museum tour titled Funky Turns 40: Black Character Revolution Exhibition.

Listed below are some of the historical “firsts” in Black Animation featured in Funky Turns 40: Black Character Revolution Exhibition.

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First positive Black character, Black male character in a Saturday morning cartoon series – Peter Jones, The Hardy Boys – the cartoon and real life drummer in the Hardy Boys band (1969) First positive Black female character in a Saturday morning cartoon series – Valerie Brown, Josie And The Pussycats (1970)

First positive Black cast Saturday morning cartoon series – Harlem Globetrotters (1970) First positive Black cast Saturday morning cartoon series featuring Black musicians – The Jackson 5ive (1971) 5. Longest running positive Black cast Saturday morning cartoon series – Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids (1972) 6. First truly multicultural Saturday morning cartoon series – Kid Power - based upon Morrie Turners Wee Pals comic strips and books (1972) 7. First Black male superhero character in a Saturday morning cartoon - School House Rock – Verb (1974) 8. First Black female superhero character in a Saturday morning cartoon series – Astrea, The Space Sentinels (1977) 9. First Black female superhero character in a Saturday morning cartoon series – Astrea, The Space Sentinels (1977) 10. First Black superhero duo to appear in a Saturday morning cartoon series – Micro Woman and Super Stretch, Tarzan And The Super 7 (1978) 11. First team of Black superheroes in a Saturday morning cartoon series – The Super Globetrotters (1979) To see when Funky Turns 40: Black Character Revolution Exhibition will be in your area, click the pic below.

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http://skunkandburningtires.com/the-museum-of-uncut-funk-presents-the-golden-age-of-blackanimation/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-museum-of-uncut-funk-presents-thegolden-age-of-black-animation