Scripted television programs added African American supporting characters, and one new show (the sitcom Julia) starred an African American woman in a leading role as a nurse instead of a domestic servant. The removal was part of a wave of programming changes in television in 1968–the year of the federal governments declaration that the United States was becoming two societies, black and white, separate and unequal and the year of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.s assassination.
The following year, Transamerica combined UAs separate television production and television distribution units, and UA withdrew the aforementioned eleven cartoons from circulation.
UA kept the cartoons after the Transamerica Corporation purchased the studio in 1967. The motion picture studio United Artists (UA) acquired AAP in 1957 and kept all 337 cartoons in syndication. However, syndicated television depended on the standards of individual stations instead of one national network, and many stations had no qualms about airing the eleven cartoons.
African and African American characters appear in eleven of the 337 films as the main characters (not counting the Inki series), depicted largely as nearly-naked African natives, antebellum southern slaves, and northern jazz-lovers.Īfrican Americans protested the theatrical circulation of some of these cartoons upon their original releases, and television networks refused to show similar cartoons from other studios. AAP immediately offered the cartoons for television syndication, and in 1957 they made their debut on local stations nationwide. In 1956 the company Associated Artists Productions (AAP) purchased the library of Warner Brothers Merrie Melodies cartoons produced to 1948 and Looney Tunes cartoons made between 1943 to 1948–a total of 337 short films.
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