Thoughtnami

There is a band called World Famous Superfriends.

They are represented by Universal Music Group.

There is a cartoon franchise called Superfriends. It is owned by DC Comics and was produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions.

It is not connected in any shape or form with Universal Music Group.

A few years ago, Family Guy did a parody of one of the Superfriends’ most famous openings, the one from The All-New Superfriends Hour (the familiar syndication opening with the Superfriends title card). Great opening. You’ll only find an older poor copy with a skidmark site’s logo smeared all over it as if they owned it. You won’t find a clear version of the original opening. You also won’t find the Family Guy parody clip.

Why?

Because it has been blocked by Universal Music Group.

Why?

Because UMG represents and distributes a completely unrelated group called World Famous Superfriends.

It’s the increased traffic from the Family Guy parody as well as the search for the original All-New Superfriends opening it parodied to see how intact the parody was (spoiler alert: VERY) that caused UMG to act like Big Brother and take the fair use clips of something they don’t even own out of circulation on YouTube except for the poor clip with the skidmarked logo of a site that doesn’t own it (they didn’t create it either).

I’d think that DC Comics would own the Superfriends name in any medium anyway (be it in Superfriends or “Super Friends” form), so I’d go after UMG on that alone. Makes a hell of a lot more sense than a mediocre baseball team suing a film studio because they think audiences are stupid enough to confuse a story of a redhead princess who becomes a warrior with an inept baseball team that has fizzled out for much of the decade and aren’t really trying to rebuild its rosters to be great.  Takes a really brave man to pick on a little girl.

But I digress.

There is no such thing, and anybody who says this in my presence has, more or less, giving me license to knock their teeth in with a ball-peen hammer and rinse out the remaining broken shards of teeth with a mixture of raw lemon juice and salt.

Okay, that may have been a bit too harsh. But, a little history lesson for those that throw the term around so haphazardly.

Blackface performances and minstrel shows were performed across the United States and often used stereotypes that disparaged, humiliated, and dehumanized Black people in the country. One such performer, Thomas Rice, created and performed as a character in blackface known as “Jim Crow.” The character made him rich and famous, but the stereotypical character became synonymous with the term “Negro,” and politicians used Jim Crow as a symbol of populism against Blacks. These Jim Crow laws systematically made it a lot harder for an entire race of people to live life. The world was separated, and it stayed that way for over 100 years, from the time Blacks were freed from slavery to the latter third of the 20th century, and the effects and attitudes from those Jim Crow-era laws as well as those created in the minstrel shows that were a prominent part of society for much of that time are still felt in 21st century, which is shameful.

The Big Bang Theory doesn’t malign, discriminate, disparage, nor created and inspired conditions that segregate an entire race of people like blackface and real minstrel shows did, and it never will.

So, please, don’t call that show “nerd minstrel” or “nerd blackface” again nor even use those phrases in my presence. Otherwise, you’re having an appointment with a hammer.