Buddy The Woodsman (A Lesson in Chinese Cookery)

 

Director: Jack King

Summary: Just the typical post-Bosko musical fluff, with Buddy as a lumberjack, dealing with chopping trees, Chinese camp cooks, and a bear that wandered in from the forest.

The Channel: Nickelodeon (Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon, Nick@Nite version)

Part(s) Edited: Though Nickelodeon does edit to get rid of outdated East Asian (read: Chinese and Japanese, mostly) stereotypes (with some exceptions), they kind of split the difference here. We do get to see scenes of Chinese camp cooks saying nothing, but the part where one of them rings the triangle, announcing dinner in what I assume is broken English (sounds like straight-up, garden variety gibberish, but it could be interpreted as broken English with a Chinese [Mandarin, mostly. Cantonese and other dialects don't get the representation in Western film that they should] inflection) was cut. The Censored Cartoons Page and the Looney Tunes wiki do say that the edit was done with an obvious computer wipe effect, but the edited version I saw on Archive.org (which may or may not still be uploaded) had it as a simple cut that anyone can do, including me when I created the compare and contrast video.

How It Plays Edited/Video Comparison: It...actually plays pretty well without the scene. As mentioned before, there was an edited version on Archive.org, but it might have been taken down and since I didn't download it as proof that it was edited on Nickelodeon, I decided to recreate the cut to the best of my ability. As always, here's the video:

What Wasn't Cut That Should Have Been Cut: Definitely the totem pole creature dance. Not just because it could be offensive to indigenous peoples who have totem poles as part of their culture, but the scene just ran too long. I know Buddy cartoons have a reputation for being boring, but this is ridiculous.

Availability Uncut: As of 2024, there's no official release of this (and, because of the outdated ethnic stereotypes, there probably won't be, unless someone has the guts to use the content warning from the Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVDs from volumes three to six for future home media releases and streaming). I found the uncut version on Archive.org (as well as the edited version that used to be there), so that's pretty much where it will be until DCMA requests take it down.