Believe It, or Else (Berth Defects)

 

Director(s): Tex Avery (credited as “Fred Avery”)

Summary: A spoof of Ripley’s Believe it or Not, where viewers get to see strange and unexplained phenomena from around the world, from a man who speaks in moos after drinking nothing but milk to a wishing well in Arabia that’s not exactly helpful to a matchstick optical illusion that gets complicated. All the while, Egghead (which, according to the Looney Tunes Fandom wiki is a prototype version of Elmer Fudd) makes his skepticism known by carrying a sign that says, “I Don’t Believe It!” (despite that he’s able to ride in Buck Dodgers’ spaceship camper trailer and somehow survives getting sawed in half).

Fun Facts: 

• This is the last cartoon where the Egghead incarnation of Elmer Fudd was voiced by Danny Webb (“Elmer’s Candid Camera” would have Arthur Q. Bryan voice Elmer until Bryan died in the late 1950s).

• Buck Rogers is an actual pulp space adventure series and character. In the days before Star Wars and Star Trek, this was the space adventure series that was everywhere, whether people liked it or not. There’s even a Looney Tunes parody of it. You probably know it: “Duck Dodgers in the 24th-1/2 Century” (Buck Rogers was the 25th century) from 1953. Here, Buck Rogers is called Buck Dodgers (eh, close enough...)

Sorry, no “Letterboxd Says the Darndest Things” this time. The reviews weren’t funny or interesting enough for me to cut in...

The Channel(s): Cartoon Network, Boomerang, MeTV, and Tubi

Part(s) Edited: The entire scene of “the berth of a baby” (as in “a crying baby in a train car”) was cut because the two people who pull back the curtains just happen to be stereotypically black train porters.

What Grinds My Gears About the Edit(s): This simultaneously doesn’t grind my gears and does. It doesn’t grind my gears because this is one of those spot-gag cartoons that are just a flimsy excuse to show as many cheesy visual jokes and scenes that feel like a Family Guy-style cutaway joke with no set-up (in the days before Seth MacFarlane was even conceived) as possible, and cutting a scene like that isn’t going to ruin the flow of the cartoon. 

So what does grind my gears about this edit? That the censors chose to simply cut the scene. That’s not how you make memorably bad censorship cuts on TV. If it were me, I’d replace the scene of the black porters parting the curtains with a black screen (or freeze-framed the green curtains, then dissolved onto the crying baby). In fact, I did the former hypothetical edit just because I could (and because my first plan to crop the shot to get rid of the black porters didn’t work as well as I thought it would. I also was considering digitally removing the porters with AI editing, but the last time I used AI-based digital removal, it made the Toilet Duck scene from Father Ted look stranger than usual. I’m still learning all this AI stuff because it’s better than ignoring or protesting against it):

The blackout edit would make people think their television blew out or that there are technical difficulties on the station’s end. I’d much rather have that, since that can easily be turned into a meme or discussed as a collective childhood memory for 1990s kids online.

Video Comparison: 

Availability Uncut: Outlook not so good. As of this writing, the only way you can see this uncut legally is on the Golden Age of Looney Tunes laser disc from 1992 (volume three, side eight: “The Evolution of Egghead”).

Is/Was It on Streaming or Digital Download: Good news: It’s currently on Tubi. Bad news: They somehow managed to upload the edited version instead of the uncut version, or better yet, just omit it, since Tubi doesn’t show a lot of the WB cartoons that have been phased out due to outdated racial and ethnic stereotypes. Worse news: It’s not available anywhere beyond that.

 

‘Til next time: Stay Looney and Be Merrie!