As highlighted in the previous post, all manner of symbols, mascots and icons are getting a second look and being eliminated if they have a history of a racist past. My avatar should be no exception.
When I chose Marvin the Martian as my avatar a few years ago, it was simply because I had stumbled across the pic used below which had been embellished with some colorful framing and looked like it would make a great profile photo framed in a circle as is the case with Google, Facebook, here on Blogger and many other websites.
Marvin was one of my favs as a kid watching Saturday morning Looney Tunes since he was a bad-ass Martian astronomer hell bent on one singular mission: to get a better view of Venus from his home planet of Mars. Naturally (but really illogically), the Earth was in his way so it had to be eliminated. No passion, no avarice, just interplanetary remodeling. Feng Shui for the solar system. Marvin had the Big Gun but needed the important missing element of Pu-36.
Plus, his voice was awesome.
Now in all my research about Marvin, I didn't find anything that indicated the character had any racial bias (other than being Martian, I guess) but did appear as totally black skinned. His outfit isn't a racial stereotype, it's a cartoonized version of an ancient era warrior, ostensibly an homage to the Roman god Mars.
But Looney Tunes themselves most certainly did have a racial past and there are at least eleven of their 1930s and 1940s era cartoon shorts deemed so much so as to be pulled from distribution since the late 60s. Most are more of that ever-so-popular blackface minstrel era stuff that was so prevalent in late 19th and early 20th century media that even Disney famously partook in.
So, to coin a now-familiar 2020 phrase, "out of an abundance of caution," I decided to retire ol' Marvin and go back, for now, to my old fatface depiction.
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| 2015 - 2020 |