How Gay Are Cartoons? We Ran the Numbers.
From This Week in Queer History · 24:10
Show by Kris with a K
Every cartoon you grew up with gets a score. He-Man, Jem and the Holograms, ThunderCats, Rainbow Brite, My Little Pony, The Little Mermaid, The Legend of Korra, Steven Universe, The Owl House: each one graded on three categories, Character, Culture, and Creator. The category that wins the final tally is not the one you expect, and it changes how you hear every song Howard Ashman ever wrote.Along the way: the pansy craze cartoons of the early 1930s that put openly queer characters on movie screens nationwide until the Production Code erased them overnight. The love letter Hans Christian Andersen could never send, and how it connects an 1837 fairy tale to a 1989 Disney classic written by a man facing his own mortality. And Susan Blu, the lesbian voice actress behind Stormer, Arcee, and half your childhood, who was in every living room in America at a time when nobody was allowed to know who she was.Plus a trip inside the edit bay at Bob's Burgers, where queer people behind the scenes and on screen get to make the kind of joyful, taboo-free moments that earlier generations never saw.Keep a scorecard and play along. Your Saturday mornings were queerer than you knew.Learn more at https://thisweekinqueerhistory.comSubscribe to our newsletter: https://thisweekinqueerhistory.com/subscribeSend us Fan MailSupport the show
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