The other characters, including the Sebben Dwarfs, are voiced by veteran Warner Bros. Leo Watson is the voice of "Prince Chawmin'". The main character, So White, is voiced by Vivian Dandridge, sister of actress Dorothy Dandridge. The Clampett unit made a couple of field trips to Club Alabam, a black club in the Los Angeles area, to gain a feel for the music and the dancing, and Clampett cast popular radio actors as the voices of his three main characters. In fact, the idea to produce Coal Black came to Clampett after he saw Duke Ellington's 1941 musical revue Jump for Joy, and Ellington and the cast suggested Clampett make a black musical cartoon. Ĭlampett intended Coal Black as both a parody of Snow White and a dedication to the all-black jazz musical films popular in the early 1940s (like Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather). The film was intended to have been named So White and de Sebben Dwarfs, which producer Leon Schlesinger thought was too close to the original film's actual title, and had changed to Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs. Several scenes unique to Disney's film version of Snow White, such as the wishing-well sequence, the forest full of staring eyes, and the awakening kiss, are directly parodied in this film. The story is set during World War II in the United States, and the original tale's fairy tale wholesomeness is replaced in this film by a hot jazz mentality and sexual overtones. In this version of the story, all of the characters are black, and speak all of their dialogue in rhyme. As a result, Coal Black and similar cartoons have been removed from circulation and are little known today among mainstream audiences. The character designs for "So White" and her seven friends are examples of the 'darky' iconography typical of Hollywood animation during the first half of the 20th century. The cartoon has been rarely seen on television, and has never been officially released on home video. As such, it is one of the most controversial cartoons in the classic Warner Brothers library, being one of the Censored Eleven. The stylistic portrayal of the characters is an example of "darky" iconography, which was widely accepted in American society at the time. The film is an all- black parody of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale Snow White, known to its audience from the popular 1937 Walt Disney animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The short was released on January 16, 1943. Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs is a 1943 Merrie Melodies animated cartoon directed by Bob Clampett.
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