Amazon warns viewers that Tom and Jerry cartoons are racist

Subscribers with Amazon Prime Instant Video accounts who want to watch the classic Tom and Jerry cartoons are being warned that "episodes of the iconic show may depict scenes of 'ethnic and racial prejudice.'"

According to the Daily Mail, the concerns stem from the representation of a black maid in early episodes of the cartoon from the 1940s.

Amazon's caution reads: "Tom and Jerry shorts may depict some ethnic and racial prejudices that were once commonplace in American society. Such depictions were wrong then and are wrong today."

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

One viewer took to Twitter to complain of the precaution's "PC madness." Another person commented, "I loved Tom and Jerry as a kid and it never made me think poorly of ethnic minorities or want to smoke cigars."

In recent years, producers have taken to releasing recut versions of the classics, eliminating scenes depicting smoking and other behavior considered to be inappropriate. When Looney Tunes released a collection of classic cartoons in 2005, Whoopi Goldberg remarked: "Removing these inexcusable images and jokes from this collection would be the same as saying (these prejudices) never existed. So they are presented here to accurately reflect a part of our history that cannot and should not be ignored."