Techtite Feature Article!

"While old Tom & Jerry and Little Rascals shorts were edited left and right thanks to a whole barrage of inappropriate racial jokes, along comes Apache Chief, acting like all Apache talk...real ...slow ... must ... speak ... short ... sentences ... must ... think ... long ... to ... solve ... problems!"

---from the article

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Once upon a time, Hanna-Barbera created a really cool show called The Super-Friends; a show where five DC comics super-heroes would fight the stronger forces of evil, together, as a team. This team consisted of Batman, Robin, Wonder Woman, Superman, and Aquaman. As comedy relief, they had the occasional "trainees," like Wendy, Marvin, Wonderdog, Zan & Jana, Gleep...

The gripes from minorities, however, was that there was no representation of an ethnic super-hero. This gripe had merit; it's "solution" did not. Enter Apache Chief; the most inadvertent of racial slurs to have ever been animated for politically correct reasons.

The first problem: Apache Chief had never been in a real comic book. If he had, only to have the animators say "something was lost in the translation," this would make more sense. However, seeing as he was never in a comic, it was the job of the show to explain Apache Chief's back story: where he came from, how he got his super-powers, and so on. They never did. In fact, so little back story was ever conceived for this guy, that he wasn't even given his own arch-villain to fight; "Giganta" was from the Wonder Woman comics. What a sad state of affairs.

That's just the short of it: Apache Chief was, quite simply, as worse of a racial slur as 1970's cartoons ever got. While old Tom & Jerry and Little Rascals shorts were edited left and right thanks to a barrage of inappropriate racial jokes, along comes Apache Chief, acting like all Apache talk...real ...slow ... must ... speak ... short ... sentences ... must ... think ... long...to...solve...problems! "Politically incorrect" is putting it mildly.

Oh, in case you're wondering; Apache's super-power was growing and shrinking. So, in a jam he had too possibilities; he could shrink and have a bad guy step on him, or he could approach a scene of terror, grow to humongous size, and scare the living @#$% out of every innocent man woman and child in jeopardy. Man, what a stupid cartoon concept this was. What two cartoon figures could possibly be worse? Good question:

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