Group Four - Television and Film

The I Want My Mammy sheet music was produced in 1921. This was the soundtrack for a musical comedy called “The Midnight Pounders.” The cover of this sheet music features a popular comedian, singer, song writer, and actor named Eddie Cantor in black face. This musical, and the sheet music produced for it, were meant to degrade African American culture and increase the stereotypes that many in the white community had about African Americans. Mammy had become a part of most forms of popular media including plays, radio, and music. In the following years, once television was invented, she became a part of movies and television shows as well. The mammy figure was already widely known throughout the country and this musical was attempting to make her something to laugh at for entertainment.

            This type of entertainment was established in order to make sure that whites continued to feel superior to African Americans. The phrase “I want my mammy” was popular because it was forming the idea that African Americans were not strong willed and needed “Mammy” to help them accomplish anything of value. This idea was very important in the ways that oppressors wanted to feel that African Americans could not accomplish anything. While there has been progress in depleting this character and the negative connotations that go along with it, the Mammy character does still play a role in displaying African American women and men in a negative manner. 

The Federal Project, created in 1935, put forth the effort to provide artists jobs during the Great Depression. African American actors and musicians were given the opportunity to showcase their talents and take on more serious roles in the theater. They were able to bring their culture into the mainstream American society. As African Americans took their spot on the stage, they fought to change the stereotypes that had been portrayed through theatre and film. Often they played roles of lazy and clumsy people, but people like Oscar Micheaux sought to write plays that represented African Americans as noble people. Five main genres performed during this time were

1. Popular Commercial Plays: Made for theaters and live audiences.
2. Folk Dramas: Focused on the life of African Americans and their folk stories.
3. Historical Dramas: Plays that focused on historical characters.
4. Social Realist Plays: Fought for social justice and equality.
5. Living Newspapers: Fighting political force, producing plays that focused on political problems of the time period. 

In the 1973 blaxploitation horror film, which seemed to be on a low budget copies the idea from the original film Frankenstein. This film titled Black Frankenstein, but also called Blackenstein, is a horror film that didn't receive the boost like expected from the original. The general idea remains the same, which wasn't a surprise. This would consist of the doctor doing work on a Vietnam injury in his legs and arms. Shockingly, the doctor poisons the patient that results into a harmful man. Luckily, the end of the killings he dies the same way by the police. This correlates to Black Film and Television because it was a great movie that shows the upcoming of the black production working. Even though it didn't make it as far as the original Frankenstein, taking pieces from it wasn't going to cut it. Later down the line, there were additions such as The Return of Blackenstein and The Fall of the House of Blackenstein. Also, images of this movie later prove that racism still played a major role in films. Some pieces confirm that the typical Black man inferior to the white women in not only this movie, but in print as well.

The Wiz was a New York production all the way. Locations used around the city included Lincoln Center, the Broadway theatre district, Astor Place, both Shea and Yankee Stadiums, and the New York State Pavilion at the old 1964 World’s Fair site. Filming actually began with a night shoot on the World Trade Center plaza. The movie of The Wiz was significantly different from the Broadway show. Although the show had an all-black cast as well as an African-American composer (Charlie Smalls), director (Geoffrey Holder), and choreographer (George Faison), and featured songs (“Ease on Down the Road,” “No Bad News”) in the soul and rock mode, the story was laid in a Kansas and Oz familiar from earlier versions. For the film, producer Rob Cohen, screenwriter Joel Schumacher, and director Sidney Lumet changed the setting to a “fantastically transformed New York,” in Cohen’s words. The dreary Kansas Dorothy is swept from was re-imagined as a dreary Harlem, while the Oz she is swept into was located mostly downtown, in fantasy versions of landmarks like New York Public Library, the World Trade Center, the subway system, and Coney Island. The character of Dorothy herself was transformed, mainly because Diana Ross had a bee in her bonnet about playing the role. In the show, 17-year-old Stephanie Mills gave as fair a rendition of Baum’s little girl as did 16-year-old Judy Garland in the MGM movie. But Diana Ross was 32 when she convinced producer Cohen and Motown executive Berry Gordy Jr. to cast her as Dorothy, and so the character mutated into a timid 24-year-old kindergarten teacher who had never ventured south of 125th Street. This development prompted original director John Badham’s departure, and became the focus of much of the criticism directed at the finished film. New Yorker critic Pauline Kael said Ross’s insistence on playing the role was “possibly the chief example in movie history of a whim of iron.”

The film Dream Girls has played an important role in film and television because it tells a story of three African American women with dreams of becoming a successful band. Loosely based on the story of the Supremes, the story tells of the trials and tribulations that the women experienced as they fought against a plethora of stereotypes and obstacles. 

This is an important film because, while it does have fictional aspects, it was able to reach a wide demographic of age and race, and to educate the audience on the ways that African American women have constantly had to tackle obstacles that have been put up only to oppress their specific group. For example, Jamie Foxx's character in the film plays an emotionally abusive love interest/producer, who is incredibly controlling over the women in the group.

Black-ish is an American sitcom in its second season highlighting an upper-middle-class African American family living in a white middle class neighborhood. This show airs on ABC primetime on Wednesday nights with many viewers each week. I believe this is a different show that we haven’t seen on primetime television before. Black-ish is about a family and highlighting on the father who is trying to find an identity for his family growing up in a white neighborhood. I believe that this show captures more people and helps them grasp the idea of the struggle that some families have to grow through during the time we are living in. With this show airing on ABC, a main network for television, it can capture a bigger audience to gather people and inform them about some situations going on in today’s society and the struggles that some African American families go through day in and day out. This show has an overall positive review and has gotten many awards for the job it has done over the year and half it has been running. Both the roles of the father and mother of the family play where they have very successful jobs and are teaching their children how to grow up in the situations that are handed to them.