Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat

Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat (1941)

Lazy black folks in Lazy Town (Pop. 123½) are napping and attracting flies. They are so lethargic they even fight in slow motion. Then a riverboat arrives with a red hot mama on board. Faster than you can say "Jim Crow", she has everyone moving to a Harlem boogie beat, dancing, scrubbing clothes, and eating watermelon. As the boogie-woogie comes to a close, Mammy hoists her skirt. Her big bottom reads "The End".

Date of release
1941-03-27
TMDB
4.5 / 10 (28)
Runtime
7m
Genres
Comedy, Animation, Family
Director
Walter Lantz

Casting

  • Ivie Anderson — The Girl (voice)
  • Mel Blanc — Boat Captain / Mammy / Fighter One / Fighter Two / Various (voice)

Interesting facts

"Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat" is a 1940 hit boogie-woogie song written by Don Raye. A bawdy, jazzy tune, the song describes a laundry woman from Harlem, New York whose technique is so unusual that people come from all around just to watch her scrub. The Andrews Sisters and Will Bradley & His Orchestra recorded the most successful pop versions of the song, but it is today best recognized as the centerpiece of an eponymous and controversial Walter Lantz cartoon from 1941, distributed by Universal Pictures. The short was denounced by the NAACP for its racist and stereotypical imagery of African-Americans.

Production

The short version, released on March 28, 1941, by Universal Pictures, features no director credit (although Woody Woodpecker creator Walter Lantz claimed to have directed the cartoon himself), with a story by Ben Hardaway, animation by Alex Lovy and Frank Tipper, and voiceover work by Mel Blanc and Nellie Lutcher. The short uses blackface caricatures based upon stereotypes of African Americans in the rural Southern United States.

The "Scrub Me Mama" short is today in the public domain. Clips from it are featured in the Spike Lee satirical film about African-American stereotypes, Bamboozled (2000).

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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