While I understand the thoughts on Space Jam 2 and what they’re doing to Speedy Gonzales, Lola Bunny, and Pepe Le Pew. Change, censorship, and cleverly written development can be good at times. However, swiftly removing a character entirely for the sake of focus groups and statistics just seems too much.

I get it. He was the original Glenn Quagmire and like him a lot of us were rooting to see him get his comeuppance. Needed to learn boundaries and consent. TBH I was hoping to see him getting helpful advice from Lebron James or just get common sense knocked into him Johnny Bravo style. Wasn’t he also rewritten to be a lone bachelor and ambiguously questionable designer and wedding planner in the Looney Tunes Show? Plus, why is this there so much art of him with Penelope Pussycat together in romantic art when it’s obvious in the cartoon she ain’t interested?

This is something that’s been bothering me as an artist/cartoonist for a long time now. It’s nothing new. Whether it be boomers, zoomers, Karens, soccer moms, rednecks, punks, millennials, whoever it might be, it’s debatable on seeing which generation or group of people are the most “sensitive” or just outright stupid and toxic. The Internet while it’s a great invention to connect with others especially during a worldwide pandemic, it unfortunately provides getter opportunities for stupidity and toxicity to be expressed and paraded. In this day with smartphones and the Internet, ignorance is a choice and they still choose ignorance and obsessively push it. Why you think we had a person like Donald Trump in the White House?

We shouldn’t be afraid to point out controversial subject matter and look past stereotypes, but there’s a way to do it, and it’s becoming less about our movements for peace, and finding ways to make money just to appease a certain crowd. Stop appropriating culture and just let people art for once if it’s not hurting anyone. There’s Latinx people who absolutely adore Speedy Gonzales. (Both current voice actors Fred Armisen and Gabriel Iglesias spoke out on this too.) There’s Asians and non-Asians alike who enjoy anime. There’s a lot of Italian Americans like me and my family who enjoy The Godfather films, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci films. Art is art. Period.

However, it’s true we shouldn’t be afraid to stand for justice to call out something evil when we see it. Actual stereotypical caricatures (ex. black-face), Nazi propaganda, and other dark suggestive imagery like Oedipic/r*pe fantasies and c/p, z/p should be some of the real garbage removed from media. We’re quick to remove a cartoon character from a well known cartoon series but we leave shows notorious with this subject matter like Big Mouth and Cuties on streaming platforms. What’s wrong with people?