You can't keep up with with the pop culture these days without a scorecard app. In truth, you probably need five or six apps on two different smartphones plus a desktop version just to keep up to date.
The Disney Corporation launched its new highly-touted video streaming service this past week, and in their infinite wisdom to appear suitably angelic to the world, they've been hard at work apologizing for or plastering over past perceived wrongthinking and insensitivity. Disney's old movies, TV shows and cartoons are now accompanied by disclaimer notices like "This program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions.”
But the Disney programs aren't being kept "as created," and many have just plain been edited with potentially 'offensive' sequences and images altered or removed entirely. The result has been an international anvil chorus of hoots of derision against Disney, with an almost equal and opposite clamor that they edit even more out. But editing and censoring the past is a fool's errand that ultimately makes no one happy, and arguably, increasingly ignorant of even the recent past. Sorry, but I'm a big believer that understanding the whys and wherefores and the history of the past is a whole lot more successful and influential than attempting to eliminate every possible trace of it. Call me crazy.
These just aren't old Mickey Mouse cartoons, Peter Pan's depictions of Indians, Dumbo's black crows, or the forever embargoed Song of the South. Now fans of the very recent Disney cartoon series Gravity Falls are calling foul. It seems that the show's character Grunkle Stan's distinctive Shriner-like fez symbol has just been given over to Disney's internal Winston Smiths for erasure in their Soviet-style Great Purge treatment. And they did it for a bizarre reason that has nothing to do with sensitivity to Shriners.
Digitally censored fez from the opening credits of Gravity Falls
On the surface, this isn't new. Warner Brothers has put up a 'warning label' like this for years with their old classic Looney Toons and Merrie Melodies cartoons, but at least they've been left intact. It's like a 'Don't drink and drive' notice that means 'Don't watch and get pissed off over something made 75 years ago because life's too short not to laugh at funny cartoons.'
MGM walked the tightrope by mostly leaving their old cartoons visually intact, but dubbing out 'offensive' voices and dialects and replacing them with more generic ones, as in old Tom & Jerry cartoons with their 'Mammy Two Shoes' character. She was originally voiced by African-American actress Lillian Randolph back in the 1930s and usually only seen from the ankles down - often swatting at the cat with a broom and threatening to lock him out of the house. She was implied to be Tom's owner and the head of the household, and so her feet and voice popped up in a lot of the shorts over the years. In the 1960s, the black legs and ankles were re-colored white and a female Irish-accented voice was recorded for some of the episodes. By the 1990s, the original images were brought back, and the voice was re-dubbed again, this time by African-American comedian Thea Vidale, minus the over the top dialect.
But Disney seems to want to try a little of both methods - reediting and outright removal - and they're doing an inept dance step version of it by catching some, missing others, or concentrating on odd choices like the Gravity Falls fez symbol. Like I said, this has nothing to do with perceived hurt feelings among Shriners.
Freemasons rarely show up in these types of animated or artistic depictions, but Shriners or their visual stand-ins sometimes do. And nobody has ever really found a reason to get worked up over it.
Grant Wood's Shrine Quartet (1939)
"Oh my dear Lord! They blackballed Howard Sprague!"
Fraternal groups and goofy headgear were commonplace objects of comedy over the years, from the 'Mystic Knights of the Sea' in the wildly popular Amos and Andy radio show in the late 20s and 30s (created by real-life Masons Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll) and depicted in the early 1950s TV version; the Raccoon Lodge of The Honeymooners with Jackie Gleason; and the Loyal Order of Water Buffalo Lodge No. 26 on the Flintstones in the 1960s.
Raccoon Lodge in The Honeymooners
Loyal Order of Water Buffalos in The Flintstones
It wasn't really until the 1990s that the Shriners started to get grouped in with the kind of spooky connections to "ancient mystic rites" like the Masons - even if only as parody. Ironically, that was just about the same time that the Shrine changed its name from the suitably bilious 'Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine' to just plain Shriners International. 
Todd Schorr's painting, Secret Mystic Rites in the Temple of Fraternity (1993)
Todd Schorr's Temple of Delirium (1991)
Images like this suddenly morphed the Shriners into an odd combination of middle-aged goofiness with "secret wisdom of the ages," because as we all know, there's always supposed to be some special wisdom about Life, the Universe and Everything at the bottom of an empty glass - if only we drink enough.
Still looking.
Of course, there have long been criticisms from various corners about the Shrine's 19th century take on tarted-up Orientalism with its images, costumes, rituals, and even local Shrine names. Practicioners of the Muslim faith and those living in Muslim countries don't think it's a bit funny that Shrines have names that are parodies or lifts of Arabic words or place names like Scimitar, Mecca, Bagdad, Wahabi, phony pseudo Arabic names like 'Moolah,' 'Lu Lu,' 'Zem Zem,' and even holy objects like Al Koran or Kaaba.
It all came from a much earlier age, and modern sensibilities have gotten extraordinarily humorless and hyper-sensitive when they are on the receiving end of even a mild a jibe today. With a group like the Shrine, it was never about insulting anyone and always about sounding more exotic and more over the top than any other run of the mill fraternal group did in the late 1800s.
Anyway, back to Disney and that fez.
From the end credits of Gravity Falls
Gravity Falls was a cartoon that ran on Disney XD between 2012 and 2016. It told the mis-adventures of Dipper and Mabel Pines, a pair of twins who spent their summer vacation with their uncle, Grunkle Stan, in the odd Oregon town of Gravity Falls. There they all encountered all manner of the weird and the unexplained like ghosts, shape-shifters, and frozen dead presidents. Episodes contained clues and visual tidbits to solve an ongoing series of puzzles, not entirely un-derivative of National Treasure by way of Twin Peaks, Eerie, Indiana and Winky-Dink and You - all laid over a theme very much like Pokemon.
As we used to say in advertising, "Where do good ideas come from? SOMEBODY ELSE!"
The show's creator Alex Hirsch actively stoked puzzle hunts on Twitter among the show's fans, and pseudo-Masonic and Shriner imagery began to proliferate.
Alex Hirsch's Twitter clue that set the hunt in motion
Fan art from Japan by @nyankun1
If you poke around enough, you'll find that the probable source of the desperate need to scrape this obscure cartoon image from an obscure corner of the obscure culture is that somebody, somewhere made the executive decision that the imaginary symbol of the 'Royal Order of the Holy Mackerel' was just a little too close in their hunt for hyperactive offensiveness to the star and crescent symbol found in many flags of Islamic nations, like that of Turkey.
The national flag of Turkey
Some have said that the censorship first appeared when the show was being syndicated in foreign countries, but The Mighty Mouse has refused to comment about it at all.
Oh the outrage. It wears a fella out.
Meanwhile, now that a little clot of fans have roared their online displeasure (there have to be at least a few dozen fans of anything this obscure), citing Disney's imperfect censorship has spread throughout all of Internet nerdom. They have been pointing out all week long that the Holy Mackerel on Grunkle Stan's fez still appears on numerous thumbnail images on Disney's service, so it's descended into the usual obsessive game of a-HA-ism and noisy declarations of HY-pocracy that so characterizes the current era we have the misfortune of experiencing right now.
I'm sure most Shriners neither know about any of this, nor care one bit (besides perhaps my friend Seth Andrews who eats, sleeps and breathes all things in Fezdom - visit his online Museum of Fezology). It's a fair bet that no more than 100 Shriners have even heard of Gravity Falls at all.
But I will take this odd opportunity to call to attention one last bit of past pop culture in case there are any advertising geniuses at the Shriners International headquarters in Tampa, they'd be silly not to take advantage of.
Back in the 1960s when the pseudo-adult cartoon The Flintstones was airing in prime-time and parents watched it along with their kids, Shriners Hospitals did a series of advertising tie-in commercials that featured Fred Flintstone.
Oh the outrage. It wears a fella out.
Meanwhile, now that a little clot of fans have roared their online displeasure (there have to be at least a few dozen fans of anything this obscure), citing Disney's imperfect censorship has spread throughout all of Internet nerdom. They have been pointing out all week long that the Holy Mackerel on Grunkle Stan's fez still appears on numerous thumbnail images on Disney's service, so it's descended into the usual obsessive game of a-HA-ism and noisy declarations of HY-pocracy that so characterizes the current era we have the misfortune of experiencing right now.
But I will take this odd opportunity to call to attention one last bit of past pop culture in case there are any advertising geniuses at the Shriners International headquarters in Tampa, they'd be silly not to take advantage of.
Back in the 1960s when the pseudo-adult cartoon The Flintstones was airing in prime-time and parents watched it along with their kids, Shriners Hospitals did a series of advertising tie-in commercials that featured Fred Flintstone.
The MeTV network today airs on local over-the-air broadcast TV stations these days (usually as a side-band digital channel for one of the four major networks), and they just started airing the Flintstones cartoons as part of their evening schedule. The network is essentially a nostalgic station that is laser-focussed on Baby Boomer-aged viewers, and requires no cable hookup in most markets. They don't even offer a live streaming app, in part to protect local stations and their shrinking advertising streams from dilution.
The Flintstones Shriners commercials were designed to include contemporary footage from the hospitals back in the 1960s, and that could very easily be reedited today with new footage and contact graphics.
Hey Tampa - how about modifying these old ads just for targeted airing on MeTV to its perfect audience of retirees who are potential new members and donors?
Just sayin.'
Yabba Dabba Donate.
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